.png)
Sofia Coppola spoke tenderly about her late mother and their family’s film legacy at a BFI London Film Festival session on Thursday afternoon.
The Oscar winner, best known for directing The Virgin Suicides (1999), Lost in Translation (2003) and Marie Antoinette (2006), admitted she couldn’t have made the latter without the awards success of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson’s Tokyo-set genre mash-up. “You kind of get a free pass to do whatever you want,” she told interviewer Edith Bowman at London’s Royal Festival Hall. “I wouldn’t have been able to make [Marie Antoinette] before because it was a big-scale, big-budget movie. So because [Lost in Translation] was successful, people [were] approaching me, ‘What do you want to do?'”
Her answer? A deliciously vibrant, sugary take on the ill-fated 18th-century Queen of France with Kirsten Dunst in the titular role. Eleanor Coppola — who had Sofia with fellow filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola in 1971 — turned the camera on her daughter and captured over 80 hours of behind-the-scenes and on-set action while musing on what it means for a mother to watch her 34-year-old daughter at work. The documentary Making Marie Antoinette, assembled by Sofia Coppola and editor Aaron Matthews with input from Eleanor’s close friends, is screening here at the 70th London Film Festival, two-and-a-half years after Coppola’s death.
When Coppola came to film her daughter (who actually shot at the Palace of Versailles), Sofia remembered the documentarian immediately switching into filmmaker mode. “But it was really nice to have her on set because it was a big, stressful, daunting project,” said the younger Coppola. “And when my mom shows up… Everyone was happy to have my mom there because she’s such a grounding presence, and something she always loved to visit. […] And she loved being on that set because she loved the costumes and all the visual beauty and seeing the flowers and corsets.”
Coppola wasn’t aware just how much footage her mother had in the archives. “I went home to Northern California… and she was like, ‘Oh, let’s get out that footage.’ She wanted to revisit it, and I’d never seen it before. And then there were hours of all this footage on set, and it really brought me back. She was excited about it, like: ‘Let’s make it into some major thing. What can we do with it?’ So we started talking about what could happen with it,” Coppola recalled, “and then she passed away a few years ago. At the end of her life, she said, ‘I want my book to be published, and I want this film to be finished.’ And so I felt like, ‘Okay, I have to do it.'”
In a very sweet moment, Coppola reflected on being a parent now and why that’s informed her relationship with the doc. “I didn’t realize how challenging it would be, but it was also a gift to spend time seeing that set [through] my mom’s eyes, and then see her as a mother watching me. Now I have almost- grown daughters. I can see it as a mother, so it was a really meaningful project for me to work on.”
Bowman took Coppola through the major milestones of her career, including Virgin Suicides, which was born out of her desire to depict authentic teenage relationships. “Growing up, I didn’t see movies where the teenage girls were normal… I just didn’t see a lot of characters that I related to and treated young people with respect,” she explained. “The teen movies were always cheap and had bad photography!”
The audience was shown a clip from her melancholy drama for dreamers, Lost in Translation, and Coppola lauded the improv work from Bill Murray, revealing that she spent a year trying to track him down for the film and wouldn’t have made it without his involvement.
On the subject of Marie Antoinette — which received mixed reviews upon release but has gone on to become quite the cult classic — Coppola recalled: “At the time, people did not like [Dunst’s] performance. I think they were like, ‘What’s going on with the different accents?'” she laughed. Coppola later said about her many collaborations with the U.S. actress: “She just had this quality that was so unique, this depth in her eye and this sense of humor, this playful quality.”
At the very end of the session, Bowman asked: What could we expect next? Coppola replied that after working on two documentary features (her Marc Jacobs film hit last year’s Venice Film Festival), she’s still enthralled by “movie magic” and is going back to “writing, creating, imagining the world and imagining the challenge.”
The 70th BFI London Film Festival runs Oct. 7-18.
English (US) ·