![]() Sofia Coppola would not argue with Murray's assessment of her working style. She has been able to reinvent what her last name represents.'' When you see her movies, you forget that she is Francis's daughter. She nods her head and says, 'You're right, you're right, but this is what I want to do.' And it works. She's tough, but she doesn't pretend to be a man. ''Don't let Sofia's littleness and quietness confuse you,'' Bill Murray told me recently. Which is not to say that she does not get exactly what she wants. Sofia Coppola is much less dictatorial: soft-spoken, a listener, an encourager of those around her. ''Sofia has uniquely great taste,'' Anderson says, which, given the way Coppola works, is at once a compliment to her and himself.Īlthough her father fosters a familial atmosphere on most of his sets, he, like most directors, has a god complex. As Anderson sees it, what holds this network of Coppola's together is her taste - which is an amalgam of their tastes - and her talent, which encompasses letting them do what they do best. And to persuade Bill Murray to take the lead role in her movie, she enlisted her friend Wes Anderson, who directed Murray in two of his films. punk-pop band Redd Kross, and who now produces the soundtracks for her films. Some are friends of her father - for instance, the producer Fred Roos, who worked on almost all of her father's films, and who encouraged her to cast Josh Hartnett, then unknown, for the pivotal role of the heartthrob Trip Fontaine in ''The Virgin Suicides.'' Others are her own friends, many of whom she took with her to Tokyo to shoot ''Lost in Translation'': the cinematographer Lance Acord, whom she met years ago on a photo shoot with the photographer Bruce Weber, and Brian Reitzell, whom she met when he was drumming with the L.A. Rather, she calls on a network of creative people. For her movies, Coppola doesn't simply employ a crew. It is perhaps not too much to say that she is the most original and promising young female filmmaker in America.Īmong those most convinced of her talents are the people who have worked with her. Her films are sophisticated and plangently romantic, and the emotions she stirs up linger. She writes scripts that establish, sustain and then gently shift tone and atmosphere - not Tolstoy but Chekhov. She doesn't sweep across history or build to dramatic climaxes like her father but rather has her camera search out meaning in small details. Where her father's great themes - the struggles of Man and Patriarchies in the Modern World - are vast and epic, Sofia's themes, like the happenstance encounters and quiet epiphanies that can haunt the rest of your life, are more intimate, if no less profound. Francis Ford Coppola may have started out as a director of small films (''The Rain People,'' one of his earliest films, was an intimate character study), but his greatest triumph was ''The Godfather,'' a large-scale studio movie. It's thrilling, and new.Ĭoppola's first feature film, ''The Virgin Suicides,'' which she made five years ago, is increasingly seen as a precocious debut and, among many young women, as a generational statement about suburban life, first love and sexual awakening. When Murray's character, a disillusioned movie star in Japan to shoot a whiskey commercial, sings the old Roxy Music song ''More Than This'' in a late-night karaoke bar, he fuses cultures and generations, to say nothing of earnestness and camp. It also hints, in everything from the set to the soundtrack, at a finely tuned sensibility, a high-low, here-there globalism. With its subtleties of character its strange, luminous pictorial beauty (especially in its distillation of Tokyo) its literary attention to telling detail its unforced blending of comedy and sadness and its dreamy intimacy, the film summons place and sustains mood as few contemporary films do. ''Lost in Translation'' is no ordinary American film or typical independent film. Her second feature film, ''Lost in Translation,'' which she wrote and directed, and which opens in mid-September, has already generated a great deal of excitement in the independent-film community and also in Hollywood, with talk that Bill Murray's performance should earn him an Academy Award nomination. At 32, she seems years younger: she's slight and girlish, and her manner is almost dreamy, as if she were not fully awake.īut the career arc of Sofia Coppola has upended expectations. And Sofia, unlike her father, is not an outsize, force-of-nature personality. There's her last name, shining like a stoplight, encouraging doubt: how could the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, one of the most important American filmmakers of all time, live up to the standard set by her father? Is Sofia one more bad case (there have been enough) of nepotism taking someone where talent could not? There was her notorious performance in ''Godfather III,'' and, right after that. ![]() ![]() It is easy to underestimate Sofia Coppola.
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