Gia Coppola
- Thread starter Zoolander
- Start date
Not Plain Jane
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Mar 3, 2010
- Messages
- 15,422
- Reaction score
- 718
^ Yep super cool... following in the footsteps of Sofia. So far her film has received mainly positive reviews at Rotten Tomatoes.
Not Plain Jane
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Mar 3, 2010
- Messages
- 15,422
- Reaction score
- 718
Ha! Lovely photos - karma jexxica!!
She has such amazing and huge brown eyes.
She has such amazing and huge brown eyes.
jexxica
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Mar 14, 2009
- Messages
- 31,719
- Reaction score
- 357
Unto the Next Generation, Cinematically
By most counts, Gia Coppola — whose first film, “Palo Alto,” opens May 9 — is the fourth generation in her famous Hollywood family to enter the world of film.
But her “grandpa,” the man otherwise known as Francis Ford Coppola, says she’s the fifth. Not only did his father, Carmine, win an Oscar for scoring “The Godfather: Part II,” but his grandfather, Agostino, helped engineer the Vitaphone, which brought song to silent films.
“They were excited,” Ms. Coppola, 27, said recently, recalling her family’s reactions when she told them she would be writing and directing a film. “But mostly this was my chance to really try do it on my own.”
Based on the short story collection by the actor James Franco — who stars as a charmingly lecherous high school soccer coach with a penchant for underage bedmates — “Palo Alto” traces the meandering lives of a loose (so to speak) group of California teenagers. Dreamy, poignant and devoid of any trace of moralizing, the film depicts their partying, hookups and awkward crushes with unblinking ease, almost tenderly. The film drew warm reviews at last year’s Telluride Film Festival where it had its debut, and where Mr. Coppola came along as his granddaughter’s plus-one.
“It’s a big relief,” Ms. Coppola said of the critics’ reception, over coffee in Chelsea last month. “I totally forgot about the review process when I was making this.”
Venturing into feature directing and screenwriting is a hefty lift for anyone, even if — especially if — they hail from what is arguably Hollywood’s most illustrious dynasty. If you count Sofia Coppola, Talia Shire, Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman among your kin, not to mention a living legend for a grandfather, cries of nepotistic advantage are inevitable.
But Ms. Coppola said she largely steered clear of her family in making “Palo Alto,” instead seeking some mentoring from Mr. Franco.
“It definitely opens doors,” she said of her name. “But at the same time I have to work hard to prove that I have my own voice. It’s not interesting for me if I get all this help and cheat. I want to learn.”
Whisper-thin, as delicately boned as a bird and with honeyed hair and dark chocolate eyes, Ms. Coppola is reserved and private in person, evoking her aunt Sofia. Yet she holds a singular position in the family; her entry into it came on the tail of its biggest tragedy.
Her father was Francis Ford’s firstborn, Gian-Carlo Coppola, or Gio, a fledgling film producer who was killed in a grisly boating accident in May 1986. He was 22, and his girlfriend, Jacqueline de La Fontaine, was newly pregnant with their only child. Seven months later, Ms. Coppola was born.
Ms. Coppola is the namesake of Gian-Carlo; her full name is Gian-Carla. Though Ms. Coppola was largely raised by her mother in Los Angeles — who went on to marry and divorce Peter Getty, of the oil family — the Coppolas took her firmly under their wing. “They kind of took over that void of not having a father,” Ms. Coppola said.
She spent her girlhood vacations with her grandparents in Northern California, picking blackberries and catching crawfish with her uncle Roman. When she was 9, Francis took her on a long tour of Europe, at one point strapping a walkie-talkie to her so she could roam free and squawk if needed (they were on a cruise ship at the time).
“There was this new baby girl in the family, this younger sister we were going to look after and protect,” said Robert Schwartzman, one of Ms. Coppola’s second cousins. (His mother, Ms. Shire, is Mr. Coppola’s sister). “We all raised Gia; it was like this group effort.”
He and Ms. Coppola grew especially close. She attended private schools in Los Angeles, the Center for Early Education and then the Archer School for Girls, where, cripplingly shy, she felt alienated from the other students. So Robert and sometimes his brothers, Matthew Shire and the actor Jason Schwartzman, drove her to school. “If she had any issues,” Robert said, “I would go there and try to put out some fires.”
Still, Ms. Coppola struggled. Academics were not her strong suit. A lack of coordination precluded sports and dance. She yearned to be creative but hated having attention directed her way. But she found refuge in taking photographs.
“I was more of an observer, and so it was hard for me to think what to say,” she said. “That’s why I felt really comfortable with photography, rather than being inspected.”
She dropped out of Archer before her senior year, earned her G.E.D., took community college classes, then transferred to Bard College to study photography. Once there, she also reunited with her first boyfriend, Sam Freilich, now a literary agent who remains her beau.
Ms. Coppola still did not consider a future in film, put off in no small part by her family’s collective talent and famous last name. “It deterred me a little bit,” she said. “I think I felt a little intimidated.”
It was not until she graduated and returned to Los Angeles, where she picked up a job as a barback at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon, that fate, or something like it, intervened. She was asked to appear in a short film for the fashion label Built by Wendy. Ms. Coppola demurred, but agreed to make a film herself, along with her friend, the musician and video maker Tracy Antonopoulos. She cast Nathalie Love, who has been her best friend since both girls were 7 (they met when they appeared in Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ 1994 video “Red Right Hand”), and ended up loving filming. It felt like an extension of photography, Ms. Coppola said, “but with more things to play with.”
Whimsical if amateur, the video led to fashion shorts for Opening Ceremony, United Arrows, Wren and Zac Posen for Target. Not unlike her aunt Sofia’s work, Ms. Coppola’s films take in small, quiet moments. And, like her aunt, she garnered the attention of the fashion set. Ms. Coppola also worked in the wardrobe department of Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” (2010) and behind the scenes with her grandfather on “Twixt” (2011).
She also made a short film starring Robert Schwartzman that she edited into the video for his song “All My Life.” Throughout the filming, Mr. Schwartzman was struck by her understated directorial way.
“It was this amazing moment,” said Mr. Schwartzman, who went on to score “Palo Alto” with the musician Dev Hynes. “I know her to be so soft-spoken, so shy, so sweet, so gentle. She’s not like an alpha woman, but she’s able to get it done as a director.”
Yet the prospect of directing or writing a full-length feature remained distant. Then, one night about five years ago, Ms. Coppola found herself at the same Hollywood party as her mother, who had been speaking to a charming actor named James Franco. Would Ms. Coppola like to meet him?
She would.
Mr. Franco had been kicking around the idea of having his book “Palo Alto: Stories” adapted, preferably by a woman, since he felt that would give the largely male-centered stories a more layered approach. After meeting Ms. Coppola, he reviewed her photography and videos, liked them and, acting on a gut feeling, asked if she would adapt and direct the film.
“I realized she had the right sensibility for it,” Mr. Franco wrote in an email. “Sometimes I have great instincts for these things, and sometimes I don’t, but in this case I did.”
Ms. Coppola, for her part, found she could easily relate to the teenagers in the stories — their awkwardness, their zigzagging emotions, their general confusion and dawning realizations that grown-ups are flawed too. After shooting a short test film, she began fleshing out the script, with the help of Ms. Love and Mr. Franco. She cast Emma Roberts, the Nickelodeon star who is the daughter of Eric Roberts and niece of Julia Roberts, in a lead role, and enlisted many first-time actors, including Jack Kilmer, whose father, Val Kilmer, also plays a small part.
For her part, Ms. Coppola’s longtime friend Ms. Love, who has a small part in “Palo Alto,” said that Ms. Coppola’s blossoming into directing seemed a logical outgrowth of who she already was.
“Gia rarely spoke to anyone, especially adults,” Ms. Love said, recalling their childhood together. “She would kind of whisper in my ear, ‘I want to go to Disneyland,’ and I would have to announce it to the group, as if it was my idea. So she’s kind of always been behind the scenes, directing what was happening.”
Still, Ms. Coppola could not find financing for the film: Would-be investors balked at the number of neophytes involved. Finally, Mr. Franco stepped in. “I believed in Gia so much I just wanted to get this movie made at any cost,” he wrote. So he gave his earnings from the film “Homefront” to Ms. Coppola to make the film. (Ms. Coppola declined to reveal the amount.)
Filming started on Halloween in 2012 in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, a 30-day shoot that, by several accounts, was a homespun affair. Jack Kilmer and his co-star Nat Wolff, who played a troubled troublemaker named Fred, slept on rollaway cots in Ms. de La Fontaine’s garage, where they watched old movies on Francis Ford Coppola’s old TV. Ms. de la Fontaine sometimes showed up on the set to drop off boxes of cupcakes and bags of In-N-Out Burgers. Unable to afford extras, Ms. Coppola tapped her friends to appear in a party scene.
“It was all young people,” Mr. Wolff said. “There’s something about it being her first movie that made it so we all felt like we were in it together.”
And as the director, Mr. Wolff said, Ms. Coppola possessed an ease that reverberated through the set. “Gia’s so calm and in control and fun that it make everybody feel like they had a voice,” he said.
With the film on the eve of release, Ms. Coppola is still settling into life in New York: She and Mr. Freilich moved to the city from Los Angeles in January. Among all the changes, she said, moving on from “Palo Alto” might be the toughest one yet.
“It’s hard to let go of,” she said.
Source: nytimes.com
By most counts, Gia Coppola — whose first film, “Palo Alto,” opens May 9 — is the fourth generation in her famous Hollywood family to enter the world of film.
But her “grandpa,” the man otherwise known as Francis Ford Coppola, says she’s the fifth. Not only did his father, Carmine, win an Oscar for scoring “The Godfather: Part II,” but his grandfather, Agostino, helped engineer the Vitaphone, which brought song to silent films.
“They were excited,” Ms. Coppola, 27, said recently, recalling her family’s reactions when she told them she would be writing and directing a film. “But mostly this was my chance to really try do it on my own.”
Based on the short story collection by the actor James Franco — who stars as a charmingly lecherous high school soccer coach with a penchant for underage bedmates — “Palo Alto” traces the meandering lives of a loose (so to speak) group of California teenagers. Dreamy, poignant and devoid of any trace of moralizing, the film depicts their partying, hookups and awkward crushes with unblinking ease, almost tenderly. The film drew warm reviews at last year’s Telluride Film Festival where it had its debut, and where Mr. Coppola came along as his granddaughter’s plus-one.
“It’s a big relief,” Ms. Coppola said of the critics’ reception, over coffee in Chelsea last month. “I totally forgot about the review process when I was making this.”
Venturing into feature directing and screenwriting is a hefty lift for anyone, even if — especially if — they hail from what is arguably Hollywood’s most illustrious dynasty. If you count Sofia Coppola, Talia Shire, Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman among your kin, not to mention a living legend for a grandfather, cries of nepotistic advantage are inevitable.
But Ms. Coppola said she largely steered clear of her family in making “Palo Alto,” instead seeking some mentoring from Mr. Franco.
“It definitely opens doors,” she said of her name. “But at the same time I have to work hard to prove that I have my own voice. It’s not interesting for me if I get all this help and cheat. I want to learn.”
Whisper-thin, as delicately boned as a bird and with honeyed hair and dark chocolate eyes, Ms. Coppola is reserved and private in person, evoking her aunt Sofia. Yet she holds a singular position in the family; her entry into it came on the tail of its biggest tragedy.
Her father was Francis Ford’s firstborn, Gian-Carlo Coppola, or Gio, a fledgling film producer who was killed in a grisly boating accident in May 1986. He was 22, and his girlfriend, Jacqueline de La Fontaine, was newly pregnant with their only child. Seven months later, Ms. Coppola was born.
Ms. Coppola is the namesake of Gian-Carlo; her full name is Gian-Carla. Though Ms. Coppola was largely raised by her mother in Los Angeles — who went on to marry and divorce Peter Getty, of the oil family — the Coppolas took her firmly under their wing. “They kind of took over that void of not having a father,” Ms. Coppola said.
She spent her girlhood vacations with her grandparents in Northern California, picking blackberries and catching crawfish with her uncle Roman. When she was 9, Francis took her on a long tour of Europe, at one point strapping a walkie-talkie to her so she could roam free and squawk if needed (they were on a cruise ship at the time).
“There was this new baby girl in the family, this younger sister we were going to look after and protect,” said Robert Schwartzman, one of Ms. Coppola’s second cousins. (His mother, Ms. Shire, is Mr. Coppola’s sister). “We all raised Gia; it was like this group effort.”
He and Ms. Coppola grew especially close. She attended private schools in Los Angeles, the Center for Early Education and then the Archer School for Girls, where, cripplingly shy, she felt alienated from the other students. So Robert and sometimes his brothers, Matthew Shire and the actor Jason Schwartzman, drove her to school. “If she had any issues,” Robert said, “I would go there and try to put out some fires.”
Still, Ms. Coppola struggled. Academics were not her strong suit. A lack of coordination precluded sports and dance. She yearned to be creative but hated having attention directed her way. But she found refuge in taking photographs.
“I was more of an observer, and so it was hard for me to think what to say,” she said. “That’s why I felt really comfortable with photography, rather than being inspected.”
She dropped out of Archer before her senior year, earned her G.E.D., took community college classes, then transferred to Bard College to study photography. Once there, she also reunited with her first boyfriend, Sam Freilich, now a literary agent who remains her beau.
Ms. Coppola still did not consider a future in film, put off in no small part by her family’s collective talent and famous last name. “It deterred me a little bit,” she said. “I think I felt a little intimidated.”
It was not until she graduated and returned to Los Angeles, where she picked up a job as a barback at Thomas Keller’s Bouchon, that fate, or something like it, intervened. She was asked to appear in a short film for the fashion label Built by Wendy. Ms. Coppola demurred, but agreed to make a film herself, along with her friend, the musician and video maker Tracy Antonopoulos. She cast Nathalie Love, who has been her best friend since both girls were 7 (they met when they appeared in Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ 1994 video “Red Right Hand”), and ended up loving filming. It felt like an extension of photography, Ms. Coppola said, “but with more things to play with.”
Whimsical if amateur, the video led to fashion shorts for Opening Ceremony, United Arrows, Wren and Zac Posen for Target. Not unlike her aunt Sofia’s work, Ms. Coppola’s films take in small, quiet moments. And, like her aunt, she garnered the attention of the fashion set. Ms. Coppola also worked in the wardrobe department of Sofia Coppola’s “Somewhere” (2010) and behind the scenes with her grandfather on “Twixt” (2011).
She also made a short film starring Robert Schwartzman that she edited into the video for his song “All My Life.” Throughout the filming, Mr. Schwartzman was struck by her understated directorial way.
“It was this amazing moment,” said Mr. Schwartzman, who went on to score “Palo Alto” with the musician Dev Hynes. “I know her to be so soft-spoken, so shy, so sweet, so gentle. She’s not like an alpha woman, but she’s able to get it done as a director.”
Yet the prospect of directing or writing a full-length feature remained distant. Then, one night about five years ago, Ms. Coppola found herself at the same Hollywood party as her mother, who had been speaking to a charming actor named James Franco. Would Ms. Coppola like to meet him?
She would.
Mr. Franco had been kicking around the idea of having his book “Palo Alto: Stories” adapted, preferably by a woman, since he felt that would give the largely male-centered stories a more layered approach. After meeting Ms. Coppola, he reviewed her photography and videos, liked them and, acting on a gut feeling, asked if she would adapt and direct the film.
“I realized she had the right sensibility for it,” Mr. Franco wrote in an email. “Sometimes I have great instincts for these things, and sometimes I don’t, but in this case I did.”
Ms. Coppola, for her part, found she could easily relate to the teenagers in the stories — their awkwardness, their zigzagging emotions, their general confusion and dawning realizations that grown-ups are flawed too. After shooting a short test film, she began fleshing out the script, with the help of Ms. Love and Mr. Franco. She cast Emma Roberts, the Nickelodeon star who is the daughter of Eric Roberts and niece of Julia Roberts, in a lead role, and enlisted many first-time actors, including Jack Kilmer, whose father, Val Kilmer, also plays a small part.
For her part, Ms. Coppola’s longtime friend Ms. Love, who has a small part in “Palo Alto,” said that Ms. Coppola’s blossoming into directing seemed a logical outgrowth of who she already was.
“Gia rarely spoke to anyone, especially adults,” Ms. Love said, recalling their childhood together. “She would kind of whisper in my ear, ‘I want to go to Disneyland,’ and I would have to announce it to the group, as if it was my idea. So she’s kind of always been behind the scenes, directing what was happening.”
Still, Ms. Coppola could not find financing for the film: Would-be investors balked at the number of neophytes involved. Finally, Mr. Franco stepped in. “I believed in Gia so much I just wanted to get this movie made at any cost,” he wrote. So he gave his earnings from the film “Homefront” to Ms. Coppola to make the film. (Ms. Coppola declined to reveal the amount.)
Filming started on Halloween in 2012 in the Woodland Hills neighborhood of Los Angeles, a 30-day shoot that, by several accounts, was a homespun affair. Jack Kilmer and his co-star Nat Wolff, who played a troubled troublemaker named Fred, slept on rollaway cots in Ms. de La Fontaine’s garage, where they watched old movies on Francis Ford Coppola’s old TV. Ms. de la Fontaine sometimes showed up on the set to drop off boxes of cupcakes and bags of In-N-Out Burgers. Unable to afford extras, Ms. Coppola tapped her friends to appear in a party scene.
“It was all young people,” Mr. Wolff said. “There’s something about it being her first movie that made it so we all felt like we were in it together.”
And as the director, Mr. Wolff said, Ms. Coppola possessed an ease that reverberated through the set. “Gia’s so calm and in control and fun that it make everybody feel like they had a voice,” he said.
With the film on the eve of release, Ms. Coppola is still settling into life in New York: She and Mr. Freilich moved to the city from Los Angeles in January. Among all the changes, she said, moving on from “Palo Alto” might be the toughest one yet.
“It’s hard to let go of,” she said.
Source: nytimes.com
Not Plain Jane
Well-Known Member
- Joined
- Mar 3, 2010
- Messages
- 15,422
- Reaction score
- 718
I love the sparkly short dress with the tent sleeves; what a fabulous look there - perfect shoes, hair and lips too. She's very stylish! Thanks for all the updates Jexxica!
