CIVIL WAR DRAMA
Sofia Coppola goes Southern Gothic
When she was 6, Sofia Coppola starred in a home movie made by her father, Francis Ford Coppola.
“Halfway through, my mom walked through the set, which was our living room,” Coppola recalled. “She said, ‘Just tell him you’re Wonder Woman’.”
The 46-year-old filmmaker laughed.
“That was the attitude when I was growing up,” she said. “My parents always told me that I could make anything happen.”
Forty years later the youngest Coppola is indeed making things happen. At 46 she is arguably more prominent among today’s filmmakers than even her legendary father.
Her latest project is The Beguiled, which opened nationwide Friday. Written and directed by Coppola, it’s a Civil War drama set at a girl’s school in the South. The early buzz is all positive. Among other things, Coppola received the Best Director award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.
Based on a 1966 book by Thomas Cullinan, The Beguiled is set at Miss Martha Farnsworth’s Seminary for Young Ladies, nested deep in the woods of Virginia. At the height of the Civil War, one of the girls finds a wounded Union Army corporal named John McBurney (Colin Farrell) in the woods, bleeding and near death.
Standard protocol demands that the women turn him over to Confederate authorities, but Miss Martha (Nicole Kidman) decides that the right thing to do would be to let his wounded leg heal first. They take him into the school, and before long Miss Martha becomes infatuated with him. So does a lonely teacher named Edwina (Kirsten Dunst) and an older student, Alicia (Elle Fanning).
McBurney ends up beguiling the ladies in different ways as he manooeuvres to remain at the school and not rejoin the war. His mere presence sets the women against each other, but ultimately brings them together.
A 1971 version of The Beguiled starred Clint Eastwood as the wounded soldier and Geraldine Page as Miss Martha. It wasn’t a hit but, years later, it inspired Coppola to her first remake.
“After I did The Bling Ring [2013], I did want to do something beautiful,” she recalled. “I was so tired of all the pop-culture references. Then a friend of mine told me about this film The
Beguiled. She said, ‘I think you need to see it and remake it’.” Coppola checked it out, and was fascinated.
“The premise was so loaded,” she said. “It said so much about the power between men and women constantly shifting back and forth.”
Wearing a white skirt and a black sweater set for an earlymorning interview at a Los Angeles hotel, Coppola said that the clincher was when she found herself thinking about a new way to tell the old story.
“The original movie was told from the male point of view,” she said. “It was this man who suddenly found himself in this women’s world. What I thought would be interesting was to go back in to tell the story from the women’s point of view.
“These women are living together in this isolated place, just trying to survive a war,” Coppola explained, “and then this man literally shows up on the doorstep and changes the dynamic of the place, while also shifting the relationships between the >>
>> women. “I knew this was the way to flip this story, so with both films we could have two sides of the same story.”
Coppola filmed in New Orleans, and brought Civil War re-enactors to the set to speak with the cast.
“We had an etiquette teacher and a dance instructor and did Bible study,” she recalled. “We learned sewing. This is how these women spent their days.”
Several critics have called The Beguiled a feminist tale, a label which Coppola herself doesn’t embrace.
“That’s for the audience to determine,” she said. “All I can say is that I put my story on film. How an audience interprets it, or how they connect to it, is very individual.
“I just imagined what it was like for the women of the time who were raised to cater to men,” she added. “Then they were on their own and had to find their strength to survive … In the end, I prefer to think of this film as a power struggle between a man and these women.”
The Beguiled is Dunst’s third film with Coppola, following The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Marie Antoinette (2006). In a separate interview, she said that it was no coincidence.
“I would do anything to work with Sofia,” Dunst said. “I love her as a person, and I’ve known her since I was 16. We’re always on the same page on how to approach a story. We have this shorthand too. We’re friends and we understand each other.”
It’s Kidman’s first film with Coppola, and the Oscar-winning actress reported that the filmmaker had visited her in London to talk about the project.
“We had dinner and I said to her, ‘It doesn’t matter what it is. You can give me the phone book and I’m in’,” Kidman said in a separate interview. “Sofia puts out stories that I want to see.”
Coppola is noted for her work with actresses, but realised that casting the right man as McBurney was crucial to the film.
“I had to find a man who could handle these women who would objectify him,” she said with a laugh. “I wanted him to be masculine and exotic. Colin is a great actor, but also brought the charm I needed. He found a way to connect with each of the women on different levels, while showing a dark side that was such a contrast to this feminine world.”
Born in New York as the youngest child and only daughter of Francis Ford and Eleanor Coppola, Sofia Coppola grew up on film sets, usually behind the camera but occasionally in front of it. That’s her as the baby in the baptism scene in The Godfather (1972), and she went on to tiny roles in her father’s The Godfather, Part II (1974), The Outsiders (1983), Rumble Fish (1983), The Cotton Club (1984), Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) and Tucker: The Man And His Dream (1988).
She graduated to a leading role as Mary Corleone in The Godfather, Part III (1990), but was greeted with hostile reviews and has acted only occasionally since then.
By that time, however, her interests were shifting. Coppola studied photography at Mills College in Oakland and painting at the California Institute of the Arts, but an intensifying interest in filmmaking led to her making some short films. She was captivated.
“I loved filmmaking,” she said, “because it combined so many of my artistic interests, including storytelling, photography and music.”
Coppola made her feature debut with The Virgin Suicides,
which won critical plaudits. Her second feature, Lost In Translation (2003), was the making of her. It earned her an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay and nominations for Best Director and Best Picture. She went on to Marie Antoinette, Somewhere
(2010) and The Bling Ring.
For some directors, such offbeat indie fare is a calling card on the way to a superhero blockbuster. Don’t expect to find Coppola among them, though.
“I love making low-budget films,” she said. “I’m really allowed to do it the way I want to do it. With those huge films, there are a lot of cooks and meetings in conference rooms.
“I never say never,” Coppola added with a laugh. “But I do prize creative freedom.”
Divorced from director Spike Jonze, Coppola lives in Greenwich Village with her second husband, musician Thomas Mars, and their daughters, 10-year-old Romy and 7-year-old Cosima.
Juggling family and filmmaking isn’t as hard as you might think, she said.
“My husband and my mom help me when I’m filming,” Coppola explained. “It’s so intensive when you’re shooting a film. My kids would come visit me, and I allowed them to yell ‘Action!’ a few times, which they love.”
In general, she said, regular life takes precedence over her career.
“I was at Coney Island with my kids, eating hot dogs, when I found out about the Cannes win,” Coppola said. “My girls were so proud. They told everyone at school that their mom won for directing. My first grader even stood up and told the class. I didn’t even know she understood that kind of thing.”
Are we seeing the emergence of the next generation of the Coppola movie dynasty?
For now, Coppola said, her daughters are content to be movie fans, albeit passionate ones: She takes them to numerous movies, and has spoken out publicly about the need for films to be seen on the big screen.
“I shot The Beguiled on 35mm film,” she said. “It’s meant for the big screen. I want people to feel the largeness of an atmosphere. It’s about a big frame and not watching it on your phone.”
She sighed.
“There is nothing that compares to the experience of sitting in a movie theatre,” Coppola said. “To really lose yourself in a film, once the lights go dark, is one of life’s true joys.”