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Sofia Coppola makes it look easy, but it isn’t

Young women let the director know how influential she is. But it’s still a battle to make films like her acclaimed 'Priscilla'

Sofia Coppola is so drawn to the idea of becoming that she sometimes finds it hard to grasp that she became. Over eight feature films — including her latest, Priscilla, about young Priscilla Presley’s tumultuous relationship with Elvis — she has delved deeply into the liminal stage that is a young woman’s coming-of-age. So, you can hardly blame Coppola that after staying in that head space for so long, it comes as a surprise that 25 years have passed since filming her debut feature, The Virgin Suicides.

“It’s weird to reflect back at having a body of work,” she said. “Like, ‘Oh, you’re a grown-up now and actually established, not just starting off.’”

It was a sunny October afternoon in Los Angeles, and we were sitting on a restaurant terrace at the Academy Museum, where the 52-year-old director had come to tout Priscilla and autograph copies of Sofia Coppola Archive, a new art book assembled from the boxes of letters, photographs and reference images she had collected throughout her career. After the signing, she participated in a conversation moderated by members of the academy’s teen council, who asked Coppola questions about screen-writing and style as a form of self-expression.

Teenagers and young women are still her demographic sweet spot, and Coppola, who is now the mother of two teenage daughters, met the young moderators’ queries with encouragement. “These are such good questions from the teen council, right?” she said to the audience. Many of the people attending the panel had come dressed to impress her, although Coppola was simply attired in a navy T-shirt with black trousers and ballet flats, her fingernails painted the same light-pink hue as the cover of her book.

In a profession where so many directors are chatty, high-strung neurotics, Coppola is the picture of placidity. But her even keel shouldn’t be mistaken for a lack of caring. In a letter to actor Bill Murray included in Archive, Coppola describes a low moment when it seemed Murray couldn’t be reached to star in “Lost in Translation” (2003) and friends coaxed her out to dinner to consider other options. They soon found that her personal investment in Murray’s casting was more fraught than they could have known. “I broke down in tears at the restaurant (something I never do),” Coppola wrote.

This is all to say that Coppola is so serene — and her films, at their best, so sublime — that people may assume it all comes easily to her. (That she hails from a filmmaking family led by a titanic father, Francis Ford Coppola, can only further that notion.) But over the course of our lunch, Coppola was candid about the issues she faces this far into her Oscar-winning career. Making movies the way she wants remains so difficult that all the recent genuflection — such as the moment early in our lunch when a young fan with a Virgin Suicides shoulder bag came over to praise Coppola for being “such a light” — can still catch her off guard.

“To be treated with that kind of respect, it’s surreal,” Coppola said. “Maybe that’s why I’m surprised when I’m in this context, because I’m still fighting to get movies made and getting budgets cut. I don’t think I’m professionally treated in the way that I am when I encounter these young people.”

Early in her career, she was told that although women would go to a film starring men, the reverse wasn’t true. Although the prevailing attitude in Hollywood has evolved somewhat since then — or at least executives have learned to stop saying the quiet part out loud — Coppola still faces plenty of skepticism when trying to budget any female-fronted project. “The people in charge of giving money are usually straight men, still,” she said. “There’s always people in lower levels who are like myself, but then the bosses have a certain sensibility.”

On the press tour for Priscilla, young women keep telling Coppola that they plan to be filmmakers, too. Their ambition gives her hope, although it’s tempered by 2 1/2 decades of experience, including the tough battles she fought to save her new movie.

“If it’s so hard for me to get financing as an established person, I worry about younger women starting out,” she said. “It’s surprising that it’s still a struggle.”

Coppola isn’t especially interested in directing blockbusters, although she once tried to mount a big-screen take on The Little Mermaid for Universal and was briefly courted for the final Twilight film. “I’ve never expected to be mainstream,” she said. “The culture that I always liked growing up was the side culture.” All she really wants is the ability to tell her stories with the budgets that befit them, and with people around who support her sensibility.

But in the era of the comic-book tentpole, even that modest ask can be rejected as too much. Coppola meets frequently with director Tamara Jenkins — she calls their friendship a “two-person ‘women in film’ coffee group” — to compare the battle scars they’ve earned from trying to get movies made: “We’re like, ‘It’s so hard. Why do we do this?’”

Maybe that’s a question with no answer. Or maybe it’s an answer Coppola just has to keep relearning.

“When you finish a project, you’re like, oh,” she said, as a Mona Lisa smile appeared on her face. “You have to do it, because it bugs you until you do.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.