“I nev­er expect­ed peo­ple to con­nect with it so much” – Sofia Cop­po­la on Lost in Trans­la­tion at 15

“Fif­teen years? It’s hard to believe.” Sofia Cop­po­la is a lit­tle sur­prised that so much time has passed since she made her sec­ond fea­ture Lost in Trans­la­tion and quite hon­est­ly, so are we. It only feels like five min­utes since the writer/​director made a qui­et rack­et back in 2003 by trans­port­ing Scar­lett Johans­son and Bill Mur­ray to Tokyo’s Park Hyatt hotel and its sur­round­ing neon streets. ​“It’s fun­ny because I was just at the Park Hyatt and they’ve kept it exact­ly the same,” she says. ​“I was in the bath­room and kept expect­ing Bill to pop out from behind the mirror.”

The film’s pri­ma­ry loca­tion may not have changed over the years but the film­mak­er behind it has. Cop­po­la was 32 when she made Lost in Trans­la­tion, the sto­ry of an unlike­ly yet pro­found­ly touch­ing friend­ship between con­fused young new­ly­wed Char­lotte (Johann­son) and washed-up actor Bob Har­ris (Bill Mur­ray) forged whilst iso­lat­ed in a for­eign city. Since then she’s gone on to helm four more fea­ture releas­es, includ­ing 2017’s Palme d’Or nom­i­nat­ed The Beguiled and yet the stay­ing pow­er of Lost in Trans­la­tion remains strong.

“I spent a lot of time in Tokyo in my twen­ties and I real­ly want­ed to make a film around my expe­ri­ence of just being there. That was the start­ing point,” recalls Cop­po­la. ​“I got mar­ried not long before and kind of felt iso­lat­ed. I was in this stage where I wasn’t sure if I’d made the right choic­es or what I was doing in the post-col­lege begin­ning of my adult life,” she says. ​“Brief Encounter was in my mind while writ­ing but I was look­ing a lot of the idea of being con­nect­ed because at that moment, I wasn’t.”

To bring this idea of dis­con­nec­tion to life Cop­po­la cast a new­com­er on a hunch, in the hope that she had what it takes. ​“I’d seen Scar­lett in a movie called Man­ny & Lo when she was like 12 years old and I just loved her,” explains Cop­po­la. ​“She had that husky voice even then and seemed mature beyond her years. There was some qual­i­ty about her that stood out and I con­nect­ed with. She’s able to con­vey a lot with­out say­ing any­thing. I had a feel­ing about her. I wasn’t sur­prised she went on to do lots of dif­fer­ent things after but I’m sur­prised when I look back at how young she was. She was only 17.”

With Scar­lett secured, the next task was to track down the film’s elu­sive co-star. Hav­ing writ­ten Bob Har­ris with Bill Mur­ray specif­i­cal­ly in mind, Cop­po­la was deter­mined to find him or not make the movie at all. ​“It was real­ly nerve-rack­ing,” remem­bers Cop­po­la. ​“We went to Tokyo and were spend­ing mon­ey in the hope that he would show up. I don’t even know how we got our financ­ing with­out a con­tract. I was deter­mined and prob­a­bly spent a year try­ing to track him down. Peo­ple were try­ing to give me oth­er options but I was set that I wasn’t going to make the movie if he wasn’t doing it and I real­ly want­ed to make this movie, so I had to find him.

“I would just ask every­one I knew that might know him. I was on a hunt,” she con­tin­ues. Thank­ful­ly, Coppola’s deter­mi­na­tion paid off when a friend and old writ­ing part­ner of Bill’s passed her script along. ​“He brought so much,” says Cop­po­la on final­ly shoot­ing with Bill and Scar­lett in Tokyo. ​“I was hav­ing a hard time at that stage of my life and I’d wish Bill would show up and take me on an adven­ture. I imag­ined him emerg­ing in that world. A lot of it was just found moments with Bill impro­vis­ing,” reveals Cop­po­la. ​“The scene in the sushi restau­rant with the black toe? That was just Bill riff­ing on the situation.”

Along with Wes Anderson’s Rush­more (which co-starred Coppola’s cousin Jason Schwartz­man), Lost in Trans­la­tion marked a key moment of rein­ven­tion for Mur­ray. On craft­ing her ver­sion of Mur­ray, Cop­po­la says, ​“I was and am a big fan of his and thought it’d be fun­ny to put him in a tuxe­do because I hadn’t seen that side of Bill. There was a lot of throw­ing stuff at Bill and watch­ing him respond. In the pho­to­shoot, that was a real pho­tog­ra­ph­er and I’d be giv­ing him prompts. It was fun to see Bill real­ly not know what he was going to tell him. Also, I love to see him sing. Karaōke is always fun in Tokyo and I knew he’d be up to the task.”

Through the lens of cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Lance Acord, Cop­po­la craft­ed an ethe­re­al look to match her sto­ry of dis­con­nec­tion, along­side a care­ful­ly curat­ed sound­track. ​“I made a ref­er­ence book that I showed to Lance,” Cop­po­la recalls. ​“I had a look in mind. It was this kind of dreamy feel­ing of when you’re jet lagged. There’s all this neon and it had a kind of Blade Run­ner feel,” she adds. ​“I was def­i­nite­ly lis­ten­ing to music when we were film­ing and when I was writ­ing, too. That was the music I was lis­ten­ing to at the time, stuff with that Tokyo dream-pop feel­ing. Com­bined with those visu­als and the half-awak­e­ness, the dreamy music gave it a roman­tic quality.”

It also gave the project an unex­pect­ed life, with Coppola’s Lost in Trans­la­tion mix­tape emerg­ing as one of most endur­ing movie sound­tracks of the ear­ly 2000s. ​“We sequenced the sound­track so that it worked as a record,” the direc­tors reveals. ​“My Bloody Valen­tine and The Jesus and Mary Chain are such great bands that I’m not sur­prised it holds up over time. That’s one of the ear­ly shap­ing points for me, the look and sound. It’s this abstract way to describe the feel­ing of what you want to make.”

Fif­teen years lat­er, it’s not just Lost in Translation’s sound­track that has with­stood the test of time. ​“I nev­er expect­ed peo­ple to con­nect with it so much,” Cop­po­la admits. ​“I was sur­prised because I thought it was this real­ly self indul­gent, per­son­al project. It’s still fun if some­body comes up and tells me they con­nect to it because it was just what I was feel­ing at that time. It’s always scary to do some­thing per­son­al because you put your­self into. There’s some­thing about being naïve that allows you to jump into things in a freer way.”

This ethos came in handy, espe­cial­ly dur­ing the film’s icon­ic cli­max between Mur­ray, Johans­son and some whis­pered advice that was ulti­mate­ly lost in trans­la­tion. ​“Luck­i­ly I did it with­out a stu­dio so we were able to just make it how I want­ed. That thing Bill whis­pers to Scar­lett was nev­er intend­ed to be any­thing. I was going to fig­ure out lat­er what to say and add it in and then we nev­er did. It was between them. Just acknowl­edg­ing that week meant some­thing to both of them and it affects them going back to their lives. Peo­ple always ask me what’s said,” smiles Cop­po­la, ​“I always like Bill’s answer: that it’s between lovers – so I’ll leave it at that.”