‘Beguiled’ told by the women
“Apocalypse Now” and “Godfather” fame, and her mother is artist and filmmaker Eleanor Coppola (whose feature “Paris Can Wait” opened in theaters just weeks before her daughter’s “Beguiled” will premiere). Sofia’s brother, Roman, who lives in San Francisco, is a screenwriter and producer, and her cousin Gia directed the James Franco movie “Palo Alto.”
“I never would have thought of remaking someone else’s film,” the 46-year-old director said by phone before the red-carpet premiere of “The Beguiled” at the Directors Guild of America in Hollywood.
Yet, Coppola recalled, her friend and longtime production designer Anne Ross suggested she watch the 1971 Civil Warperiod melodrama “The Beguiled.” “She said, ‘I think you need to make your own version of it.’ ”
The movie, directed by Don Siegel, stars Clint Eastwood as a wounded Union soldier in 1864 who seeks refuge in a Christian all-girls boarding house — to predictably, and sexually, disastrous results.
As soon as Coppola saw the original, based on a 1966 novel by Thomas P. Cullinan, she said, she “knew immediately why Anne thought of me. Even though it was a story told from a kind of macho 1970s male point of view, it stayed in my mind. It reminded me a lot of things I was thinking about during ‘The Virgin Suicides,’ ” her acclaimed 1999 debut feature starring Kirsten Dunst at 16.
Coppola and Dunst also worked together on her candy-colored, popinfused “Marie Antoinette” (2006), and reunited once again for “The Beguiled.”
“The Virgin Suicides,” an ethereal adaptation of a Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, launched Coppola’s successful career behind the camera. She had already acted in several of her father’s films, including a critically panned turn as Michael Corleone’s daughter in “The Godfather Part III” (a role she took on at the last minute when Winona Ryder backed out).
“I’ve been interested for a long time in the special things that happen when a group of women live together without men,” said Coppola, who won an Oscar in 2003 for her screenplay for “Lost in Translation,” which starred Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. “Whether in a convent or a girls’ school, emotions can become very heightened. Men become even more mysterious to the women, and the women are enigmatic to any man who enters that situation.”
In Coppola’s “Beguiled,” which updates its perspective (from the male narrator to the women’s points of view) but not the original’s plot, Colin Farrell plays Cpl. John McBurney, an Irish immigrant turned Union mercenary who convalesces at the secluded all-girls Farnsworth Seminary.
Nicole Kidman plays headmistress Martha Farnsworth, Dunst the buttoned-up teacher Edwina, and Elle Fanning (who was in Coppola’s “Somewhere” at age 11) is one of their mischievous, sexually curious young charges.
Coppola said she “always pictured Nicole as Martha and wrote it with her in mind, and yet she brought so much more to this than I could have imagined. One of her great talents is her ability to somehow convey five conflicting emotions in one glance. She also has a great, twisted sense of humor, which I remember from ‘To Die For’ and wanted in this part to contrast with her virtuousness.”
Coppola said casting Farrell was a no-brainer after meeting him, which she said happened after “a year of asking all the women I know which male actors they think are hot.”
“McBurney needs to be rugged and masculine in contrast to the women’s delicacy, and he has to be sexy, but also complicated enough to believe the girls are captivated by him, not just a dumb hunk, she said. “Colin was a great sport about being the only guy” on the set. “It takes a real man to sit back and let the women be in charge.
“I always start a project with an aesthetic, how I want to tell a story visually,” said Coppola, whose understated personal style is often sought after by designers. She has modeled for Marc Jacobs and recently directed commercials for Cartier and Calvin Klein.
“I’d never done anything in a genre before, but was really into the idea of keeping this Southern Gothic,” said Coppola. “I used an understated palette (long white dresses, gossamer light through the curtains of the Louisiana plantation house) to show they are really cut off from the world, almost like ghosts wafting in their own seclusion. I was thinking of 1960s horror films, with girls in nightgowns with candelabras.”
Coppola lived at her father’s French Quarter house while filming outside New Orleans, and she returned home to her parents’ Rutherford home to unwind after her big win at Cannes — and to help out with the fundraiser Auction Napa Valley, which her family hosted in early June. “I still consider San Francisco my hometown, even though we moved to Napa from the city in first grade,” she said.
Coppola, whose first marriage to director Spike Jonze ended in 2003, now lives in New York with her husband, Phoenix lead singer Thomas Mars, and their two daughters.
In anticipation of the release of “The Beguiled,” critical conversation has swirled around whether Coppola’s remake is actually more feminist, or simply more gauzily and beautifully rendered, than the Clint Eastwood original.
“That is the fun of the story, I think, watching the power dynamics shift back and forth between the women and McB, and not always knowing the answers” said Coppola. “Is he a guest or a prisoner? Who is the title referring to as ‘beguiled’?”