1971: Born in New York City.
2000: The Virgin Suicides.
2004: Lost in Translation.
2006?: Marie-Antoinette.
Going into the family business has its good points and its bad. Sofia Coppola experienced the bad right off, when her dad, Francis, inserted her as a last-minute replacement for Winona Ryder in Godfather III. (She had made her film debut as a infant being baptized in the original Godfather.) Her performance was mercilessly panned, but just as director’s daughter Anjelica Huston did in a similar situation, she recovered from horrendous initial reviews, to establish herself as an independent force in Hollywood.
Cousin to Nicholas Cage and Jason Schwartzman, married to director Spike Jonze for some years, Sofia Coppola certainly is a filmmaking insider, but she has established an individual voice and vision at a very young age, working on her own terms at her own pace and process.
Recoiling from her critical drubbing, Sofia Coppola enrolled at Cal Arts and took up photography and fashion design. She began work on her first film at the same time then-husband Jonze was making Being John Malkovich. She had loved Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, The Virgin Suicides, and began adapting it into a screenplay even though another version was in the works. Eventually her labor of love won out and she was also hired to direct her own script.
With the release of her first film as writer/director, Ms. Coppola went from punching-bag to critical darling in one sweeping gesture. She immediately established herself as an original artist with a unique sensibility: open-ended, spontaneous, true to the moment and not to some preconceived story arc. A problematic narrative of five teenaged sisters -- beloved collectively and retrospectively by the neighborhood boys -- who kill themselves in succession, the book and film deal with sex and death in a delicate and light-hearted manner. Kirsten Dunst and other teen heart-throbs appear memorably, and James Woods and Kathleen Turner perform admirably against type as the girls’ baffled parents.
With her second film, Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola established herself as a major filmmaker in her own right. Nominated for Best Director, she also won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and apart from the blockbuster Lord of the Rings, this was generally considered the best film of the year. Eliciting extremely natural and appealing performances from Bill Murray and Scarlett Johannson as two isolated individuals who happen to connect at the Park Hyatt Hotel in Tokyo, for a tender but unexpected romance in transit, Coppola and her cinematographer do a marvelous job of capturing the dislocating feel of the older-than-old, newer-than-new Japan. In all respects, the film displays a love too true to be false, too genuine to pander.
What stands out most for a director in her early thirties is Coppola’s mastery of tone and lightness of touch. Her films are gentle, winsome, and evanescent, but weighty in retrospect. From her we can expect the unexpected, and her next film, now said to be in post-production but to be released in her own good time, will be an eagerly-anticipated Marie-Antoinette (played by Kirsten Dunst.)
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