Dazed Summer 2017
Sofia Coppola: keep your dreams
Back with southern gothic epic The Beguiled, the director of her generation talks filmmaking, fashion and pushing herself with her darkest chapter to date
Text Claire Marie Healy
Photography Mark Borthwick
Sofia Coppola is sitting in a very crowded restaurant. It’s Thursday morning in New York and, after dropping off her kids at school, the director is eating breakfast with a friend. Either nobody is aware that she’s here, or everyone is good at pretending. As always, Coppola makes her own space.
“Sorry for all the noise,†she says when we eventually meet, with a tone of genuine bewilderment at the iPhone-toting brunchers that have descended. She introduces her first breakfast date (fellow mom and filmmaker, Tamara Jenkins), before strategising another spot to decamp to.
Crossing the street with Sofia Coppola feels surreal because her name has come to mean something more abstract, though acutely familiar. It’s tempting to think she dwells in the dreamlike vistas she creates, but that would do a disservice to the ways in which her vision sincerely adheres to how women and men make their way through the world. Outside, the director possesses an instant casualness, pointing out different places she is fond of, as well as the direction of the studio where she has lately been holed up finishing edits on The Beguiled, her hotly anticipated new film which premiered at Cannes in May and won her the Best Director award.
“I don’t think I was ever out of touch with reality,†Coppola explains a little later, pouring a cup of tea (there remains an urge to describe her every move as quiet, as though one could even pour tea loudly). “So much of that (adolescent) age is about daydreaming and fantasising because that’s how you figure out what you want to be, playing out different scenarios in your head... I don’t know.†Coppola’s statements have a habit of trailing off self-reflexively: she doesn’t know, or “It’s hard to say.†Yet the dreaminess is anchored by a very direct gaze, a sense that she’s taking you in even as she herself refuses definite readings. That she starts sentences without quite knowing how she is going to finish them is all part of her appeal.
From the exquisitely contained teenage tragedy of The Virgin Suicides (1999) to the courtly coming-of-age Marie Antoinette (2006), the chance Tokyo encounter of Lost in Translation (2003), and even her parable of adolescent excess in the age of flip-phones The Bling Ring (2013), Coppola has done much to define the way we see, hear and feel interiorities on screen. As a director, she intuits how our insides stick to our outsides; she understands, as the neighbourhood boys begin to grasp in The Virgin Suicides, “the imprisonment of being a girl... the way it makes your mind active and dreamyâ€. It’s no coincidence that the inhabitants of Coppola’s films stare through glass so much; both reflections and windows, these are films that have offered us new ways of seeing.
This year, for her sixth feature, Coppola makes her darkest about-turn to date. Set in Virginia in 1864, The Beguiled stars Nicole Kidman, Kirsten Dunst and Elle Fanning as residents at a secluded boarding school some three years into the American civil war. When one of the students finds an injured Union soldier (Colin Farrell) near their grounds, the women take him in rather than give him up to their own side’s forces, setting the scene for a study of sexual power games and twisted female obsession like no other. The story is based on Thomas P Cullinan’s pulpy book and Don Siegel’s 1971 film of the same name, but, as Coppola emphasises, is absolutely not a remake. In fact, the decision to put her own stamp on the story at all began as somewhat of a joke.
“It started with my friend, Anne Ross, who’s the production designer and producer on the movie. I’ve worked with her a lot and we were just shooting commercials after The Bling Ring – I think we were shooting the ‘Daisy’ commercial for Marc Jacobs – and she said, ‘Oh, I’ve just watched this movie The Beguiled, I think you need to remake it,’ as a joke. Of course, shooting ‘Daisy’ all the girls were in white gowns...â€
Don Siegel’s original The Beguiled is a film long established in pop-culture consciousness as a strange relic of Hollywood’s wilder, woollier years – with notable scenes including a grizzled Clint Eastwood kissing a 12-year-old girl smack on the lips. Described by the director as based on “the basic desire of women to castrate menâ€, one New York Times reviewer at the time went so far as to call it a “sensational, misogynist nightmareâ€. But, where other directors would be switched off by the taboo nature of the material, Coppola found herself hooked precisely because she was so disoriented. “It’s just such a classic, a genre classic,†she says. “But I found it so unexpected, how it turns. I was like, ‘Oh my God, I can’t believe it’s going that dark!’ It was so weird, it just stayed in my mind... and then I got the idea of how we could tell the story.â€
It’s taken a director of Coppola’s powers to flip the script. Subtract the puffed-up posturings of the original, and what we have at its core is a devastating portrayal of female loneliness and its consequences. “I liked that the premise was so loaded,†she explains. “I thought about what the experience for these women might have been like, to be raised to be lovely for men and then there are no men around, and how they had to survive. It talks about the power struggles between men and women, and women and women, but in such a heightened way. Retelling the story, but this time from the female point of view, turns it into their story – not the soldier, but these crazy women. It’s just more...†She searches for the right word. “...fun.â€
‘Fun’ is a word that crops up a lot when Coppola discusses The Beguiled, and there is certainly a sense of the director revelling in the story’s bodice-ripping melodrama: the women, competing for the soldier’s affections, go from mad to worse, tensions rise to blood-soaked conclusions, and the dialogue drips with era-specific sass (cue Elle Fanning as seductive southern belle: “I hope you like apple pie...â€). I wonder if, by moving back in time to a specific historical period, Coppola was able to help bring certain issues into focus. But she insists the appeal of the period setting was really more straightforward. “For me it’s about creating a beautiful world,†she says. “That setting, with the Spanish moss in the trees, with these girls in faded long dresses, it’s so dramatic and romantic... Southern gothic with those candelabras and nightgowns and rituals of femininity – I just love that. There’s a romance to the era which is more fun for making a movie than filming people in jeans.â€
The film’s sense of loosening-up might also stem from the camaraderie of the nearly all-female cast, which brings together a formidable triple-bill of three generations of leading actress: Kidman, Dunst and Fanning respectively play the school’s headmistress, schoolteacher and eldest schoolgirl. “It was interesting to not just (have that) teen role but to have women at different ages and (wearing) all different facades, relating to this man in their own way. They’re almost like the same person at different stages of her life.â€
The Beguiled also sees Dunst and Fanning, introduced to the world through their roles in The Virgin Suicides and Somewhere, united for the first time in the same Coppola-verse. It’s 19-year-old Fanning, playing the manipulative teenager who sets her crosshairs on seducing Farrell’s soldier, who gets far and away the best lines. “I thought it would be really interesting to cast her as a kind of sl*tty mean girl, because she’s so sweet and I don’t think of her like that at all,†says Coppola. As for Farrell, playing the hunky soldier on the receiving end of a claustrophobic female gaze, I wonder if he didn’t actually feel fearful at any point. “Colin has been supportive about being the token male and sex object,†she deadpans. “I think he indulged himself. He could lie on his lace pillows...â€
Coppola filmed The Beguiled at Madewood, a real plantation house in Louisiana, consulted with a civil war expert, and researched conduct books from the period. Still, Merchant Ivory this ain’t. “It’s all based on the period, but we wanted to make it look appealing and not weird to the modern eye,†says Coppola. “I loved that they don’t wear the hoops in the skirts any more, because there’s no one around – but there’s a scene where (Farrell) first arrives and they start putting their hoop skirts back on and dressing the way they’re supposed to.†The pastel taffeta, Gunne Sax-esque florals and twinkling brooches are a far cry from the lavish, instinctively joyful take on new-romantic fashion that epitomised Coppola’s Versailles in Marie Antoinette, but the director’s respect for material details on-screen – and skill at pushing their boundaries – still shines through. For costume designer Stacey Battat, when it comes to period costumes, the trick is to “know the rules so you know how to break themâ€. “All of the silhouettes are historically accurate, so small deviations like Elle wearing her hair down or evening dresses being less embellished still feel authentic,†she describes of her approach, adding that, for her, Coppola’s “greatest gift as a director is the ability to create a worldâ€.
Where the world of Somewhere was LA sun-bleached, and The Bling Ring neon-lit, the best way to describe The Beguiled might be dusty. For her moodboard, Coppola cites “Tess by Roman Polanski, and even some Hitchcock for the way he creates suspense.†(For recent markers, the women on the porch in BeyonceÌ’s Lemonade spring to mind; in fact, portions were filmed at the same location.) That the film possesses Coppola’s usual enclosed atmosphere makes the accelerating plot all the more shocking in relief. “It was fun to do something with a bit of violence and dark sexuality, (and) I had to push myself with a bit of gore,†says Coppola. “But the movie still has lots of space to it. I think the trailer makes it look more scandalous than it really is.†In the age of Netflix, Coppola is a passionate advocate for theatres – because what else are movies for but “to escape for a moment into this other world... and then hopefully connect on some level besides through the escapismâ€?
But, as Coppola describes it, The Beguiled did come to mean something beyond a totally new direction – it was more like a coming full-circle. “When I first saw all the girls in pale dresses, and then a man comes into their world... to me, it related to The Virgin Suicides. But (the women in the film) flip it, as they’re the stronger characters.â€
A story about the disillusionment of experience and the memories that locate it in time, Coppola’s debut has endured across generations of lonely girls on the brink of womanhood, who seem to feel its mystique like the Lisbon sisters were their neighbours. For Rookie founder and actress Tavi Gevinson, the film crystallises “how much of adolescence – or of love at any age – is lived in one’s own headâ€. “I think when I first watched it, I was 13, and expected that by my millionth rewatch, I’d finally feel like a Lisbon sister,†she recounts. “Of course, I never did, because I worshipped them instead of relating to them. I experienced it as one of the boys.â€
For Coppola, that The Virgin Suicides has experienced another life after its release means more than people may realise. “It made me so happy that it was rediscovered by teenagers,†she enthuses. “No one saw it at the time! It came out for, like, two minutes because the studio didn’t think it was anything worthwhile. I remember someone telling me her daughter looked up to me and I was like, ‘She wasn’t even born, how does she know about that?’ It’s nice to feel like it has another life and can still connect.â€
That the film continues to resonate with young viewers rings true to Coppola’s experience of reading Jeffrey Eugenides’ source novel. She has previously stated that her vision for The Virgin Suicides was tied up with the tragic death of her older brother Gian-Carlo in a boating accident when she was a teenager, but speaks more generally today. “I feel like there’s a universal experience of being that age so whatever I related to about it, someone of the same age would also be able to relate. I think the book is a classic because it captures the emotion of that age in a respectful way.â€
It’s different for girls, and perhaps no other director has understood this better than Coppola, whose camera has cmitted to exploring tropes of girlhood she seemed to invent. For her, filmmaking simply came from a place of wanting to fill a gap she herself felt strongly. “I didn’t feel like teenage girls were represented very much in an authentic way when I was growing up,†she explains. “I love young women and wanted to make work for them that I wanted to see, to treat them with respect and make something of quality and sensitivity that spoke to them. Like, why can’t it be artful?â€
Read more:
http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/article/36488/1/sofia-coppola-beguiled
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