By Harriet Quick
28 May 2013
Sofia Coppola enters the Snack Taverna, a Greek eatery in New York’s West Village, with the grace of a cat, raising barely an eyebrow from fellow diners. Now 42, and a mother of two, Coppola is calm and softly spoken. Her milky skin, cherubic lips, brilliant sparkling eyes and choppy, bobbed hair lend her an ever-youthful demeanour. Wearing skinny, faded black jeans, a pale grey cashmere sweater and a navy Marc Jacobs flak jacket – ‘It’s from the men’s collection, I bought it years ago’ – Coppola looks quietly chic in that New York stealth-wealth kind of way. She is carrying a navy leather duffel bag that she designed with her friend, Marc Jacobs, for Louis Vuitton a few years back. It’s called The Sofia and is lined in soft, grey suede, free of logos and glitzy hardware: a fine example of the utility luxe that Coppola wears so well. Her style-icon status is exemplified by the fact that she is casually sporting a Vuitton bag that is actually named after her, but there is absolutely no sign of the diva-ish attitude you might expect to accompany it.
She arrived at
Red’s cover shoot having walked there from home, and her only requirement was a supply of full-fat Coke. Later, she proudly showed our stylist a picture of her daughters standing in front of Paris Hilton’s pink Bentley. This down-to-earth attitude belies her incredible talent.
Coppola has always shown an astute eye for the nuances of style and language. It’s what gives her films a fashion currency, a wry humour and a sublime texture. True for the soft-focus lyricism of
The Virgin Suicides, the surreal Tokyo scenes in
Lost In Translation, the delightful
Marie Antoinette, and the sun-drenched
Somewhere, which revolved around an actor’s mid-life crisis.
Her latest film is
The Bling Ring, based on the true story of a gang of LA teenagers who take to robbing Hollywood stars’ houses to feed their addiction to designer clothes, fast cars, ready cash and a champagne-swilling, cocaine-fuelled lifestyle.
It bursts at the seams with a bombardment of brands, from Chanel to Louis Vuitton. The film is at once a compelling story and a minutely observed exposé of contemporary culture’s rabid fascination with celebrity and glamour. It’s a subject that both fascinates and repels Coppola, whose present concern is raising healthy, wellrounded daughters – Romy, six, and Cosima, three – in a culture so obsessed with both.
‘I do get prudish when I see young girls, and what is valued and emphasised,’ says Coppola, over a pot of mint tea and a bowl of chickpea soup. ‘My daughter came back from cookery class and described how they had done a “redcarpet” display. I’m thinking, what’s going on there? It’s a cooking class! I definitely try to keep a balance, but that culture is out there and she is going to see it. I do find it scary.’
While writing the script for
The Bling Ring, Coppola had to get into the mindset of these young, celebrity-obsessed thieves, and she certainly did her homework.
‘When I was writing it, I talked to my friend’s 17-year-old daughter about the slang that teenagers use, and this lovely young lady explained that all her friends call one another “b*tches, sluts and whores”.’ She raises an eyebrow.
‘I also went to clubs in LA with all the girls dressed up in miniskirts and sky-high shoes. That was pretty exotic. Everyone was texting, taking pictures, and I tried to put as much of that in the film as possible. It was almost sci-fi, this idea that living does not count unless you are documenting it. All those things interest me and say so much about our culture, and what is emphasised as important.’
Coppola grew up with a very different set of values, instilled by her notoriously hard-working filmmaker father, Francis Ford Coppola, and artist and set-designer mother, Eleanor. The family base was a vineyard estate in Northern California (Francis Coppola Reserve wine is hugely successful) or any number of film sets where dad happened to be working. With the family dominated by men (brother Roman, and endless male cousins, including actor Jason Schwartzman), Coppola says she often escaped into a virtual world of fashion magazines to explore her own femininity. And it was there, buried in issues of
Vogue and
The Face, that her love affair with photography began. Today, she has an impressive collection, including work by Juergen Teller and Helmut Newton. Her brother, Roman (a writer, director and producer), is always the first to read her scripts, because she values his constructive criticism. She tragically lost another brother, Gian-Carlo, in a speedboat accident when she was 15. The trauma of his death meant Coppola had to grow up quickly. ‘It was not a teenage time,’ she says, admitting that could be why she has an ongoing fascination with teen life in her movies. ‘There is some part of me that never totally experienced being a teenager, so I imagine it is connected with that.’
Being the daughter of one of the world’s most famous film directors and a talented mother (who shot the documentary
Hearts Of Darkness, on the making of
Apocalypse Now) has its own pressures. While there is great privilege on one hand – including close contact with the great and good of Hollywood – by entering the film business, Coppola also laid herself open to fierce criticism. Perhaps that’s part of the reason being a filmmaker was not a great ambition of the teenage Coppola; she preferred fashion. In her late teens, she interned at Chanel in Paris, and later set up her own LA ‘skater-girl’ clothing label, MilkFed.
‘I did make a short film about teenagers in high school,’ she muses of her early career. ‘But it was reading
The Virgin Suicides that made me really want to be a filmmaker.’
With that movie, Coppola established herself as a great talent with her own distinct point of view and way of storytelling. ‘I don’t think about the legacy of the family any more. I’m on my own plane. I appreciate that my name opened doors at the start of my career, and that I had access to certain people – it would have been so much harder if I had not known them – but I work hard and I try to do my own thing.’ To date, Coppola has won three
Golden Globes and an
Oscar.
Family is still very important to Coppola, who is happily married to French musician Thomas Mars, from the band Phoenix. They first met in 1998, when Mars was recording vocals for a track on the
Virgin Suicides soundtrack, although didn’t get together until much later, as she was married to director Spike Jonze at the time. After having two children together, Coppola and Mars eventually married in August 2011 at her family’s villa, Palazzo Margherita in Bernalda, Italy.
It was the family business that was on Coppola’s mind when she came across the story of the ‘Bling Ring’ in a
Vanity Fair article by Nancy Jo Sales, in March 2010, entitled
The Suspects Wore Louboutins.
‘I thought it was a great basis for a movie and, as we have a film company in the family (American Zoetrope, co-founded by her father), I wanted to find out if anyone had optioned the script,’ she shrugs.
‘I wasn’t thinking it was something I would do myself, but I met the journalist and the more I got into it, the more it took over.’ A number of lines in the film are directly from Sales’ transcripts. As Coppola says, ‘I could not have made them up if I’d tried.’
The real-life thieves stole an astonishing $3 million (£1.9 million) of goods, including cars, diamonds and furs, from the homes of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and many others.
Two are currently serving four years in an LA prison. A third, Alexis Neiers (played by
Emma Watson in the film), managed to squeeze in a reality-TV show before being locked up for a year. The night-time heists were jaw-droppingly audacious. ‘Let’s go shopping!’ exclaims the ringleader. Coppola scripted and directed the film to convey the thrill of teenage kicks out of control, yet steers away from moralising.
‘The biggest challenge was not being judgmental,’ explains Coppola, who spent her twenties living in LA. ‘I tried to see it through their eyes and tell a seductive story, but also leave enough open at the end for viewers to form their own ideas about what is important,’ she explains.
A very game Paris Hilton, whose house was raided no less than five times, has a cameo and even opened up her palatial mansion for filming. ‘I wanted to show what it is really like to be in Paris Hilton’s closet – the thrill of entering it,’ says Coppola. ‘It’s like a candy store!’ Indeed, there are floor-to-ceiling racks of heels in colour-coded sections, hundreds of gowns, diamonds, and even a ‘nightclub’ room with a pole-dancing stage. ‘It was pretty impressive,’ she deadpans. ‘I could not believe the amount of clothes. But Paris was cool.’
Hilton and Coppola make for an unlikely pair: the chic film director and the socialite who has come to epitomise everything about this culture of fame for fame’s sake. ‘Actually, I was impressed,’ says Coppola. ‘She is more self-aware than you would expect. She was very helpful in making the movie, and aware yet relaxed about her image.’
Hilton is effusive in praise of her director. ‘I was so happy when they asked me to be a part of
The Bling Ring,’ she tells me over email. ‘Working with Sofia was so much fun. She really cared about telling the true story of what happened.’
Coppola is an elusive character, revealing herself very slowly. She’s not overtly opinionated or given to loud declarations or exclamations. Rather like her films, her presence creeps up on you. At the weekend, she is off to Coachella to see her husband perform, and in the summer, they’ll holiday in France with her in-laws, and in Italy with her family. By then,
The Bling Ring will have been seen by audiences worldwide, and probably criticised and applauded in equal measure. Coppola is inured to the process.
She exits the restaurant with the stealthy grace of her arrival. There are the final editing and colour changes to be done on the film but, more pressingly, she has to pick up her eldest daughter from school. She departs, pulling that flak jacket around her, and steps out into the summer rain.
