Eleanor Coppola draws on real life for Paris
> BY ADRIAN MACK
There’s a sweet moment in Paris Can Wait when Anne (Diane Lane) leans across the table and whispers her “darkest sin” into the ear of her dinner date, Jacques (Arnaud Viard). Knowing that the film is the feature debut of Eleanor Coppola—partner to Francis, mother to filmmakers Sofia and Roman—one is reminded of that swoony whisper in Sofia’s Lost in Translation. Unless you’re Eleanor Coppola, evidently.
“Well, that’s a completely different kind of scene and circumstance,” she says, audibly unprepared for the comparison during a call to the Georgia Straight from New York. “Although I do think I was influenced by Lost in Translation,” she continues. “Lost in Translation was really based on Sofia’s own experiences. She had this clothing company in Japan and she was flying back and forth three or four times a year, being in that jet-lagged state. I thought, ‘Wow, you can take your real life and develop it into a fictional story.’”
And so, at 81 years young, Eleanor Coppola is doing publicity for a small, elegant movie, opening Friday (May 26), based on the experience of being driven from Cannes to Paris by a rascally French producer with seduction (mostly by food) on his mind.
So far, so charming. As viewers, mind you, we’re attuned to moments that remind us of the family of cinema artists Eleanor (herself a respected visual artist) has presided over for most of her life. There’s the zoetrope that Anne observes at the Institut Lumière in Lyon (American Zoetrope is the name of Francis’s production company), or the incidental appearance of son-in-law Thomas Mars’s (Phoenix) music. Beyond all that is a felicitous quality, a sense of life’s enchantment common to all the Coppolas’ movies, like a family trademark.
“Maybe it takes you—who are outside, at a distance—to see that,” she says cheerily. “Inside, I’m not as clear about those threads. Of course, I feel like I’m not really a true filmmaker. I’m a documentarian, so this is really stepping out of the box for me and I can’t quite relate to how it fits in. Obviously, I must have absorbed many qualities and experiences from my family’s life and all the time we spent together on locations.”
Most famously, Eleanor was on location in the Philippines capturing the bedlam that was Apocalypse Now. Her 1991 documentary, Hearts of Darkness, was an instant classic, but despite some affection for Wong Karwai and Jane Campion, she insists that she’s a rube about narrative film.
“It’s kinda weird to want to make a film when you’re not a big film fan,” she says. “But I also took that as: maybe I’ll make a film that is not quite a cookie-cutter film, because I don’t watch them enough to know how. Years ago, I read Star Wars and I thought it was this ridiculous comic-book movie that would never make any money. I’m not one that you want to send your script to.”
As for any direct influence on Paris Can Wait from Eleanor’s livein expert, she reveals that there’s one scene that went unchanged despite strong pressure from Francis and two other directors during editing. “It was a big step for me to go against these world-class professional men who’d been making films all these years,” she says. Can she tell us who they were? “No,” Coppola replies with a broad laugh. Because some things, obviously, stay in the family.