Sofia Coppola on Making Marie Antoinette and her career in film
Talking at her LFF Screen Talk, Coppola spoke about the importance of point of view, a key purchase in a London record shop, and why she thought no one would like Lost in Translation.
Assembled from 80 hours of footage that her late mother Eleanor Coppola captured on set over 20 years ago, the release of documentary Making Marie Antoinette (2026) is an evident labour of love for writer-director Sofia Coppola. And there was palpable love for Coppola as she took to the stage in the Royal Festival Hall during her LFF Screen Talk with host Edith Bowman.
Coppola said she rarely revisits her films and was seeing some of the clips included during the event for the first time in many years. She expressed her continued disbelief at being an artist who apparently inspires such passionate responses from people, let alone one – as Bowman described – who’s inspired generations of filmmakers coming up after her. “Even just waiting right here [for the Screen Talk to start], it’s surreal,” Coppola said. “I can’t believe I have a body of work and I’m talking about it. It’s wild to just pause and go, ‘Oh, I made these things.’ And it’s always touching when people tell me that they connect with a film emotionally, because why you make it is to connect with people. It’s really always gratifying and encouraging.”
Talking about her debut feature The Virgin Suicides (1999), she said: “When I was growing up, I didn’t see movies where the teenage worlds were relatable. They always cast them too old, and I just didn’t see a lot of characters that I related to and that treated young people with respect. The teen movies were always cheap and had bad photography. [When] my dad made Rumble Fish [1983], he was like, ‘I’m making an art film for teenagers.’ And I thought that was so cool and not done very often. There was something with [Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel] The Virgin Suicides where I really connected with the story and the writing and this kind of game between the girls and the boys, and the perception of the girls by the boys. It’s told from their point of view, but the girls are sort of doing this performance. I loved the characters and how these girls were so mythic, and got really into [showing] the visual world of that.”
Framing the cinematography of The Virgin Suicides through the observing boys’ perspectives is a choice that influenced much of Coppola’s following work: “It helps me on films now to know whose point of view the camera is. And my kids are annoyed watching movies with me because I’ll yell at the TV, like, ‘Whose point of view is that? Why are they looking at them that way?’ A pet peeve of mine is when there isn’t thought behind that, but not everyone has to do it that way.”
On the music for that film, Coppola revealed that she first discovered Air’s Premiers Symptômes EP at Rough Trade in London, listening to the CD while writing the screenplay, which eventually led to her approaching the French electronic duo to compose the score.
Her second feature, Lost in Translation (2003), also notably took inspiration from her travels outside of the USA. “This project I thought was self-indulgent because it was really personal, and I was trying to understand that period of my life in my 20s,” she said of her Tokyo-set portrait of unlikely connection. “I really thought that nobody would care about some privileged girl who’s figuring out what to do with her life. It’s a shock. You never know what people are going to connect to. Somehow, the more personal something is, the more universal it is for people. It’s very strange.”
Looping back to Making Marie Antoinette and thus Marie Antoinette (2006) itself, Coppola said she thinks her film came out the way she originally envisioned. “It’s never as good as in your imagination, but I feel satisfied that it came close to what I had in mind. My brother showed me Ken Russell’s film Lisztomania [1975], which was about Franz Liszt but in a pop way, where there were no rules and they had paparazzi cameras and ice cream sundaes.
“I had this in my mind that although [Marie Antoinette] was a period film, we could have that pop attitude. I was really nervous about making a boring history lesson. So, I might have overcompensated, but I was trying to make it feel alive and not too like a proper historical drama that felt out of distance.”
Sofia Coppola was speaking at her Screen Talk at the 70th BFI London Film Festival.