A LONGTIME COLLABORATION THAT’S GOT THEM ‘BEGUILED’
Director Sofia Coppola, star Kirsten Dunst reflect on long friendship and their latest film together.
Kirsten Dunst didn’t want to kiss anyone. She was 16 and had been playing a young innocent onscreen for a decade. Now, on the set of Sofia Coppola’s “The Virgin Suicides,” she was supposed to film a scene in which she made out with a handful of guys. And she was riddled with anxiety.
“But Sof was just like, ‘Bury your face in your hair,’ ” Dunst, now 35, recalls. “So I didn’t really have to make out with them. It was an older part for me — the first time I was seen in a sexual way. And I’m so happy that transition was in Sofia’s hands, because it could have been really different with another director.”
The experience bonded the actress and the filmmaker, forging a connection so strong that the pair went on to make two more movies together. The latest, a remake of 1971’s “The Beguiled,” debuted at the Cannes Film Festival last month — where Coppola became the first woman to be named best director since 1961. Set in Virginia during the Civil War, the movie, which hits theaters Friday, tells the story of women (played by Dunst, Nicole Kidman and Elle Fanning) who take a wounded Union soldier (Colin Farrell) into their sheltered boarding school. The arrival of the hunky soldier turns the house upside down, as the women begin vying for his attention and sneaking into his room to try to win his affection.
Though Dunst had a one-day cameo role in Coppola’s 2013 film “The Bling Ring,” “The Beguiled” marks the first time the two have really collaborated since 2006’s “Marie Antoinette.” In the new movie, Dunst plays Edwina, a chaste schoolteacher who is perhaps the most affected by the advent of the soldier.
“I liked the idea of seeing her play a character that’s so different from her,” says Coppola, 46. “The character is so innocent and vulnerable, really repressed — and Kirsten’s not repressed at all.”
In their friendship, at least, Dunst certainly appears to be the more gregarious. Coppola is not verbose. There’s a gentleness to her speech, and she often swallows the ends of her sentences. Her style is also more conservative than Dunst’s. She tends toward pants and high-neck blouses and carries quilted Chanel handbags. Dunst, meanwhile, usually opts for dresses and isn’t afraid of showing decolletage on the red carpet.
“Kirsten is some sort of alter ego I connect to in myself,” says the director, sharing a couch with Dunst. “Also, because you’re so opposite. When I met her, she was this all-American, blond cheerleader. But there was something else going on that contrasted that. And yet we already shared a sensibility and sense of humor that helps a lot. Kirsten just gets me and what I’m trying to do. We don’t even have to talk. I’ll just look at her and she’ll go, ‘OK, got it.’ ”
Youree Henley, a producer on “The Beguiled,” says the kinship between the two became obvious the moment they showed up for an early costume fitting.
“There was a great shorthand and real appreciation between them, and that carried through into making the movie,” he says. “Sofia likes to go back to things she trusts — like working with Kirsten, or Elle Fanning again after ‘Somewhere.’ Because she knows what she can do with them.”
Beyond her trusted stars, there are other classic Coppola stamps on “The Beguiled” — namely its gauzy, pastel-heavy visual aesthetic. Filmed at a historic plantation house in Louisiana, the movie is filled with moody nature — Spanish moss and Southern live oaks. And the women are all meant to look delicate and ultra-feminine, with crown braids, corsets, bows and brooches.
“I’ve always been visually driven — that’s how I relate to the world,” Coppola says. “I think about how you fill the frame, and we wanted this to feel claustrophobic, so we picked a tighter aspect ratio. Everything is in service of the story, so that the audience is disarmed by this pretty, delicate world.”
“You have impeccable taste, Sof, you do,” Dunst says. She describes how beautiful Coppola’s home is in New York’s West Village, where the director lives with her husband, Phoenix frontman Thomas Mars, and their two children. “Though it was funny to go there after she had kids, because I was like, ‘This is not Sofia’s house.’ I went to the bathroom and there’s, like, explosions of toys. I think kids change the aesthetic quickly.”
Dunst, who lives in the Valley with her fiancé, “Fargo” co-star Jesse Plemons, describes her own style as more relaxed. In her downtime, she says, she wears sweatpants and a little makeup, “but that’s only because I don’t like my skin tone. It’s so red.” On “The Beguiled,” when Coppola mentioned that the characters should look like they were “dwindling away” because of a lack of food in the house, Dunst made it clear that she would have trouble looking like she “hadn’t been fed.”
“There were so many fast-food restaurants where we shot — Cane’s Chicken, McDonald’s — and no healthy options. So I was like, ‘I can’t, really.’ ”
But Dunst values Coppola’s opinion and is planning on seeking her guidance when she directs her first film next year, an adaptation of Sylvia Plath’s “The Bell Jar” starring Dakota Fanning.
“I like making low-budget films, just because I can have total control, and I wouldn’t want to make a movie that I couldn’t make exactly how I wanted,” Coppola says.
“I couldn’t imagine not having