t’s a rainy Sunday morning at the Café de Flore in the Boulevard St Germain, and the art deco eaterie where Jean-Paul Sartre once held court is packed with Parisians reading the papers or meeting friends for breakfast. It’s noisy, so I introduce myself to the manager and explain that I am interviewing the film director Sofia Coppola, and need somewhere quieter to sit. 'Ah, Sofia!’ he smiles, immediately offering the room upstairs.
It is no surprise that he knows Coppola: her parents – the acclaimed director Francis Ford Coppola and the artist, costume and set designer Eleanor – had an apartment in this part of Paris when she was a child; she rented a place next door to the Flore while working on her third film, the epic Marie Antoinette, in 2004. She and her partner, the French musician Thomas Mars, still have an apartment in the area, and it’s clear from the way the manager greets her that she’s a regular here.
The most recent pictures I had seen of Coppola had been taken at the Venice Film Festival a few weeks earlier, when she was in full red-carpet finery to collect the Golden Lion for Best Film for her latest movie, Somewhere. Her style is distinctive and much admired. She never looks like she’s trying too hard – the laidback Californian in her – while always looking chic and pulled together in a very French way. She devoured European style magazines such as the Face and French Vogue in her teens, she later tells me, and when she was 15 and 16 she spent her summers in Paris, working as an intern at Chanel.
She may have had a privileged upbringing, but she expressed her interest in fashion by working in it, not just shopping for it. 'There was a really strong work ethic in our family,’ she says. 'It’s really important to my dad, and I’m glad that he did that.’
Even dressed down, she stands out. She’s tiny – 5ft 3in – and steps in out of the rain with dark hair scraped back in a ponytail, her face free of make-up, wearing black jeans and layers of white T-shirts under a luxuriously thick, blue knitted jumper. As we climb upstairs she thanks me for coming out so early.
She has been in Paris working, she explains, but her main base is in New York. After our interview she is meeting Mars at the airport to fly home to their two young daughters. Coppola’s mother has been looking after Romy, four, and Cosima, who was born in May this year. 'I’ve missed them,’ she says, adding that she has stocked up on cute baby clothes in Paris.
Growing up, Sofia was the only girl in the Coppola clan, surrounded by two older brothers and a host of cousins that included the actors Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman (who plays Louis XVI in Marie Antoinette). 'They would all come and stay with us, and it was fun being the only girl,’ she says. 'That’s why I like being on the film sets with all the camera guys: it’s familiar! The idea of sisters
is mysterious to me, some kind of complicated relationship that I don’t know about. So having girls is fun. I hope they’re close. At first Romy was annoyed [about Cosima’s arrival], but now she’s really into being a big sister.’
Mars is the handsome but low-key singer in the ultra-cool band Phoenix, who are French but, unusually, are more popular in America than at home (their last album, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix, won a Grammy in January). He met Coppola briefly when he worked with the French electronic duo Air on music for her first film, The Virgin Suicides (1999), contributing guest vocals to the theme song, the dreamy, seductive Playground Love, under the pseudonym Gordon Tracks. Later, her brother Roman directed some promo videos for Phoenix.
'So I’ve met them, off and on, for a few years,’ she says. 'But we didn’t really get to know each other until I was in Paris for Marie Antoinette, and we ended up living in the same neighbourhood.’
They seem happy together, but after a short, unsuccessful marriage to the director Spike Jonze in her twenties – widely assumed to be the inspiration for Scarlett Johansson’s failing relationship in Coppola’s 2003 film Lost in Translation – she is not rushing into another wedding. 'I think we will do it eventually,’ she shrugs. 'But I guess after being divorced I wasn’t gung-ho about marriage.’
Having children has changed her views on work. She plans to take more time between projects now, and it’s no coincidence that Somewhere was a relatively small production. 'It was a six-week shoot, where Marie Antoinette was six months,’ she explains. 'With kids, there’s no way I could manage that now. And I can’t stay up all night writing any more. I have to be more organised, and it takes longer to write in all the chaos. I once had this idea that I needed to be in a quiet room to write, but I’ve learnt to do it with kids running around.’
Coppola has often said that her films tend to be working out her own issues, even if she realises only in retrospect. With Somewhere, she says she was thinking about becoming a parent when writing the screenplay, so what little plot there is inevitably concerns that. Set in Los Angeles (with a brief spell in Milan), it maps out a territory somewhere between the contemporary American television series Entourage and Fellini’s 1960 classic La Dolce Vita, revolving around a jaded film star and divorced father (Stephen Dorff) whose life shifts when he is forced to spend some real time with his 11-year-old daughter (luminously played by Dakota Fanning’s younger sister, Elle).
Her father may be an acclaimed director, but Sofia herself didn’t grow up in Hollywood. The family home was the chateau of their successful vineyard in northern California, or on the location of whatever film he was shooting at the time. When she was four, the family decamped to the Philippines for two years for Apocalypse Now. When she was 12, they lived in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel in New York for a year while her father made The Cotton Club. It wasn’t until Sofia was in her twenties and enrolled at art school that she actually lived in LA, and it was later still that she began to see the place clearly enough to write about it.
After Romy was born Coppola took a year off in Paris, although she still managed to fit in a few creative projects: she directed a television commercial for Miss Dior’s Cherie fragrance, and designed a chic capsule collection of shoes and bags for Louis Vuitton, the luxury label overseen by her friend Marc Jacobs. In between she took the baby to the park, and began thinking about making a film about LA.
'In Paris you kind of avoid all the tabloids and celebrity gossip,’ she says. 'Once in a while a friend would visit and they would bring a trashy tabloid from home, and they look just so exaggerated. So this character popped into my head, but I was interested in that whole kind of world from being at a distance from it.’
If Lost in Translation was a celebration of Tokyo, revelling in the sheer strangeness of its neon streets to casual Western visitors, Somewhere is more ambivalent about LA. Coppola never lived in Japan, she points out; she only visited to promote Milkfed, the cult fashion label she co-owned in the 1990s. 'I had a real affection for that place. Whereas LA… I like it there, but it’s strange. It’s not like anywhere else, and the whole city revolves around showbusiness.’
Her character Johnny Marco is a successful actor, but a man adrift in a sea of superficiality. He goes back to the room where he lives at the Chateau Marmont hotel in Hollywood and finds parties in full swing, women in his bed, and he medicates his boredom with drink, cigarettes and pills. Occasionally the disembodied voice of his assistant over the phone calls him to a press junket for his latest film, a kitsch TV awards ceremony in Italy, or an appointment with the special effects department of his next film, but none of it really engages him. He is surrounded by people but isolated, disconnected.
At one point he has blond identical twins pole-dancing for him in his bedroom – but manages to fall asleep while they perform. Coppola milks the scene for tragicomic effect: the squeaks of the pole as the dancers work through their amateurish routine, the tiny bruises on their tandoori-hued legs, and them disconsolately folding their portable poles into nylon bags while he snoozes, oblivious.
'I like those kinds of details,’ she smiles. The twins are Playboy Playmates: a friend mentioned seeing them on a reality TV show about Hugh Hefner’s mansion. 'I liked that they weren’t that good at dancing – I thought it was more charming. It’s funny, because I made that incident up, but Stephen [Dorff] said he went to a bachelor party at the Chateau, and they’d got pole dancers in. All kinds of things go on there.’
Place is always important to Coppola’s films, and although she gets fine performances from Dorff and Fanning, the film’s other star is the Chateau itself. 'I get into that, into the place,’ she agrees. 'There’s not much of a plot. It’s more about the characters and the atmosphere.’
A reproduction Loire chateau in the lower Hollywood Hills just off Sunset Strip, the Chateau Marmont was originally built as an apartment complex in 1929, with kitchens that encourage long-term occupation and earthquake-proof walls that are also soundproof – so that what goes on inside the rooms stays inside the rooms.
The design of the entrance and the underground car-park with lifts leading directly to the rooms means that famous faces can come and go discreetly, and when it opened as a hotel in 1931 it immediately became a haven for Hollywood stars. As Harry Cohn, the head of Columbia Pictures, once advised his young actors, 'If you must get into trouble, do it at the Marmont.’
Greta Garbo went to be alone there, Jean Harlow had her honeymoon there (managing to sleep with her lover Clark Gable as well as her new husband). In the 1950s Howard Hughes would use binoculars to spy on starlets at the pool from his lair in the largest penthouse, and Bungalow 2 was the scene of the first read-through of Rebel Without a Cause. From Alice Cooper playing nude football to Led Zeppelin riding motorbikes through the halls, the Marmont has seen it all. The Blues Brothers star John Belushi checked out for good after overdosing in Bungalow 3 in 1982, at the age of 33.
After this the hotel went into decline, becoming ever more tattered and seedy – although still loved by regulars such as the photographer Helmut Newton, who lived and worked there four months a year. When the hotelier André Balazs took it over in 1990, it was refurbished, but without losing its louche yet homely atmosphere, and has continued to be the place in LA to party discreetly.
Never having been inside the Chateau, I tell Coppola that I had always imagined it as more luxurious than it seems in her film. 'Oh no, it isn’t posh!’ she exclaims. 'That’s why people like it. Staying there is like a rite of passage for actors. It shows you’re successful, but your friends can visit and it’s not too fancy – so you’re still down-to-earth, too. It’s not super luxury at all. But it’s nice. I like to stay there.’
She has vague memories of it from her childhood, and remembers Romulo Laki – a Chateau employee of some 30 years’ standing who is known as 'the singing waiter’ – performing Elvis Presley’s Teddy Bear to her in the lobby. In the film, he does the same for Marco’s daughter, Cleo.
'But most of my memories are from my twenties, when I was at college in LA, and me and my friends would go there to hang out,’ she says. 'The parking guy, who’s been there for 20 years, would open the gates so we could use the swimming-pool. It was just a fun place to go and people-watch, have a drink or something.’
It was her long relationship with the hotel, with Balazs and with the general manager, Philip Pavel, that enabled her to take over the entire fifth floor for three weeks to film Marco’s life in Room 59. Dorff himself lived in the hotel for four or five months in 1996, and had his 21st birthday party there. For the duration of the shoot he moved into number 69, directly above his character’s room, and kept Coppola up to date with the hotel gossip.
While she’s writing a new script, she listens to music – Bryan Ferry was a favourite for Somewhere – and starts to collect images, which she puts into little books for her crew to use for reference before shooting. Bruce Weber’s Hollywood portraits were important for this film – she later emails me a picture of the actor Matt Dillon, seemingly just waking up in bed, that was in her mood book. But the biggest influence was Helmut Newton. 'The Chateau has that kind of decadent side that I’ve always felt from his photographs,’ she says. 'There’s a scene towards the end of the movie, where a topless girl is getting a haircut, that’s taken from one of his photos.’
In another scene, Marco leaves the hotel in his Ferrari, passing another car that has just ploughed into a wall – a reference to Newton’s death at the hotel. In 2004 his car accelerated out of the car-park and smashed straight into a wall. He was 83, and is assumed to have had a heart attack at the wheel. 'I was there, that day,’ Coppola says. 'I talked to him that morning. I’m glad I met him, even though it was at the last possible moment, and I told him how much I liked his work.’
Coppola is a keen collector of photography, and says the Newton print she owns is one of her more prized possessions, along with a portrait of Kurt Cobain by Juergen Teller and several works by Lee Friedlander, Tina Barney and Bill Owens, whose photographs of suburbia were referenced in The Virgin Suicides.
'I wanted to take photos, but I wasn’t very good at it,’ she says. In her twenties, her pictures were published in magazines such as Allure and Interview. They weren’t bad, but nor were they exceptional. 'I was just frustrated that I couldn’t take photos as well as the photographers I liked. I thought I’d be good, because I’ve got a good eye. But I guess that doesn’t translate. Although it taught me a lot about how to make films.’
It is, of course, the family business. Her mother, Eleanor, has won awards for her behind-the-scenes documentaries about films made by her husband (including Hearts of Darkness, about the making of Apocalypse Now). Sofia’s eldest brother, Gian-Carlo, had been working with their father for six years when he was killed in a motorboat accident in 1986, aged 22. Her other brother, Roman, has also made a film but prefers to focus on music videos and advertising, although he served as second-unit director on Sofia’s first three films, and helped with the production of Somewhere.
'He’s someone I always show my script to, early on,’ she says. 'He lives in LA, so he was able to help me put this film together and protect it – he helped me keep it the way I wanted it to be, which was small. It cost around $7 million, which is more than I wanted, but to me it was important that the Milan section was shot in Milan. I try to keep the budget as small as possible so that I can work creatively, because otherwise you have to listen to the money people.’
Sofia Coppola is so low-key, so quiet and modest in the way she presents herself, that it is easy to forget how exceptional she is. When she was nominated for an Academy Award for Lost in Translation in 2004, she was the first American female – and one of only three women ever – to be nominated as a director (she won the Oscar for writing the screenplay).
Similarly, when she won the Golden Lion for Somewhere she was only the fourth woman to collect the award since it was first given out in 1949. 'There’s so many more [female directors] than when I started,’ she says. 'That’s encouraging. Maybe it’s because it’s such an all-encompassing job, and if you have a family, it’s harder to do. But there are female surgeons. And there’s plenty of women working in the film business.’
When she collected the award – from her one-time boyfriend Quentin Tarantino – she thanked her father 'for teaching me’. But I’m curious about the influence of her mother, who, aside from her documentaries, has published two insightful volumes of notes taken from her diaries.
'She would read us things about ourselves when we were kids, so I was aware she was writing them, but I don’t think I thought much about it,’ Coppola says. 'Now I see how I get that side from her. She’s not showbusiness at all, she always looked at it from a distance. She’s not one for being the centre of attention: she likes to be quiet and on the side. I don’t ever yell on the set, and people wonder why, when my dad is so loud. But I get my demeanour from my mom. She’s great at observing those strange, funny, telling little details.’
Sofia Coppola is not big on words. She was friendly and open throughout our meeting, and it was only later that I realised how little detail she had given in answer to my questions. Her scripts are notably minimal: 'To me, there’s so much that’s not expressed by words, and you can tell so much by a little glance, or a gesture.’
I’m looking forward to seeing what she makes of middle age in her films, although with her fine skin and tiny, almost adolescent frame, she doesn’t look like a 39-year-old. 'I’ve enjoyed my late thirties,’ she says. 'Now, I go back and forth between being fine about being 40 next year – and feeling that I’ll have to start acting like a grown-up. I always felt that sucks.’
She pauses, noticing one of her telling details, and laughs. 'And hey, I’m about to enter my forties and I still say, “That sucks”!’
turnnoffyourmind
titsay
ellievsbear
gracieabrams