The moment Sofia Coppola’s career flashed before her eyes: “This is terrible”
Frustrated by the lack of serious movies that encapsulated the experience of being a young girl, Sofia Coppola found her calling as a director of female-oriented stories beginning in the late 1990s. With movies like Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, and Priscilla, Coppola has become a cinematic titan, a position that came after several years of “wandering,” as she puts it.
Before she was an Oscar winner and a coveted filmmaker – worshipped for her use of feminine aesthetics and complex explorations of the teenage psyche – Coppola was drifting through the 1990s under the shadow of her father, Francis Ford Coppola. He cast her in The Godfather Part III, but her performance as Mary Corleone was so awful that some critics agreed that she single-handedly ruined the film. Criticism was harsh, and Coppola even earned two Razzie awards – ‘Worst Supporting Actress’ and ‘Worst New Star’.
However, after dipping her toes into various avenues, such as fashion design, appearing in music videos (Sonic Youth’s ‘Mildred Pierce’ is her best), and even presenting a television series called Hi-Octane with another filmmaker’s daughter, Zoe Cassavetes, she soon realised that being behind the camera was where she belonged. “I think I was just wandering in my 20s, trying to figure out what I wanted to do, trying different things and having that angst of not feeling comfortable in your own skin yet,” Coppola told the Guardian’s podcast, The Start.
One day, however, she was recommended a book by Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore, which would spur her to make her feature debut. The Virgin Suicides, written by Jeffrey Eugenides, compelled Coppola with its depiction of five teenage sisters whose lives are destroyed by their parents’ restrictive and traditionalist reign over the household. She had already explored suicide in her first short film, Lick the Star, a darkly comic look at social hierarchies, but with The Virgin Suicides, she painted a nuanced portrait of a teenage world turned upside down, one intruded on by curious boys and intensely religious parents.
Coppola cast Kirsten Dunst as the main sister, Lux Lisbon, while actors like Kathleen Turner, James Woods, Danny DeVito, Josh Hartnett, and Robert Schwartzman also make appearances in supporting roles. Luckily, she had her acclaimed father on hand as a producer – not something many people can say – but that didn’t make her less terrified.
There came a moment when Coppola was worried that her career as a filmmaker was over before it had even officially begun. She revealed in the same podcast that while she remembers “shooting in Toronto with Kirsten and all the cast” and having “fond memories of it just not being a total disaster,” she still experienced waves of anxiety when it came to post-production.
“I remember my Dad telling me that your movie’s never as good as the dailies – everything shot that day – and never as terrible as the first rough cut. When I saw the first rough cut, I thought: ‘Oh no, this is terrible, what have I done? I’ve talked all these people into letting me make a movie, and it’s terrible.’”
However, she persevered with the film, and the result came together beautifully, with lush cinematography and a dreamy soundtrack by Air. “Then, little by little, we pieced it together and made it into a film.”
