Sofia Coppola
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Sofia Coppola
Written by Annlee Ellingson
The daughter of Francis Ford
Coppola, one of the great filmmakers of our time, Sofia Coppola
took her time breaking into the field. Yes, she appeared in all
three of her dad's "Godfather" movies, making her
bigscreen debut as an infant in the original, but she tried her
hand at other endeavors, among them a clothing line, before
making her feature film directorial debut in her late 20s. It
simply wasn't something she really considered doing before
reading Jeffrey Eugenides' "The Virgin Suicides."
"I probably [was] aware of film from just being around my
dad's sets so much, but I wasn't looking for material and setting
out to direct a movie," she tells BOXOFFICE. "I had
done a short ["Lick the Star"], and that's when I
realized that [filmmaking] was something that I really loved and
that I knew something about. When I heard someone else was making
a movie of 'The Virgin Suicides,' I felt really protective of it,
and I just started working on the script.
"I didn't have the rights when I started working on the
script," she continues, "and I wasn't really planning
on making the film. And then I got so attached to it that when I
finished the script, I met the producers who had the rights to
it, and they had another director and another script, but I
begged them."
Ultimately it was Coppola's take on the material -- her ability
to mix the material's humor and tragedy -- that got her the gig.
"I just was really into the book and the subject matter and
tried to bring out what I loved," she says. "I think
the other versions kind of sensationalized it, and I liked that
it had this innocence to it and tried to keep that."
Set in a 1970s suburban neighborhood, "The Virgin
Suicides" looks back at the ill-fated Lisbon girls who,
plagued by their prettiness and their ultra-conservative
upbringing, become objects of fascination for the neighbor boys.
"[The girls] are mythical because they're the neighborhood
Lisbon sisters -- these five beautiful blonde, ethereal
sisters," Coppola says of her characters, led by Kirsten
Dunst. "They're very mysterious, and they introduced the
boys to longing for women. Because they don't stick around, they
never got old, and they stay in the boys' heads as kind of the
first representation of women."
Coppola's filmmaking style reflects the story's impressionistic
themes. "The whole story is these boys who are now men
trying to understand what happened with these girls that they
were obsessed with," she says. "They're trying to piece
together the things they remember and the things they heard and
things they collected.
"The movie wasn't really done in a realistic way. It was
more in this stylized memory, because [the boys] are looking back
on it. It's not happening right then. I think when you remember
things, you don't remember the whole picture. You remember the
pieces that impressed you like a detail, so I wanted it to be
more impressionistic [and] not go for shock value" -- a far
cry from her father's infamous image of a severed horse's head.
But Coppola doesn't concentrate on the comparison. "I try
not to think about [following in my father's footsteps] because I
really admire his work and learn from him, but so many kids
follow in their parents' footsteps," she says. "I
think, if I worry too much about that, I just wouldn't do
anything. So I'm just trying to do my own thing, and I hope
people see ['The Virgin Suicides'] for what it is -- my first
film -- and [recognize that] I'm a separate person."
