Elle Magazine did an excellent cover profile of Sofia Coppola, all to promote her foray into documentary filmmaking with Marc by Sofia. Sofia, a longtime friend and muse of Marc Jacobs, made a documentary about Marc, his life, his vision, his fashion, his chaos and everything else. It’s a unique thing, to have a designer’s muse turn her camera on the designer. What’s particularly striking about Sofia in this interview is how soft-spoken and calm she is – I don’t think this woman has ever settled a score or bitched someone out in her entire life. Even though she got screwed over by AppleTV, she has nothing negative to say about them hijacking her ideas. By the way, Sofia is 54 years old and she has two teenage daughters, and she clearly adores them and adores being a girl-mom. Some highlights from Elle:
Sofia was plagued by self-doubt through much of the ’90s. “I was awkward and I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was trying different things and felt really frustrated that I couldn’t pick one. I wasn’t, like, taken seriously.” She’d dropped out of CalArts, declaring herself a “lousy painter.”
Her two daughters, 15-year-old Cosima Croquet and 19-year-old Romy Mars: “I feel like I would’ve been better at being the mom of teenagers. But somehow it doesn’t really apply. It’s such a complex relationship. I mean, it’s so intense. There’s nothing deeper, I don’t think,” she says of mothers and daughters. “Anything that deep, it’s painful the way that nothing else is, but then so gratifying.”
On Romy’s TikTok stardom: “Thank God she has a really funny sense of humor, because I was so uptight about being the daughter-of. I would never lead with that. I was wanting to make it on my own, where she is relaxed about turning it on its head. It’s just a totally different attitude.” Dissimilar as they are, her brazen daughter “cracks me up,” Coppola says, smiling. “She’s a performer in a way that’s really fun for me to see.” She refers to Romy’s online “persona,” a subtle reminder that TikTok is a performance. A friend told Coppola: “I think you would be doing TikToks if you were that age.” She doesn’t disagree. She likens the platform to the fanzines of her youth.
Sofia doesn’t scoff at Gen Z: “I love that [Romy is] so part of her era,” she says. Last year, she directed Romy in the video for her new single “A-Lister,” a satirical shrug at fame shot at the Coppola winery. When I ask if Romy took direction from her seasoned mother, Coppola demurs: “I was trying to take direction from her.”
Sofia recognized the power of a young-female audience: Two decades ago, Coppola says, the industry “didn’t think of girls being an audience. It was like, ‘It has to have a boy as the central character.’ They actually told me that you can’t make a movie that a boy wasn’t going to go to.” Now it makes me so happy that, yes, the girls are out there. They have buying power. Even before Barbie, she says, “I think the shift was when Fifty Shades of Grey was a hit. It was like, ‘See, women do matter.’”
On the need for more female directors: “There need to be more women bosses in the industry, but there also needs to be more cultural support,” Coppola says, noting that European countries often fund films directly (also of note, many of these funds mandate gender equity). She observes more women in film school now than 20 years ago, and she’s helping them break in with the launch of her Young Filmmakers Association, which runs programs to help close the opportunity gap. “I feel like, having grown up in it, how do you bring more people in who aren’t connected?”
On ‘The Custom of the Country’: Days before our interview, news broke that Sydney Sweeney would star in an Apple TV adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. I cringe bringing it up to Coppola, who was previously developing her own version of her favorite Wharton novel for Apple, reportedly starring Florence Pugh as social climber Undine Spragg. Now, an unruffled Coppola clarifies, “I really wanted Jennifer Lawrence to play that character. In my head, she’s Undine. I think it required a big star and a big budget, so that iteration didn’t happen.” She’s also put aside a much-anticipated yet mysterious new project with Dunst, which stays mysterious in our interview. “It felt too sad,” she says. “It’s confusing in these dark times. I want to offer some hope and beauty in the world, but then you also don’t want to do something shallow, because it feels like a time for deep things.”
What cracks me up a little bit is that you can just feel that Sofia, the eternal “cool girl,” has been humbled by her daughters being cooler than her. That Sofia is possibly just a “cringe” mom, even if several generations still want to look and dress like Sofia Coppola. Anyway, she’s dealing with that humbling with as much grace as possible. That’s what comes across too – her grace, her calm, her refusal to be nasty or roll her eyes or point out that she’s been screwed over. Sofia deserves more respect.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, cover courtesy of Elle.
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