Sofia Coppola

Started by Rudie Obias, April 18, 2003, 08:27:21 PM

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MacGuffin

Sofia Coppola Recruits Emma Watson for 'The Bling Ring'
Coppola signs up the "Harry Potter" star for an ensemble picture about a group of celebrity-obsessed teen thieves.
Source: THR

Emma Watson, best known for playing Hermione Granger in the Harry Potter movies, will star The Bling Ring, Sofia Coppola's latest picture.

Based on true events that took place in Beverly Hills, the movie will tell the story of a group of fashion and fame-obsessed teens who broke into the homes of celebrities.

With the movie, Coppola wants to reflect today's culture of celebrity and reveal "reveal a sobering view of our modern culture," according to the project's producers,  which include Coppola, Roman Coppola and Youree Henley.

Watson will topline what will be an ensemble cast.

The movie will shoot this spring on location in Los Angeles.

In her post-Potter career, Watson, repped by WME and Markham, Froggatt & Irwin, is attached to a Beauty and the Beast project to be directed by Guillermo del Toro and the drama Your Voice in My Head, which would reunite her with director David Yates, who helmed many a Potter movies.

Coppola said that she's looking forward to filming. "I'm excited about the young cast we're assembling and I'm looking forward to shooting on location here in Los Angeles," she said.

Emma Watson is represented by WME and Markham, Froggatt & Irwin.
"Don't think about making art, just get it done. Let everyone else decide if it's good or bad, whether they love it or hate it. While they are deciding, make even more art." - Andy Warhol


Skeleton FilmWorks

Champion Souza

Quote from: Jeremy Blackman on August 27, 2011, 01:51:50 PM
Another marvel of journalism.

Quote from: MacGuffin on February 29, 2012, 04:38:33 PM
...and reveal "reveal a sobering view of our modern culture,"...

...David Yates, who helmed many a Potter movies.

Written by an ESL student?



Pubrick

well at least she's putting her celebrity connections to good use.

can't wait to see what will likely be the least interesting heists ever put on film.

at this point she should just release soundtracks.
under the paving stones.

wilder

The Bling Ring will be in theaters June 14, 2013

wilder

Lost and Found
via Directors Guild of America
By Carrie Rickey

As much as any contemporary director, Sofia Coppola has captured the feeling of young people adrift in a seductive world. With The Bling Ring, she continues her intimate exploration of lives in transition.

Some show business folk claim to be born in a trunk. Sofia Coppola was baptized on a movie set: she is the infant christened in the penultimate sequence of The Godfather (1972), directed by her father Francis Ford Coppola. Over the past 14 years, she has delivered two daughters of her own, as well as five feature films that have won acclaim; including a DGA and Oscar nomination for directing Lost in Translation; for her nuanced portraits of teenagers and young adults losing and finding themselves.

Coppola's academic training is in photography. It took roughly a decade for her to evolve organically from still pictures to moving ones. Her latest film, The Bling Ring, follows the nocturnal adventures of starstruck L.A. teens that steal into the homes, and closets, of celebs such as Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. Based on "The Suspects Wore Louboutins," an improbable-but-true tale published in Vanity Fair, the film is a social satire in the spirit of To Die For (1995). It looks askance at these fashion felons who walk, quite literally, in the (stolen) shoes of their style idols.

"I thought it was such an interesting story and the quotes from the real kids really made an impression," Coppola says, reflecting on her reaction to reading the story about teenagers who dreamed of having their own fragrance lines and reality TV shows. "I thought the story said so much about our culture today and how it can affect young people."

Coppola adds, "I was curious about these kids growing up always aware of their audience, constantly posting pictures online." Her intimate film captures the electronic collage of contemporary teenage life. "For visual references, I borrowed the cell phones of my actors and studied their Facebook and Myspace pages." Many shots in the film look like "selfies," those cell phone auto-portraits taken from arm's length. "This world isn't as visually beautiful as some of my other films," Coppola notes. "It's more Pop." As in Pop Art.

Mastering the small canvas rather than the big screen was Coppola's original goal. As a teenager she set her sights on becoming an artist. In the 1990s, she enrolled at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). "I wanted to be a painter," she recalls over tea at a West Village cafe near her Manhattan digs. "They told me I wasn't." When she transferred to Art Center College of Design, her photography instructor, Paul Jasmin, was more encouraging. "He told me my point of view was worth exploring."

Colleges don't give degrees in POV. In any event, by the time Coppola enrolled at Art Center she was already in possession of a doctoral equivalency. "I didn't realize it at the time," reflects the filmmaker, 41, poised and watchful. When it comes to the language of film, Coppola says, she was home schooled.

"Dad always included us," recalls the soft‑spoken Coppola referring to herself and brother Roman, also a director. "We were always talking about and looking at film. I didn't even realize I was learning."

Still, there are significant stylistic differences between father and daughter. Where the elder Coppola is attracted to larger-than-life characters, employing tracking shots for epic scope and sweep, the younger works on a more intimate scale. Her mantra is "less formality." From Coppola's preference for a handheld camera that gets into her subject's personal space to her painstaking use of ambient sounds to create a you-are-there experience, "it's about getting close and closer to the character."

To create her signature shot, shadowing a character from behind, she likes to use a handheld camera or a dolly shot. Whether her camera stalks Scarlett Johansson exploring a Buddhist temple in Kyoto in Lost in Translation (2003) or Kirsten Dunst entering Versailles in Marie Antoinette (2006) or Emma Watson, teenage celebrity stalker in The Bling Ring, Coppola gentles you into their drifts and their dreams.

Hers is not the traditional first-person point of view. In Coppola's films it's as though the camera is a balloon invisibly tethered to the nape of the protagonist's neck, bobbing and floating in her wake as she threads through space. This shot, which requires only one camera, is an umbilical cord attaching the viewer to the character. It creates the effect that you're not watching a Sofia Coppola movie; you're inside of it.

She developed this distinctive shot on her 1999 feature debut The Virgin Suicides, an adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides' 1970s‑era novel about teenage boys obsessed with a quartet of sisters whose overprotective parents have them under a kind of house arrest.

"It wasn't just showing boys looking at and spying on girls," Coppola says, recalling her conversations with cinematographer Edward Lachman. The challenge was how to convey the boys' fascination with Girl World. "I wanted to be very clear about translating their perspective, how to get up close to them as they entered these girly spaces." Unlike so many films about boys spying on girls, in Suicides the camera is focused on the boys' self-consciousness rather than on the girls' bodies. A brief moment of drollery in Coppola's elegy to adolescence involves one boy's encounter with a cache of sanitary napkins in the bathroom shared by the sisters.

From The Virgin Suicides to The Bling Ring, Coppola mines visual means to express the psychological states of enclosure and exposure. What you remember about her films are the microclimates of feeling and longing. As she puts it, "My movies are not about being, but becoming." Her protagonists are almost all teenagers or adults-in-transition (the latter would include Bill Murray in Lost in Translation and Stephen Dorff, estranged father of an 11-year-old daughter, in Somewhere [2010]).

Apart from teenagehood, the dominant themes of Coppola's movies are that of outsiders looking (and wanting) in and insiders looking (and wanting) out, imagining alternative lives. The most trancelike passages in her films are dialogue‑free sequences of the curious peering into the lives of others (The Virgin Suicides, The Bling Ring) and the entrapped gazing out to perceived freedom (Suicides, Lost in Translation, Marie Antoinette, Somewhere). Such shots present challenges.

"The biggest shock about Suicides was how hard it is to shoot from inside a car," she says with a hearty laugh. "I always forget how hard. You don't think about that when you're writing it. And I write it again and again."

Although oblivious to much of her cinematic home schooling while it was happening, Coppola now acknowledges how decisively it has influenced her choices in preproduction, on set, and in post.

In The Godfather: Part III (1990), Coppola plays Mary Corleone, the gosling‑like almost-grown daughter of Al Pacino and Diane Keaton. She was a last‑minute replacement for Winona Ryder and The New York Times panned her performance as "flat" and "uneasy." Coppola, who was much more relaxed on screen as Kathleen Turner's kid sister in her father's Peggy Sue Got Married (1986), would turn that rotten tomato into ragu.

"Having been in front of a camera, knowing how vulnerable that can be, I am sensitive to that vulnerability in my actors," she says. Clearly performers as stylistically diverse as Kirsten Dunst, James Woods, Kathleen Turner and Bill Murray feel secure enough to reveal their defenselessness.

"I was open to Bill being himself," she observes of Murray's Oscar‑nominated turn in Lost in Translation as an emotionally‑naked actor sleepless and adrift in Tokyo. To help shape the performance she wants, Coppola applies lessons she learned from studying with the acting and dialogue coach Greta Seacat (daughter of acting guru Sandra Seacat). "By going to her classes when I was younger, I learned how to talk to actors. Instead of saying, 'Act tired in this scene,' I'll say, 'You've been up all night and you want to go home,' to set the mood for them."

Coppola says she casts less for looks than for simpatico. "I feel like there has to be a connection, you have to find the same things funny. That way, you're on the same channel and you'll be able to communicate more effectively."

On The Bling Ring, she says, "I worked with a lot of first‑timers. They're so enthusiastic...and they don't have bad habits." The performances by newcomers Israel Broussard and Katie Chang mesh seamlessly with that of Emma Watson, the Harry Potter alum who spent months perfecting Valley Girl dialect for the role. "She worked really hard," Coppola says, "like the good student she is."

Coppola, too, worked hard at being a good teacher, guiding her cast away from acting and toward natural behavior. The rehearsal period is key for her. "I get ideas for dialogue and the actors form relationships so they're comfortable together. By the time we're shooting you might believe they're people who really know each other. On The Bling Ring, the kids hung out and did stuff together; they formed a group and had inside jokes."

Perhaps because she experienced filmmaking as a family affair growing up, or maybe just because it just makes creative sense, Coppola tries to create a family atmosphere among the actors. To reinforce the parent-child bond before shooting Somewhere, she had Dorff pick up Elle Fanning, his screen daughter, from school every day. Before shooting The Bling Ring, she sent her young actors on recon missions to shopping malls and clubs. "That way, during the club scenes when they are partying, they're really partying," she says.

But before directing, there has to be a script, which is her blueprint on the set. Here, the elder Coppola was more intentional with his daughter's home schooling. Sofia was 16, fresh from a Paris internship with couturier Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel, when her father asked her to collaborate on the script for Life Without Zoe, his contribution to the anthology film New York Stories (1989) that also included short films from Woody Allen and Martin Scorsese.

"That was about Dad teaching me to write, creating an opportunity for us to do something together," recalls Coppola. "It's more his story than mine," she observes of the fairy tale about a teenager longing for her absent father. What she remembers most about the experience; for which she received screen credit for costumes and screenplay; is selecting the Chanel ensembles and hats worn by the middle‑schoolers in the film. As she tells it, the takeaway wasn't so much about how to structure a script, but about being party to the process by which an idea is developed, tweaked and ultimately executed as the director.

From the start, all of Coppola's films have been image rather than dialogue‑intensive. "I don't want my movies to feel like movies," she says. "I want them to feel like life." If there's less smart talk than small talk in her films, it's because she believes that's how life is. "People don't really express themselves that articulately in real life." When she constructs a scenario, Coppola says she's thinking in images. To get more of the in‑the‑moment feel, she encourages improvisation from her actors.

"Remember Scarlett [Johansson] perched in the window ledge in Lost in Translation, looking out over Tokyo?" she asks. "You project your feelings on her. That's what I'm going for. I want the visual ways to tell the story rather than have the characters talk." What's unsaid speaks volumes.

For Coppola, "The scripts are notes to let cast and crew know what I want to do. I don't make a shot list. There's no sense in that until you see the actors rehearse the scene. So, I'll say, 'In this scene I want to show X.' I feel camera placement is really intuitive. It helps to have a script supervisor who keeps track of what I want to accomplish in each scene."

She breaks down the script while writing it. "I see the movie in three acts and have a sense of how I want each act framed. With Bling Ring I knew I wanted the early acts to be in wide shots and gradually proceed to tighter shots."

Her visual aesthetic and preference for shooting with available light whenever possible was shaped by her training at Art Center. Then in 1998, Coppola co‑wrote and directed the short Lick the Star. The angsty film about youth and death anticipates the themes of The Virgin Suicides, set in the leafy suburbs of Detroit circa 1974.

Working with her DP Lachman to determine the look of the film, she took a page from her father's preproduction playbook: watching movies and thumbing through books with Lachman. "We prepped by looking at '70s movies and photographs; Terrence Malick's Badlands, [photographer] Bill Owens' Suburbia." William Eggleston's influential dye‑transfer color photos of the '70s were also influential in establishing the palette and mood. Even now, Coppola does extensive color tests before shooting. "In general, I like things low‑contrast and adapt to the project at hand," she says.

With some embarrassment she recalls her rookie mistake of exceeding her budget for film stock. "To create a natural mood for the girls in their bedroom I would just keep the camera running."

In her films since Suicides, Coppola has adapted a visual shorthand from her days as a fashion entrepreneur (she was a co-founder of MilkFed, a label that sold street fashion in Japan). She compiles a "lookbook," an album of found images that establish the film's texture and tone, and shares it with her cinematography, art and costume departments.

And she doesn't storyboard. Like her father, Coppola plays music on the set, frequently the same cuts she listened to while writing the screenplay. She thinks it helps establish mood. She favors actual locations over shooting studio sets because a location; Tokyo in Lost in Translation, Versailles in Marie Antoinette, Hollywood and Milan in Somewhere, Los Angeles in The Bling Ring; has an energy and authenticity that can't be replicated in a studio. "I like a small crew," she says. "I like to keep it as lean and simple as possible."

Coppola is quick to credit her many collaborators, some of whom, such as film editor Sarah Flack, sound editor Richard Beggs and music producer Brian Reitzell, she's worked with since her first film. "You rely on the people you work well with." Roman Coppola has been a producer on two of her films as well as an occasional second unit director. "It was like having my clone working on another scene."

Speaking on a panel in March 2013, Lachman offered insight into how she works with her team. "The best director," he said, "is one that gives everybody the feeling that they are really helping to make the film in partly their own vision, but it's really the director who is engineering it. Sofia makes everybody feel like they are the really important one."

Such was the case on The Bling Ring. Working with her DP, the late Harris Savides, for the second time, they came up with a unique setup for a shot. One of the robberies takes place in a glass‑clad modernist house high up in the Hollywood Hills. Savides suggested shooting from an abandoned house across the street. From this perspective, Coppola found a wide-angle shot so that as the teenagers break in, enter, and turn on the lights, they resemble dolls in a dollhouse. The startling angle both underscores a sense of child's play and suggests the aphorism that people who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. "I loved how the twinkling city lights below looked just like the jewelry the kids were stealing," Coppola says, obviously pleased with the results.

Coppola shot The Bling Ring on a RED camera, her first digital feature, but because of her photography background, she said she feels more at home shooting on film. What she liked about digital: "It feels more immediate, and since you're not limited by the film in the camera you can go on and on and have really long shots."

What she didn't like: "I spent more time watching the monitor than being on set. It felt passive. I see how it can distance you from the action. I had to keep reminding myself to get back on the set. I'd shoot on film again, if it's still available."

From her father, Coppola learned that "a movie is never as bad as the first rough cut." Still, the rough of Suicides crushed her. Fortunately, she had sound designer Beggs on board as well as Reitzell, one-time drummer of Redd Kross. Reitzell has suggested the musical cues on four of her five films, including anachronistic punk tunes such as Gang of Four's "Natural's Not in It," that opens Marie Antoinette, announcing its central character as an 18th‑century riot grrrl.

Working in the editing room with Flack, "I explain what I want it to feel like, she shows me alternatives, I respond and we find it together," says Coppola. "You find the rhythm in the edit." For her, the film's pace is almost always guided by the movement inside the frame and by the tempo of the soundtrack, which in The Bling Ring is louder, and in Coppola's description, "more obnoxious" than the dreamy music in most of her films.

"I'm more rigid than my dad is about editing," she says. "He moves things all over the place; I stick to the script. He finds the movie in the editing room; I find the movie after the sound mix. The sound adds so much to make you feel you're really there."

Her first experiments wedding image with sound were for music videos for The Flaming Lips and The White Stripes. Usually the soundscape in Coppola's films, a layering of ambient noise and musical score punctuated by a pop track and punched up with augmented effects, such as the birdsong that opens The Virgin Suicides, enhances the you‑are‑there environment. She likes using songs that the characters would listen to, like M.I.A.'s "Bad Girls" in The Bling Ring, which the characters sing along to on the car radio.

Coppola made The Bling Ring on a still-modest $20 million budget. Lost in Translation, her biggest hit to date, cost only $4 million to make (and grossed $120 million worldwide). Except for Marie Antoinette, which had a $40 million budget and an arduous 12‑week shoot mostly in France, Coppola prefers to keep things smaller and more intimate.

Having completed her fifth feature, Coppola says she feels at home in what she perceives as her niche; character-driven films mapping the moves of people lost in transition. "I don't make the kind of movies that lend themselves to wide releases," she concludes.

Source


jenkins

sofia's interview both rocked and shocked my heart <33 phew, so good, so thoughtful. just -- ugh, so good

wilder

Sofia Coppola: The Trials, Tears and Talent
via The Hollywood Reporter
by Stephen Galloway
5/8/13

The Oscar-winning director is back on the Croisette with "The Bling Ring," seven years after "Marie Antoinette" famously was booed. Now the one-time "it" girl is opening up at last about filmmaking, her father, her first marriage and the childhood tragedy that still haunts her.

Think of Sofia Coppola, and an image comes to mind -- of a globe-trotting hipster whose iconic last name has propelled her to fame; who is best friends with designer Marc Jacobs, has modeled for photographer Mario Testino, guest-edited French Vogue, had her own fashion label and now is married to Thomas Mars of ultracool French rock band Phoenix. All of which makes this reporter slightly hesitant as he waits in a small neighborhood restaurant close to Coppola's home in New York's West Village. Then she enters, and any skepticism vanishes.

The Oscar winner hovers quietly by the doorway, without makeup, dressed in jeans and a simple cream sweater. Rather than being larger-than-life, she appears almost embarrassed to take up too much space.

"I remember my mom saying, 'People aren't going to like you because they'll think you're a snob,' " she says, later. " 'You have to go out of your way to show them you're not a jerk.' "

She is surprisingly a bit old-fashioned: She doesn't tweet, doesn't have a Facebook page, hasn't watched most reality TV (Keeping Up With the Kardashians is an exception) and reads books like Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country -- though she's only halfway through. "I'm a very slow reader," she explains, blushing slightly.

There is sweetness to her, and subtlety. There's also sadness -- just a hint, but it's there.

"Everyone thinks I'm like that," she says of her projected melancholy. "I have that part of myself, but it's not [everything]."

At 41, Francis Ford Coppola's youngest child has made five films, including the soon-to-be-released The Bling Ring, lived in Los Angeles, Paris and New York, won a best screenplay Oscar for Lost in Translation, been lambasted for her role in The Godfather: Part III after Winona Ryder dropped out, dated one celebrity director (Quentin Tarantino) and divorced another (she says of Spike Jonze, "I didn't marry the right person").

But perhaps the defining moment of her life came at age 15, when she lost Gian-Carlo, 22, one of her two older siblings.

In 1986, Sofia was with her mother, Eleanor, a former set decorator and the maker of award-winning documentaries including Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse (1991), when her father called from Washington, D.C., where he was shooting Gardens of Stone. Gian-Carlo had been killed in a horrific speedboat accident in Annapolis, Md., from injuries sustained after a towline connecting two other vessels tore into him. His fiancee was two months pregnant with a baby girl, who would be born the following year; Ryan O'Neal's son, Griffin, was steering the boat at the time and later would be prosecuted for manslaughter. (He eventually pleaded guilty to negligent operation of a boat.)

"Those weren't carefree years for me," says Sofia. "I felt, when my brother died, my teenage years got interrupted. I was going through a trauma. Therapy helped -- it was really important for me to be healed -- but it becomes a part of who you are."

Who Coppola is now will be on full display at Cannes, where The Bling Ring will screen May 16.

"She's not how most [people] would perceive her to be," says Kirsten Dunst, who played Marie Antoinette in Coppola's 2006 film and starred in her first feature, 1999's The Virgin Suicides. "She's not precious. She's real."

Coppola is returning to the scene of one of her career low points, seven years after the $40 million Marie Antoinette polarized audiences, leading to a standing ovation from some and boos from others.

"After Marie Antoinette, I was over movies," she says, noting she was drained from the huge six-month shoot. "Then I met [cinematographer] Harris Savides, and he gave me a new outlook. He was really into doing things small and as simple as possible. He got me excited about making movies again, in a small-scale way."

The $8 million-plus Bling Ring is set in modern-day Calabasas, Calif., and tells the true story of a group of teens that embarked on a robbing spree, stealing money, jewelry and designer clothing from the likes of Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan before they were caught and then, in some cases, given prison sentences. The film mixes a cast of unknowns -- including Israel Broussard, Taissa Farmiga and Katie Chang. Leslie Mann and Harry Potter's former teenage witch, Emma Watson, were exceptions.

Watson, who spent weeks perfecting a Valley accent, was struck by her director's spontaneity during a six-week shoot that got under way in March 2011. "Once you are on set, she lets you be," she says. "She is very loose and free and calm."

While not shooting or with her two girls (Romy, 6, and Cosima, almost 3) or accompanying her husband on tour, Coppola spends much of her time in an office near her apartment, writing when the mood strikes, responding to e-mails when it doesn't. She acknowledges that writing is "difficult," even though she never has directed a movie with a screenplay by someone else.

She follows film but not avidly (she singles out the documentary The Queen of Versailles and Denmark's A Royal Affair as recent favorites, while lamenting, "It hasn't really been an exciting era for movies"); she listens to music, usually chosen by her husband, though she retains a special affection for Elvis Costello, Roxy Music and Chopin's "Preludes"; and she watches a smattering of television -- from 30 Rock to Mad Men -- while avoiding reality TV.

She also collects photography and has works by William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander and Tina Barney on her apartment's white walls along with a treasured photograph of Charlotte Rampling, given to her by the late Helmut Newton.

"I met him the day he died [in 2004] -- that morning, in the elevator of the Chateau Marmont," she says. "He's one of my heroes. I had written about [the Rampling shot], I think for Vogue, and he sent me the photograph. I couldn't believe it. It's one of my most-cherished possessions. I was able to thank him and told him how much I love it." Hours later, Newton crashed his car right outside the hotel, and Sofia saw the smashed vehicle when she returned later that day, paying an oblique homage to it with the ruined car one glimpses in her 2010 film Somewhere.

She remains close to her parents and at the time of this interview was about to join them in New Orleans to celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary at Jazz Fest. "The actual date was Feb. 2, but this was the first time all of us could get together," she says. They e-mail regularly, but, she adds, "I'm not one of those people that talk to their mom all the time."

Francis remembers his daughter once asking "if I felt she was a dilettante. I said, 'No, do all the things you love and eventually they will be useful for whatever you choose.' When I saw her first film, a short titled Lick the Star, I knew it had all come together and she was a filmmaker."

Indeed, for Hollywood royalty (relatives include Nicolas Cage, Jason Schwartzman, Talia Shire and her brother Roman, 48), she has very carefully carved out an identity of her own, influenced by her parents but still separate from them.

"My demeanor is more like my mom," she observes, referring to Eleanor's quieter manner. But like her father, "I have strong opinions. I have a desire [to stamp them on film]." Some part of her likes that element of control, she acknowledges: "In real life, you can't do that. You can't create a world exactly how you imagine."

The Bling Ring takes a real-life story then filters it through Coppola's lucid and luminous eye. She was drawn to the subject when she read Nancy Jo Sales' Vanity Fair article "The Suspects Wore Louboutins." At first, she optioned the underlying material for her family's company, American Zoetrope, without planning to direct. But the more she learned about the case -- helped by transcripts of interviews with the teenagers and police records Sales sent her -- the more intrigued she became.

"It seemed to say so much about contemporary culture and just how this trashy pop culture has become so dominant," she says. "That can be fun, and you can peek at it, but these kids are obsessed with the idea that anybody can be famous and everybody should be."

Coppola spent a year writing the script and negotiating for some of the real characters' life rights, at the same time as a rival project, also titled The Bling Ring, was in the works at Lifetime. She says she watched only five minutes of that 2011 telepic, unwilling for it to influence her work. "I was glad it came and went, but it was everything I wouldn't want my film to be," she says.

Meanwhile, she reached out to the teenagers involved in the crimes. "I spoke to [Alexis Neiers and Nick Prugo] and the detective, Brett Goodkin," she recalls. "Alexis still claims to be innocent and that she wasn't involved in anything. She just stuck with her story."

(Neiers, who served time in prison for her crime, since has tweeted that the finished work is "trashy and inaccurate"; Goodkin, a technical adviser on Coppola's film, is awaiting the verdict of a disciplinary panel on whether his participation violated LAPD rules.)

As is her wont, Coppola kept a "reference book" of pictures and documents that she later could show her cast and crew, including snapshots of Hilton's shoe closet, images of Los Angeles' sparkling skyline and photos she found on the Facebook page of castmember Claire Julien.

While she developed the screenplay, fellow producers Youree Henley and her brother Roman (along with Coppola's agent, ICM Partners' Bart Walker, and FilmNation's Glen Basner) cobbled together funds from foreign distributors, then sold domestic rights to U.S. distributor A24, which will release the film June 14.

Watson was intrigued by her director's manner when shooting began. "Sofia was never really explicit," she says. "Her laughing or getting excited about the take was what I got confidence from. And just the fact she believed I could do it in the first place."

To Coppola's surprise, Hilton agreed to participate, taking a cameo and allowing her to shoot in the actress-model's Beverly Hills home. Coppola had met her there when Somewhere star Stephen Dorff invited her to a party. "That's when I first saw the 'Paris pillows,' " she recalls, referring to pillows that bear Hilton's image, one of the more startling examples of Hollywood narcissism that appear in her movie. "It felt very Entourage."

As to shooting in Hilton's house: "For a while, we weren't talking about it," she says, "because they don't allow filming in her neighborhood -- we had to sneak in and not look like a film crew." Hilton herself surprised her. "She has a sense of humor, and she was really nice."

It is hard to imagine two public figures more different than the socialite and Sofia, one all surface, the other with so much hidden behind her words.
Coppola speaks with candor and a lack of pretense, and yet a sense of mystery remains. It explains why the public and the famous friends she has made are so drawn to her.

She rarely sees Tarantino, her former boyfriend. "I'm friendly with him, and I'm surprised I'm not in touch with him, but that was a different time in my life," she says. Nor is she in contact with Jonze, whose relationship with her inspired Scarlett Johansson's uncomfortable dealings with the photographer spouse played by Giovanni Ribisi in Lost in Translation.

"I was trying to figure it out when I was writing that," says Coppola of the marriage, which ended after four years in 2003, the very year Lost in Translation was released. "My friends said, 'Finish the script and you'll know what to do.' " Looking back, she admits: "I think I had doubts, but I didn't listen to them because I was young. Spike didn't end well."

Her personal life is settled now, she says, and she has gained recognition in her own right. "Sofia has what we call in the wine industry 'terroir,' " says her father. "This means, all you need to do is see a few moments of film, and you know she made it."

She is thinking of teaming with her Somewhere discovery Elle Fanning for a film with her sister Dakota; and she says she is open to doing a studio movie, even though she didn't enjoy the unwieldiness of Sony's Marie Antoinette.

She has one foot in the contemporary world but one foot decidedly out. "There are aspects I enjoy about pop culture -- music and fashion," she says, "but reality TV and the tabloids -- I don't relate."

Her family is what she relates to most ("She's become a truly great mother," notes Francis), possibly even at the expense of her own work. She can't write late into the night as she once did and must tailor her hours to theirs; nor can she readily embark on a months-long shoot, unless she brings the kids, as her father did on Apocalypse Now. That, she recognizes, is the reality of being an adult.

"It's weird being a grown-up," she says, a smile illuminating her face. "I think I'm just getting used to it."

jenkins

you're posting great interviews

she's in such a battle with gus over who's my fav usa director


wilder

Sofia Coppola To Co-Write 'Fairyland' For American Zoetrope
via Deadline

EXCLUSIVE: American Zoetrope has acquired screen rights to Alysia Abbott's Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, with Sofia Coppola set to adapt it with Andrew Durham. She will produce with Roman Coppola. The memoir was published by W. W. Norton & Co  last June. The book is a coming of age story set against San Francisco's vibrant cultural scene in the 1970s and '80s, both before and after the AIDS epidemic, a crisis that would later claim the life of Abbott's father, Steve Abbott, a widowed poet and gay activist.

"I love the book Fairyland; it's a sweet and unique love story of a girl and her dad, both growing up together in 1970′s San Francisco," Coppola said. "I think it will make an engaging and touching movie on a subject I've never seen before."

Said the author: "I'm delighted that Sofia Coppola and Zoetrope are going to create the film version of Fairyland. Sofia's understanding of the feminine perspective and the artistic vision that she shares with Andrew Durham make them ideal partners to make this movie. I could not be happier."

Abbot is repped by Gersh's Brandy Rivers, attorney David Davoli and David Patterson at Foundry Literary + Media. Zoetrope was represented by ICM Partners and attorneys Hirsch Wallerstein Hayum Matlof + Fishman.

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Sofia Coppola To Helm 'The Little Mermaid'
via Deadline

EXCLUSIVE: Sofia Coppola is negotiating to direct The Little Mermaid, a live-action version of the classic Hans Christian Anderson fairy tale for Universal Pictures and Working Title partners Tim Bevan and Eric Fellner. Caroline Thompson of Edward Scissorhands fame is rewriting the script, about the mermaid willing to make a Faustian bargain to live on land after she falls in love. Previous drafts were done by Fifty Shades Of Grey scribe Kelly Marcel and Shame scribe Abi Morgan, and Joe Wright was at one time eyeing this to direct.

The intention is to move quickly. This is a departure for Coppola in that her projects are usually focused on adult themes. She's got kids and it wouldn't be shocking if she wanted to please them with a movie they can see and understand. Working Title is currently in production on Everest, the drama about the climbing disaster. The director is repped by ICM Partners and attorney Barry Hirsch. ICM also reps Thompson. Coppola last helmed The Bling Ring.

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TV: Bill Murray Reteams With Sofia Coppola For Christmas Special
via The Playlist

Murray has revealed he's reteaming with "Lost In Translation" director Sofia Coppola for a holiday project that's still coming together. "It's not going to be live," Murray told Variety. "We're going to do it like a little movie. It won't have a format, but it's going to have music. It will have texture. It will have threads through it that are [being] writing. There will be prose." There are no details yet on when it will air, but presumably it will be this holiday season.

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George Clooney, Miley Cyrus to Play Themselves in Sofia Coppola Christmas Special
via The Hollywood Reporter

The lure of working with Lost in Translation collaborators Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray has proved too powerful to resist for the likes of George Clooney, Amy Poehler, Miley Cyrus and Maya Rudolph, who, like Murray, will play themselves — with some even singing carols — on a Coppola-directed 2015 Christmas project.

Sources say a deal still is being worked out for distribution on the special, which follows the notoriously agent- and manager-less actor as he evades the advances of a shark dying to sign him. Angelenos will relish a subtler cameo: Sunset Tower host Dmitri Dmitrov missed a few nights at the Tower Bar recently to play the role of valet to Murray, who in his SNL days frequented L.A.'s Diaghilev, Dmitrov's former home.

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Netflix has dropped a promo for the appropriately titled "A Very Murray Christmas." George Clooney, Amy Poehler, Miley Cyrus and Maya Rudolph are also involved and the story will involve Murray playing himself and trying to avoid a Hollywood figure who wants to represent the actor who famously forgoes having a manager or agent. And somewhere in there will be rooms for Christmas carols to be sung by the actors (everyone is playing themselves) and probably more bits and pieces of holiday cheer.