Sofia Coppola on her father Francis: ‘Our family revolved around the needs of a powerful man’

It was a bright spring morning on Italy’s Ionian coast in 2016, but above the Coppola family villa in their ancestral town of Bernalda, a dark cloud loomed.

Francis Ford Coppola, first of the New Hollywood buccaneers, was on holiday with his daughter Sofia, who had by then made five films of her own. The idea had been to unwind before she started shooting her latest feature, The Beguiled, but bad news had come in from Los Angeles overnight. The studio, Focus Features, was unsure if Sofia’s preferred cast had sufficient star power, and had put the project on hold.

“They’re not giving me the green light,” a glum Sofia told her father over breakfast.

“Green light?” spluttered Coppola Sr, slapping the table so hard that the coffee cups jumped. “In my day, we didn’t wait for a green light. We just drove.”

Last summer, while languishing in bed with Covid, Sofia found her mind wandering back to this ­conversation. She had spent the past two years working on a longstanding passion project for Apple TV: a five-hour drama adapted from Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel The Custom of the Country, about a nouveau-riche Midwestern clan worming their way into New York’s social elite. But Apple executives were concerned about the “unlikeability” of its young female protagonist, Undine Spragg, as well as the budget required to realise ­Coppola’s vision of Manhattan’s Gilded Age.

To distract herself from both this and her illness, she’d been leafing through Elvis and Me, the 1985 memoir by Elvis Presley’s ex-wife, Priscilla, in which she describes the couple’s highly unusual 14-year relationship. Coppola had already read the book more than a decade before, as “a fun, juicy paperback on vacation”, and when a friend had suggested to her that it might make a good film, she’d demurred. Another story about a young woman in a golden cage? Hadn’t she just made Marie Antoinette, with Kirsten Dunst playing Marie as just such a woman?

But on this second read-through, the Elvis and Priscilla story struck her differently. “Whether because I was now the mother of two teenage girls or for some other reason, I found I had this entirely fresh perspective,” she tells me. She was shocked anew that Priscilla was still attending high school while ­living at Graceland – and noticed for the first time how her life as a rock-icon’s wife had captured, in a madly magnified way, the domestic expectations heaped on women of Coppola’s mother’s generation.

Suddenly, it struck her, with the china-rattling thump of her father’s hand on the breakfast table.

“I was like, ‘I just want to jump into this world and make this – I know how to do it.’” So she did – and she did.

Barely a year later, there was Priscilla: Sofia Coppola’s eighth feature, and her most widely acclaimed since Lost in Translation in 2003. Retelling the story of Priscilla’s marriage to Elvis from an intimately personal perspective, and starring as its central couple hot young things Cailee Spaeny (of Mare of Easttown) and Jacob Elordi (of Euphoria and Saltburn), it opens in UK cinemas in early January, following preview screenings on Boxing Day. Coppola, 52, speaking on a Zoom call from New York, is enthused by this, in a placid Californian way, even though she isn’t clear on when, or even what, Boxing Day is.

Priscilla is the second film about Elvis to have ­surfaced in the past couple of years: the first was Baz Luhrmann’s all-glitter-guns-­blazing biopic, Elvis. Usually, Coppola actively avoids other filmmakers’ treatments of her subjects “because I don’t want to be unconsciously influenced”. However, a few days before she began shooting Priscilla, she sat down to watch the Luhrmann film, “because I felt with Baz there was, you know, a slim chance of artistic overlap”.

As you might expect, Priscilla is like soft pastel chalk to the glistening, bright-orange cheese of Elvis, not least in terms of scale: the former was shot in 30 days, to the latter’s 165, and for around a tenth of Elvis’s elephantine budget. But Luhrmann’s film was also celebratory, and made with the full cooperation of the Elvis estate. Since Coppola was airing Priscilla’s side of the story, she found the estate less obliging: a series of snide briefings cropped up in American tabloids, while they blocked her by law from using any of Elvis’s music on her soundtrack. Instead, with her music supervisor Randall Poster, she devised a dreamily eclectic playlist stretching from the 1920s to the present, while the score was composed by her husband, Thomas Mars, and his band Phoenix.

When she was growing up in the Coppola household, “Elvis Presley was never a sacred cow,” she explains. “I mean, I have nothing against him, but I honestly can’t remember a single occasion during childhood when my parents put on an Elvis Presley record.”

Indeed, to her, the whole Graceland aesthetic – the drapery, the shag carpet, the mythic Americana of it all – “always felt incredibly exotic. I mean, we were living way over in Northern California. My mum wore little shift dresses; we were hosting huge Italian family dinners. So that whole Norman Rockwell thing felt very far from everything I knew.”

Nevertheless, she stresses, “I was never out to tear down the myth. I just wanted to look around the back of it. I’m always interested in the backstage of things – how they look to the public and what’s going on out of the spotlight.”

Once she had resolved to make the film, Coppola sought permission from Priscilla Presley herself, who soon became an invaluable guiding hand.

Her main stipulation, Coppola explains, “was that the mutual love between her and Elvis had to be in there. She still harbours a lot of love for him today, and talks about how loving he was to her, too. I could have easily made him out to be all sorts of things, but for her I wanted to balance the light and the dark.”

An obvious point of potential discomfort for the Elvis estate was his future spouse’s wince-inducing youth when the two first met: he was 24; she, just 14 years old. Does Coppola regard Elvis as a predator? Did Priscilla consider herself preyed upon?

“She was very young,” Coppola says. “But the fact they didn’t consummate their relationship until their wedding night, when she was 21, was something Priscilla always stressed.

“I mean, I’m not a psychologist. It definitely seems like Elvis had issues around losing his mother.” Gladys Presley died in 1958, the year before her son met Priscilla. “So to him, this girl was clearly a symbol of purity. But as for whether or not he was a predator, I feel my job as a filmmaker isn’t to speculate. It’s to capture Priscilla’s experience.”

Priscilla was also determined that Coppola should show she wasn’t pressured into using drugs – the uppers and downers she would take to regulate her sleep patterns and mood – by Elvis or his friends.

“As a girl, you want to try things,” Coppola says. “It’s that very teenage combination of being vulnerable but also mischievous. So she wasn’t totally innocent: she was just coming into her sexuality – and had that mix of drive and confusion that always entails.”

Could Coppola relate? “There have always been young girls hanging around rock bands,” she laughs. “Even in the 1990s when I was going to shows, there were always ‘friends of the band’ ­inviting pretty girls backstage. I’m absolutely not condoning it. But we also have to recognise this is a familiar, ­longstanding culture, of which Priscilla’s story is just an extreme example.”

But, as much as any of this, it was Coppola’s memories of growing up in a household dominated by a ­creative alpha male that seemed to hold the key to understanding how Priscilla’s life might have felt.

“For my whole childhood, our family’s lives revolved around the needs of a big, charismatic, ­powerful man,” she says. Her earliest memory is playing with her toys in the Filipino jungle while her father shot Apocalypse Now. “So, I have to say that was not a totally unfamiliar dynamic.”

She now thinks it was inevitable that being raised a Coppola would eventually ignite her own love of filmmaking: “How could I not want to do this?” she asks. “Whenever I was on a set as a kid, it felt like watching magic.” But after her father cast her, aged 19, as Mary Corleone in The Godfather Part III, the reviews that savaged her performance – or, really, that savaged her, as a proxy attack on her father, who was now widely felt to have grown too big for his boots – exposed her for the first time to the darker side of the trade.

Three years ago, Coppola Sr recut his film, and released it under a new title, The Godfather Coda: The Death of Michael Corleone. Although her performance is and always was completely fitting for the role of the gawky, precocious, self-conscious teenage Mary, Coppola suspects that the recut was, at least in part, an attempt by her father to assuage his guilt. “He felt so awful after they went after me so badly,” she says. As for her verdict on the new cut, “I still can’t bring myself to watch it, even after all these years,” she tells me. “But I heard that it plays much better, so that was nice to hear. And I think dad felt good about it.”

Even so, she would never dream of casting her own daughters – Romy, 17, and Cosima, 13 – in any of her films. “Children push against what their parents want, so trying to tell your own kids what to do on a movie set is a bad combination,” she says. Instead, with the usual parental reservations, she’s content to watch them experiment in the medium on TikTok: one of Romy’s recent clips, in which she jokingly claimed to have been grounded after chartering a helicopter with her father’s credit card, went viral. “I’m very grateful that my daughters have a sense of humour,” Coppola adds drily.

Their favourite of their mother’s films is also the one with which Coppola herself is least happy – her 2013 crime drama The Bling Ring, which was at the vanguard of the now-raging wider reappraisal of the excesses of Noughties celebrity culture. “At the time, I had been living in Paris, and I came back to the States and was like, ‘Whoa, what is this?’” she recalls. “Suddenly, there were all these people around who were famous for doing nothing – unless you counted sex tapes, which most of them had made. And while the scandals themselves passed quickly, the stardom somehow sustained.”

Coppola had just turned down the chance to direct the final chapter of the Twilight franchise, with two Noughties stars who actually were famous for a reason: Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson.

“I thought it would be really fun to do a vampire movie in that series, so I had a meeting with them,” she says. “But it was the one that got really weird, where the ­werewolf falls in love with the baby, so it didn’t end up happening.” Thus, it joined a short but intriguing list of studio projects from which ­Coppola has walked away, which also includes a non-Disney adaptation of The Little Mermaid for Working Title.

“When a film gets too big, there are suddenly a lot of ­executive cooks in the kitchen,” she explains. “Even on Marie Antoinette, some middle-level executives wanted me to add a voice-over by Kirsten Dunst, because they said the ­audience had to know how she was really feeling. I was like, ‘No! The audience has to discover how she’s feeling for themselves!’ ” ­Fortunately, she says, Amy Pascal, the then-Sony Pictures Entertainment co-chairman, “came down on my side”.

Her current view of studio filmmaking is “never say never”, she says, “though my father raised us with the idea that personal filmmaking is the very best thing you can do. And I have to experiment; I have to do my stuff.” She shrugs. “I guess I am my father’s daughter.”

Priscilla is in cinemas from Jan 5; Archive by Sofia Coppola (MACK, £55) is out now

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