Sofia Cop­po­la: ​‘I’m telling the same sto­ry but from the women’s point of view’

Sofia Coppola’s films access the sad­ness of lives that seem drenched in exte­ri­or splen­dour. It’s been 18 years since her upset­ting­ly per­fect fea­ture debut, The Vir­gin Sui­cides. Since, there have been four fea­tures (Lost in Trans­la­tion, Marie Antoinette, Some­where, The Bling Ring), an Oscar, a bag designed for Louis Vuit­ton, an opera direct­ed for Valenti­no, two chil­dren with French musi­cian Thomas Mars and side projects galore.

Her life could make the aver­age uncool film nerd weep with envy, but it’s prefer­able to weep at the elu­sive emo­tions she cap­tures on screen. Like Don Siegel’s 1971 film, Coppola’s sixth fea­ture, The Beguiled, is adapt­ed from Thomas Cullinan’s 1966 nov­el, and we spoke to her about trans­form­ing words on a page to lights on a screen.

LWLies: When you’re prepar­ing a script you lis­ten to a lot of music. What you were lis­ten­ing to while writ­ing The Beguiled?

Cop­po­la: You know what, usu­al­ly I do, but I didn’t so much on this one, maybe because it was peri­od. So I don’t have a good sto­ry about some­thing I was lis­ten­ing to. I guess I start­ed writ­ing it when we were on vaca­tion in the Ital­ian coun­try­side two sum­mers ago and I’d just got­ten the book of ​‘The Beguiled’. I was just going through it mark­ing it up while my kids were swim­ming. I wasn’t in the iso­lat­ed pro­fes­sion­al writ­ing world. It was just a lit­tle sum­mer project. I was going through it mak­ing notes and then when we came to back to New York where we live I would go to my office and write it. But it’s fun­ny as I didn’t real­ly have a sound­track and the music is very, very minimal.

When you were going through the book choos­ing the pas­sages, were they com­ing alive to you visually?

I guess you pic­ture what you’re read­ing. I’d known about the sto­ry from the movie that I saw a cou­ple of years before, and then I got the book and I tried to for­get about the movie and look at it fresh­ly, or just get more infor­ma­tion, and then I filled it in with what I could add from imag­i­na­tion and life and stuff. That movie is from the soldier’s point of view and the book was writ­ten by a man in the ​’60s – each chap­ter is a dif­fer­ent one of the girls telling the sto­ry. It’s not real­ly worth read­ing, I have to say, as a book, so I was just going through and edit­ing down which char­ac­ters I want­ed to have, because you have to cut – there were too many and pare down the char­ac­ters. I start­ed to write the sto­ry from a female point of view.

Is your film inspired by rather than adapt­ed from the book?

To me, it’s telling the same sto­ry but from the women char­ac­ters’ point of view. I would nev­er want to remake some­one else’s movie, but I love the premise of it. When I saw the movie I thought it was so… I don’t know… weird. It stayed in my mind. It’s a very macho guy’s point of view in this women’s world, so it start­ed mak­ing me think about what it must have been like for the women dur­ing wartime. They were raised to relate to men, that was their whole role in the South­ern world of that era, and now there’s no men. It was wartime but these women were left behind.

Did you make a mood board for your collaborators?

Yeah, I always do that. I just took pic­tures as I was writ­ing and then Anne Ross, my pro­duc­tion design­er also helped pull images. Togeth­er we make boards so we can talk to the cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er and cos­tume design­er and all be on the same page with the visu­al style. That is always an ear­ly start­ing point for me… to see the world that I imag­ine. Peo­ple said, ​‘Oh, you don’t have to set it dur­ing the Civ­il War, you could change it,’ but I love that era. Some­thing about the Civ­il War, women and the South has this very exot­ic… The South is still very exot­ic to me, not being part of that world. The man­ners and the cos­tumes all appealed to me. It’s like a dusty world of women who are cut off. They’ve had to wash their clothes so many times that everything’s kind of faded.

Clint East­wood is so sexy in the 1971 film. What was it about Col­in Far­rell that made you feel like he could be the cat­a­lyst for all these beau­ti­ful women’s lust?

We need­ed a guy who was real­ly man­ly who could appeal to all of them and he’s real­ly charm­ing and charis­mat­ic as a per­son. He’s very mas­cu­line. I want­ed a real con­trast from these del­i­cate pale ladies. He’s dark, and has hair, and is just super-mas­cu­line. In the book he was an Irish immi­grant so I like that Col­in keeps his accent and he’s more exot­ic to them, just to real­ly con­trast how fem­i­nine they are. He’s com­pli­cat­ed, not just some kind of a dumb hunk. He had to be sexy but also intrigu­ing. To me, he’s like the think­ing woman’s hunk, but manip­u­la­tive and mys­te­ri­ous too.

There’s this amaz­ing con­tra­dic­tion about you, which is that you are an insid­er by virtue of your fam­i­ly, but it seems like you’re more inter­est­ed in telling the sto­ries of outsiders.

I guess I feel like I have both sides and I can relate to being an out­sider and being on the inside of things. Yeah, I feel like an observ­er, so some­times you stand back and you’re look­ing at the world that you’re in from the side, but I can feel con­nect­ed to it also. That’s my vague answer! I think it’s being an observ­er, then you kind of stand back and look at the world even if you’re in the mid­dle of it.

How dif­fer­ent was it work­ing with Elle Fan­ning again?

In Some­where she is a bas­tion of pre-sex­u­al puri­ty, while in The Beguiled, hers is the most sex­u­al char­ac­ter. Now, she’s 18. It was real­ly fun to work with her because she’s real­ly the same girl. She still has the same sort of humour. She hasn’t lost the qual­i­ty I loved about her as a kid but now she’s more mature, so it’s fun to hang out with her as an adult, but she has that same per­son­al­i­ty that I always loved when I first met her. It was fun to cast her as the slut­ty bad girl because it’s so not her per­son­al­i­ty. Kirsten [Dun­st] is also real­ly against type – she plays a real­ly repressed char­ac­ter and is not like that at all. But I thought it was fun because Elle is such a sweet girl. I want­ed to let her be the vain, self-absorbed bad girl. That char­ac­ter from the book, her whole iden­ti­ty is based on men find­ing her attrac­tive and final­ly there’s a man around for her to be like that with.

Now that Don­ald Trump has been elect­ed and is now the leader of the free world, do you feel any pres­sure to take a more overt moral posi­tion with you work?

The elec­tion hap­pened while we were shoot­ing The Beguiled and we were so depressed. My mom said, ​‘You have to make art. That’s what we have to do: make art’ so I just try to make what I can. I don’t know. I guess you have to pay a lit­tle more atten­tion and be more involved. I don’t want to talk too much about pol­i­tics but I feel like you do have to pro­tect what’s impor­tant to you in a way that you didn’t realise you had to before, if that makes sense?

How would you advise peo­ple to pro­tect what’s impor­tant to them?

I don’t think it’s my role to give that advice. For me per­son­al­ly, I feel like, peo­ple are always ask­ing why there aren’t as many women film­mak­ers, so I feel like I have to put this movie out there and talk about it and be present so there are more points of view out there, and the more you see, the bet­ter it is, rather than just hav­ing white male points of view as the dom­i­nant voice. I think just putting out dif­fer­ent points of view is help­ful, to be a part of con­nect­ing people.

Do you have spe­cif­ic ambi­tions in terms of sto­ries you’re still hun­gry to tell, or things you want to do creatively?

I don’t real­ly. I just do one thing at a time and then see where that takes me.

So, you’re in the moment…

I’m not real­ly because I’m always wor­ry­ing about plan­ning future things, but some­how with my work I try to fin­ish one thing because the next one is usu­al­ly a reac­tion to the one before. Marie Antoinette was so dec­o­ra­tive and com­pli­cat­ed and Some­where was so min­i­mal in reac­tion to that one. I feel like there’s always kind of a shift, but it’s all very mys­te­ri­ous to me too.

How many times have peo­ple asked you what Bill Mur­ray whis­pers at the end of Lost in Translation?

I don’t know but a lot of times!

It’s still happening?

It hasn’t for a while…

Do you still feel attached to every­thing that you made?

I can talk about my movies. I feel affec­tion for them and the oth­er things that I made, but I don’t watch them after­wards so I’m not that famil­iar with them. Some­times some­thing will be on TV and I’ll start watch­ing a lit­tle bit of it, but I don’t go back and revis­it them.

Why is that?

You see them so many times when you’re edit­ing. One thing is I don’t feel the emo­tions as much, because I think about how we were film­ing, or this or that, so you kind of burn out of them in a cer­tain way, but I still feel affec­tion for them.

This is an abridged ver­sion of our inter­view with Sofia Cop­po­la – you can read the full piece in LWLies 70: The Dunkirk issue.

The Beguiled opens in cin­e­mas on 14 July. Thomas Cullinan’s ​‘The Beguiled’ is released by Pen­guin Clas­sics on 1 June.