“In all my filmography there is a common denominator: there is always a world and there is always a girl trying to navigate it. I am passionate about this odyssey,” Sofia Coppola told the press at the presentation of her latest film, Priscilla (premiere in Spain on February 14), at the Venice International Film Festival.
The imagination of this filmmaker with a nostalgic, romantic and sophisticated outlook has become the object of desire of not only a multitude of fans who watch her films over and over again and listen to the song lists that serve as inspiration on Spotify, but also from luxury brands that have asked him to direct their advertisements or sign limited edition collections. For Coppola, the main condition for accepting is that everything reflects that eternal youth that actresses such as Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, Scarlett Johansson and now, in the role of Priscilla Presley, the very young Cailee Spaeny, have embodied in their films.
Innocence and melancholy, signature of the house. “I perfectly remember the moodboard of the advertisement for Christian Dior's Miss Chérie perfume that we shot in Paris. I felt that, instead of paper and images, everything was cotton candy. The inspiration was macarons, balloons, peonies, the Eiffel Tower, bicycles, hotel rooms and, obviously, that blush that betrays first crushes,” says Marie Isabelle Peterson, stylist and production assistant of this 2009 advertisement that many prefer to catalog. like fashion film.
Because that's what Coppola does with everything he explores, giving it that aura of intimate magnetism, whether he's filming in lavish spaces like Versailles (Marie Antoinette) and Graceland (Priscilla) or in the bedroom of a middle-class family in Grosse Pointe, Michigan (The Virgin Suicides). "Sofia had come several times to visit Elvis' mansion before filming Priscilla and she surprised me how she took photos of details that I, who have been working here for more than 15 years, had not paid attention to."
"She caressed objects, asking politely and even shyly if she could hold an object up to the light to determine its exact color... We have millions of visitors a year, but she has that particular look that leaves you wondering what was going through her head at that moment," Lorraine Temple, of the Graceland museum in Memphis, explains to Magazine.
Last September the book Sofia Coppola Archive went on sale, which has been a phenomenon and has been out of print and reissued ever since. Delving into its almost 500 pages means a deep encounter with her methods, references and collaborators. Everything starts, as explained by Rosie Coleman, from the communications department of the publishing house that edited the volume, MACK, from Coppola's own collection of unpublished photos from sets and filming.
"Looking at all this referenced material is like immersing yourself in your dream world and reflecting on unmistakable cinematographic works." As the filmmaker herself says in the interview conducted by Lynn Hirschberg, editor-in-chief of W magazine, which opens this endearingly personal book of memories, Photography has always been crucial for her, since her beginnings as an assistant to the famous and demanding Paul Jasmin and Fumihiro Hayashi.
Later, as a film director, there were those who told her that it was not natural or logical to include snapshots in the scripts, but for her it was precisely the opposite. “The best thing is to provide images so that from the actors to the costume or photography designer they have the same visual references,” she has told the press on numerous occasions. For the same reason, she has always invited photographer friends to attend filming, and they would then be the ones to sign the poster or press stills of the film.
“I really admired Corinne Day's work on The Face, so I was very happy when she agreed to come visit me. "I still don't know how we did it, because we made the promotional image for The Virgin Suicides for two dollars," says Coppola. For Priscilla, the filmmaker has asked the actor who plays Elvis, Jacob Elordi, to provide some of the snapshots that, as a good photography fan, he took with his Leica during filming.
As often happens with Coppola and other artists when they finish a project, everything related to it ends up stored in boxes anyway. It was during the pandemic when he decided to open those unpublished treasures that he kept in the Coppola family home in Napa, California, and began to organize them and create this unique book. Because, many times, we lovers of the seventh art want to know more, we want to find out how that scene was made, how many takes were necessary.
Thus we discover that, although it may seem surprising to us, the actresses who in The Bling Ring simulate stealing from Paris Hilton's closet, who delightedly handed over the keys to her mansion to Sofia Coppola without supervision for filming, did what anyone who could would do. access there: open drawers, try on clothes, take photos... It was barely necessary to repeat the shot.
Coppola feels a fervent passion for exploring that passage from adolescence to adulthood, that inconcrete point (or not) at which one's identity as a woman is defined, some to be from then on 'the trophy wife' or 'the girlfriend of'. So there aren't that many differences between Lux Lisbon in The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, Charlotte in Lost in Translation or Priscilla Presley. They all try to find their way, with more or less luck. Sofia Coppola herself explains this in an interview with Keaton Bell for the North American edition of Vogue: “During my adolescence, this stage had not been represented authentically, so I still find it stimulating to portray it with new nuances.”
“I have always thought of Sofia Coppola as that woman that one would like to be. Unlike her characters and although at a very young age she did not know what she wanted to do with her life, whether to paint, photograph or write, her person subconsciously instills in you that 'allure' of the American girl with an indie spirit so fresh and implausibly 'easy' to be (or interpret). Decades pass and her style transcends generations. And the same goes for her movies. You can watch them with your daughters or your mother, yesterday, today and tomorrow,” explains Scottish stylist and fashion journalist Pamela McKillop.
Now, its protagonists are one thing and their will and perseverance another. Coppola not only challenged another filmmaker to bring Jeffrey Eugenides' book, The Virgin Suicides, to the big screen, with innocence and delicacy, fleeing from any explicit sexuality, but his mind does not give the go-ahead to any of his projects without He has conceived and planned them almost obsessively down to the smallest detail. In an interview with The New York Times, she reveals that she spent a year trying to locate Bill Murray and, in desperation, wrote him letters saying, “I'm not going to make this movie without you!”, and that she also wrote a lot of letters during months to Lady Antonia Fraser asking for the rights to her book Marie Antoinette: The Journey.
“She is the personification of the angel under pressure, of talent without grandiloquence, of creativity that prevails in everyday life instead of anger or fear,” this is how Lynn Hirschberg exquisitely puts it in the prologue of this fabulous book. that allows us to dream during a visit to Sofia's office and admire the inspiration board of a unique filmmaker. As she herself has stated: “I realized that, if I was interested in a specific filmmaker, I would like to see the objects linked to her films.”
