In a buzzing Royal Festival Hall clearly filled with fans and admirers, Sofia Coppola gave an on-stage interview with Edith Bowman as part of this year’s Screen Talk series at the London Film Festival. Open, honest and with a refreshing humility, Coppola gave thoughtful answers that broke down the myth-making arc that often surrounds revered filmmakers and revealed the artist and human beneath.
This was the first Screen Talk I had attended at Royal Festival Hall (others have been in NFT1) and I was wary that the scale of the venue may overpower the intimate feel that these conversations often have. However, the warmth of the audience combined with the openness of Coppola’s answers managed to draw you into the conversation and ensured the space didn’t feel too cavernous. A livestream of the pair was projected onto the screen behind them, alongside live captions, and a BSL interpreter was present on stage.
As is the structure of LFF Screen Talks, Bowman worked her way chronologically through Coppola’s filmography, highlighting four key works and screening a clip of each. There was a touching sentimentality to Coppola immediately after each clip as she explained she hadn’t watched them in a long time and the scenes clearly took her straight back in time. However, as the film Coppola was attending the festival with was Making Marie Antoinette, the conversation didn’t take in much of her work of the past two decades – an omission, perhaps, but it allowed for a more in-depth discussion of her process and earlier works than otherwise would have fit into the talk’s run time.
On Becoming a Director and her Visual Language
Going back to her initial steps into film, Coppola explained that because film was ‘what her family did’ (putting it mildly), she didn’t want to go into it herself. She went to art school to study photography and struggling with figuring out what she wanted to do due to being interested in so many things. Despite her earlier reticence, she found herself drawn back to the film world. It was a meeting of all of her interests, and the position of the director allowed her to work with experts in all kinds of creative fields, rather than having to choose one to become an expert in herself. Her first project was her short, Lick the Star, the inspiration and impetus for which was observing the lives of her friends around her. It wasn’t conceived as the first step towards a career in film, but the experience of making it confirmed that this was where she wanted to be. With her roots in photography, her distinct visual language developed naturally, and she always complies a reference book when starting a project to help herself visualise the world and communicate that vision to others.
On The Virgin Suicides and Girlhood
The first film the talk dove into was Coppola’s feature debut, The Virgin Suicides. Coppola had loved the book and heard that a film version was being made – like every book fan, that news came with trepidation and hope that they would get it right. Born out of this love for the book and the continued pull towards filmmaking, Coppola decided to start trying to adapt it some of it into a screenplay, purely as an exercise. Before she knew it, she had a full script. With what she now terms as the audacity and naivety of youth, she found and approached the producers who held the rights to the novel with her screenplay, sending it in case their original plans fell through. I think we all know that they did and the producers took a chance on Coppola.
One of Coppola’s frustrations as an audience-member was that teenagers in films never seemed like real teenagers, they were never people she could relate to. An apparent mission in her approach to The Virgin Suicides, this clearly became a throughline across her career, the success of which has manifested itself in how her films have struck a real chord with the young women and girls in her audiences. She was asked about being drawn to making films about women and she said, alongside wanted to create that relatable representation, that it is just what she is interested in and she would find it harder to be interested in films without them. I find this question off and a little derivative – the same was levelled at Greta Gerwig during her Screen Talk a few years ago (then by an audience member) – but it is never asked of the male directors who rarely even feature parts for women. I can understand why it was asked in relation to Coppola’s place within young women’s hearts, but I think there is a bigger conversation to be had elsewhere.
She spoke about capturing The Virgin Suicides as if the story was told through snapshots and memories, the camera remaining still, with the girls moving in and out of frame. The camera reflected the perspective of the boys narrating the story as they are piecing together the past and going back over the evidence. Coppola believes that the camera should always be showing someone’s perspective, that it is inherent to the storytelling. She joked how her kids will get annoyed when watching something with her because she’ll get frustrated and point out when it feels like the camera placement has no meaning or point of view (an interesting insight into the mind of a filmmaker, even when casually watching TV).
On Lost in Translation
Unsurprisingly, the next film in the spotlight was Coppola’s Oscar-winner Lost in Translation. Again, with a refreshing honesty and relatability, Coppola explained that the film ultimately came from that feeling of being lost in her 20s and unsure of what to do. Combined with a personal connection to Tokyo, where she spent much of that decade, she thought that the film would be too personal and didn’t think people would connect to it or care about it – the idea of a privileged girl not knowing what to do with her life. Instead, its huge success gave the lesson that the more personal something is, often the more universal it is in turn. This led to a discussion of how her experience feeds into her work, highlighting later that perhaps the parental relationship at the centre of Somewhere came from her having become a parent shortly before. She touched on really wanting Bill Murray to be in the film and having to track him down, also highlighting his talent for improvisation, evident in the clip played. Bowman also asked her about how significant a moment that final whisper has become for people – Coppola didn’t think it would be such a big deal, it was just something they would figure out later. It is fascinating to see how something could be merely a placeholder on the day it was captured on film, but later become an iconic moment in cinema history based on how the audience reacted.
On Marie Antoinette
Following the huge success of Lost in Translation, Coppola decided to use the blank cheque it afforded her to create Marie Antoinette, a film she doesn’t think would have been made otherwise. She’d been working on the screenplay at the same time as Lost in Translation’s – something she advises writers to do to help with the difficulty of the process; having another project to switch over to when she got stuck helped move them both along. A different beast to her previous projects, Coppola proved her ambition in actually getting to shoot at Versailles; she said that whenever someone tells her she can’t do something, it makes her more determined to. The large-scale of the production was new to Coppola, who didn’t shy away from the more challenging experience it presented when discussing it. Coverage was one of the biggest difficulties she faced, later working with a cinematographer who came with the motto ‘keep it simple’, shifting Coppola to shooting more minimal shots. The experience made her want to return to doing smaller, character-focused pieces again, ultimately leading to her next film Somewhere (which she also said probably came from her experience of becoming a parent). Due to the complex logistics of the shoot, Coppola couldn’t shoot in order as she usually prefers to. She joked that they would keep track of where they were in the story by the height of Kirsten Dunst’s wigs, but also marvelled at how actors are able to keep track of the emotional arc in such circumstances. Reuniting with Dunst, Coppola wrote the film for her and found she didn’t particularly have to explain her vision to her much, such was their working relationship and understanding of one another. She had always found Dunst had a unique appeal; the all-American blonde girl but with real depth behind her eyes. Coppola spoke of Dunst’s performance not being well-received at the time, something that has perhaps been in line with more of a reappraisal of the film in general.
On Making Marie Antoinette
Attending the festival with her new documentary, Making Marie Antoinette, Coppola spoke of how embarrassing it had been to be rewatching footage of herself as a young director, but that it was a promise to her mother that kept her determined to bring the film to fruition. Having uncovered around 80 hours of behind-the-scenes footage shot by her mother, Eleanor, whilst at home during the pandemic, the pair wanted to shape it into something to share with the world. Eleanor sadly passed away in 2024, so Coppola finished the film without her, yet made sure the choices she made would reflect her mother’s rather than her own. She incorporated her mother’s diaries (read aloud by Diane Lane) to bring her voice to the film in another way and relied on her mother’s friends as well as the editors to help shape and judge footage in which Coppola appeared herself. She hopes the film will inspire young filmmakers and it stands as a tribute to her mother and her work. She touched on the sacrifices her mother had made, as many mothers of that generation did, to support her family and the differences she had encountered when becoming a mother herself but being able to continue with her career (alongside the complexities that carries too). Alongside the mixed feelings of seeing herself as a ‘baby director’, Coppola also came to see that the footage represented a mother looking at her daughter too.
On Being a Trailblazer and Connecting with Audiences
When asked if she can now look at her career and see herself as a trailblazer and maverick, Coppola said that she has always just been focused on what she is currently creating before moving straight onto the next project. She found herself backstage prior to the talk really thinking about and being somewhat in awe of the fact that she now has such a body of work that she can talk about. She said it always touches her when someone has an emotional reaction to her films and shares it with her. She was very open about artists having a lot of self-doubt, so that audience connection means a lot, saying ‘I’ll take it’ before a shout of ‘I love you’ from the audience and a huge round of applause.
Safe to say, the room was full of people who had been touched by her work and who sent her off with a really warm round of applause. A delighted audience funnelled out and many made a beeline for a pop-up shop of Coppola’s gorgeous coffee table books. An inspiring talk sprinkled with insight and honesty, with a tease at Coppola’s excitement to get started on the next project, it was a reminder of the person behind the camera.
