Sofia Coppola — from VIRGIN SUICIDES to PRISCILLA

There’s maybe no working filmmaker more associated with film fashion than Sofia Coppola. But in this brief history of her super-stylish body of work, we figure out the thematic stitching inside those perfect fits.

Host Rico Gagliano talks with Coppola, her brother (and collaborator) Roman, and her award-winning costume designers past and present, to learn how the director depicts her characters’ search for identity in beautiful, difficult worlds.

Season 5, titled Tailor Made, dives deep into the worlds of film and fashion. Each episode tackles a landmark movie that captured a major fashion look of an era, and then decodes what that look meant—to the culture that spawned it, the people who wore it, and the audiences who watched it on screen.

Sofia Coppola's PRISCILLA will stream exclusively on MUBI in the UK, Germany, and many other countries starting March 1. It is currently in cinemas in many countries. For tickets and showtimes, visit mubi.com/priscilla

HOW TO HAVE SEX is streaming exclusively on MUBI in the UK, Turkey, and Latin America. The film is currently in US theaters and will come soon exclusively to the platform in the US as well. Find upcoming US showtimes and tickets here.

To stream some of the films we've covered on the podcast, check out the collection Featured on the MUBI Podcast. Availability of films varies depending on your country.

The article mentioned in this episode: "She Says Good-bye to Him in Pants" by Roxana Hadadi for Vulture.

MUBI is a global streaming service, production company and film distributor dedicated to elevating great cinema. MUBI makes, acquires, curates, and champions extraordinary films, connecting them to audiences all over the world. A place to discover ambitious new films and singular voices, from iconic directors to emerging auteurs. Each carefully chosen by MUBI’s curators.

Transcript

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Heads up, this episode includes spoilers, adult themes and conversation about fictional moments of self harm. We love you, so please listen with care.<i>You there baby?</i><i>Mm-hmm, I'm here.</i><i>How are you doing?</i><i>I'm great.</i><i>It's all been really wonderful.</i> There's a sequence I keep thinking about, in Sofia Coppola's new biopic <i>Priscilla</i>. It's 1963 and 17 year old Priscilla Beaulieu has left her military family in Germany to live at Graceland, the home of her boyfriend, soon to be husband, Elvis Presley. It hasn't really been wonderful. He's always away on movie shoots, she's got no friends at her new Catholic high school. Even if she did, she's not allowed to bring him home. And getting a job...<i>You'll have to forget about that.</i><i>I thought it could be fun.</i><i>Well, it's either me or a career, baby.</i><i>When I call you, I need you to be there for me.</i> Even when Elvis gets home from Hollywood, he shyly declines to have sex with her. But then one morning he greets her at Graceland's door with an invitation to get off this lonely island for a minute.<i>Hop in, I'm going to take you shopping.</i> Her face lights up, groovy music kicks in and cut to a luxurious boutique.<i>Well, would you look at that.</i> With Elvis and his buddies looking on Priscilla tries on a string of gorgeous dresses in sophisticated gray baby blue...<i>I like you in blue. Yeah, blue's your color.</i> She smiles. Even when Elvis rejects one she likes in patterned brown.<i>Well, the solids suit you better.</i><i>I hate brown, it reminds me of the army.</i> And she keeps smiling when he straight up dictates the rest of her look.<i>Black hair and more eye makeup</i><i>will make your eyes stand out more.</i><i>It's four o'clock boys. We gotta go, barbecue's waiting.</i><i>Come on.</i> If you had to sum up Sofia Coppola's movies in one scene, I'd suggest this one. A young woman alone in a difficult beautiful world, surrounded by beautiful fashion that offers escape or imprisonment or both. I'm Rico Galiano, welcome back to the MUBI Podcast. MUBI's the streaming service, the champions great cinema. On this show we tell you the stories behind great cinema. This is season five we're calling it'Tailor Made' because every week we're diving into fashion on film and why it matters. Last few episodes we've been looking at individual movies. This time we're looking at a bunch of them by a very individual film maker, Sofia Coppola. From day one, her movies have been celebrated for their dreamy photography and fashions. You'll find practically every frame from every one of them posted and raved about on Instagram. But she's not quick to tell you what it all means. I remember my dad, he gave me a book of the dictionary of poetry and said, you know, "films are the same as poetry." So I think it's-- in the same way you can't really describe what it is, and it expresses something that you can't really articulate. But we're going to try anyway. I spoke to Coppola, her costume designers, past and present and many more to figure out where her fashion fascination came from and how it goes hand in hand with the central theme of her work, the lives of young women out of place. So doff your pink karaoke wig and kick off your Converse as we rip open the scenes of a few films by Sofia Coppola. To figure out the building blocks of Coppola's are really anyone's style I figure you gotta start with their roots. And the first thing I flashed on was this,<i>There have been stories in the press about production problems with the film.</i><i>Has the filming been delayed?</i><i>Well, we're behind, but</i><i>there-- we have not stopped shooting.</i> That's Sofia's dad Francis in the documentary <i>Hearts of Darkness</i> about the making of his movie <i>Apocalypse Now</i> on location in the Philippines.<i>I would say it's, it's twice the scope</i><i>in terms of the production of any film I've done,</i><i>including the two Godfathers, together.</i> Sitting topless in a director's chair. Elsewhere in the movie, you see him in sweat stained shirts, maybe the occasional safari jacket. Not high fashion is what I'm saying. I'm reminded though that's not the whole picture. Yeah, my name is Roman Coppola, I'm a filmmaker. Roman's of course, also Sofia's brother and her sometimes producer and second unit director. You know, my dad has had different modes of dress on, on different films. He wore a corduroy suit for much my childhood on the set of his films during <i>Apocalypse</i> he was, you know, in a T-shirts and shorts just because it was so hot and that was the uniform of the time. Yeah, actually type Francis Coppola 80s into Google and you'll see him in some pretty stylin' knit ties and Panama hats. Still I get the feeling maybe even more influential was the family matriarch, Eleanor. Yes, she has a collection of fabrics and she loves fabric as art, woven fabric or embroidery or she's very interested in Japan and Japanese culture and a tie dye thing called Shibori, which is has all these little knots that create these patterns, so in her home often we'll have a fabric on display. So I brought this up to Sofia Oh yeah! And she seemed pleased I made the connection. Yes, I think, I think we inherited that from her. You think that influenced your aesthetic? Yeah, definitely. And she just exposed us to, she was interested in contemporary art where my dad wasn't. So she would always drag us to the museum and we'd be complaining and always... appreciate, like the importance of beauty. Like she, she never felt like beauty was frivolous. She felt like it was really essential. I think I got that from her, definitely. Yeah, I feel like that almost defines a certain kind of artist. Like they want to live their lives aesthetically. Like the most important thing is to be around beautiful things.- Yeah.- You think that's true? Yeah, for me it is. Like I-- and I know that about my mom, for sure is very sensitive to her environment. She really wilts if she's not in a beautiful setting. Because my dad is in Georgia right now filming and he took an old motel and was really excited to live in this old motel. And my mom was like,"I can't live in the motel!" and it's not a snobby thing. I just think that she's very sensitive to her environment and I can I can relate to that. I can see that especially part of being a director is that you get to create this world exactly how you imagine it. And pretty early on the world she imagined seemed to come from the pages in a certain kind of magazine. Well, Sofia has always been drawn to fashion. As a kid she had, you know, subscription to <i>Vogue</i> and you know, made tear sheets and drew imagery of, you know, women with dresses. From there Sofia says she got into fashion photography and later started shooting her own art photography. Spurred on by a teacher who said she had what at the time was a pretty unique point of view. In the nineties, there was a photographer called Hiromix and there was a lot of this kind of like girl culture snapshot photography, which now just looks, you know, like Instagram or something. But at that time, it was really unusual that, you know, the girls taking pictures of their messy bedrooms and stuff like that and that I was really connected to that, of kind of like a girl's environment, a girl in their bedroom and that kind of world. Which is interesting because it sounds like growing up the last place she spent much time in was her room. This is another moment from<i>Hearts of Darkness</i>. By the way, co-directed by Eleanor Coppola who narrated from her own diaries.<i>This is the first day of heavy rain.</i><i>A typhoon is off the coast.</i><i>I've never seen it rain so hard.</i><i>Water has started coming in the rooms downstairs</i><i>and Sofia is splashing around in it.</i><i>Francis has decided to make pasta</i><i>and he's turned on</i> La Boheme<i>full volume.</i> Yeah, for long stretches, Sofia and her family were kind of filmmaking nomads living location to location as her dad's shoots demanded.<i>I was only thinking if I got a shoot tomorrow.</i> She has described it as a blissful time like growing up in the circus, but it wasn't all joy. Her mom struggled with being a creative whose main job was now tending to the family while her husband made films. And the travel took some toll, in ways Sofia shares with the hero of her latest movie. I relate to like Priscilla being an army brat, I can relate to that because I always went to new schools. I don't know how to, I can't multiply, I can't do math. I can't help my daughters with their homework because I never learned how to multiply because I switched schools at that age. I barely graduated high school because I missed a bunch of math. That was, that made it a nightmare in high school after that. Wow, so in a way, I mean, like you can identify with Priscilla, this person that was like taken out of the mainstream in a way. And I think I've always been the new kid at school. I could really relate to that. So any scene about the new kid at school, I was always the new kid. So it's maybe no surprise her very first feature was about schoolgirls hustled away from the typical world. And even the first 15 minutes set the themes for a lot of her films and fashions to come.<i>What are you doing here, honey?</i><i>You're not even old enough to know how bad life gets.</i><i>Obviously, doctor,</i><i>you've never been a 13 year old girl.</i> The <i>Virgin Suicides</i> is based on the book by Jeffrey Eugenides. Set in an idyllic looking seventies suburbia it tells the wry dark fable of the five beautiful teenage Lisbon sisters who to the local boys are mysterious objects of desire.<i>No one could understand how Mrs Lisbon and Mr Lisbon</i><i>our math teacher had produced such beautiful creatures.</i> So the guys can't figure out at first why one sister Cecilia starts the movie by, yes, attempting suicide. But her psychologist tells her parents, he thinks he knows why.<i>I know you're very strict.</i><i>But I think that Cecilia would benefit</i><i>by having a social outlet outside of the codification of school.</i> Yeah, her kind but conservative folks keep their budding daughters safely sequestered at home. For Cecilia's sake though, they let the kids throw the world's most adorably awkward mixer in the basement.<i>Um. how'd your S.A.T.s go?</i><i>Okay.</i> But Cecilia just watches blithely from the sidelines and heads upstairs...<i>Ronald!</i><i>Cecilia!</i> And tosses herself out the window onto the metal picket fence in the front yard.<i>No!</i><i>No, no, don't look, turn around.</i><i>Turn around. Darling, turn around. Oh no no...</i> I mean, I grew up on a lot of older films, lot of like Lean, and a lot of epics. Roxana Hadadi is a TV critic and pop culture writer for Vulture and just wrote a great piece about Coppola's use of costumes. But I remember <i>Virgin Suicides</i> just doing something else, making me think about myself as a woman and all the times that I had felt lonely or unseen. But I also remember that it made me really like that feeling, which I think is what all of her movies do, right? There's this very bittersweet, melancholy. You like being sad while you're watching them because it also makes you feel recognized. Like a recognition that a lot of times there's only a sliver of room for young women to take some agency over their lives. I mean, I think all of her movies, aside from maybe something like <i>On the Rocks</i>, I mean, even <i>On the Rocks</i>, what most of them are doing is this sort of like weaponized femininity thing. It's knowing what other people expect of you and what you're supposed to look like as a girl of a certain age, as a woman of a certain age, in a certain social rank. So it's knowing all of those things, being aware of them and trying to exert some sort of identity or control over other people's perceptions of you because you can't control a lot of things. You can't control men, you can't control the larger patriarchal society. You can't control capitalism. But maybe the one specific thing you can control is how you look. It's an idea that's right there super subtly in <i>Suicide</i>'s first act. When right before the basement party, the girls suit up in their parent approved dresses.- And Cecilia's...- It's like a white lace dress and I think she's wearing beaded bracelets. Oh, yeah. One sister actually helps her put them on to cover up the bandages on her wrists, I think.<i>There. Is that ok?</i><i>I gotta get dressed.</i> And I remember thinking that was so specific for her to be wearing this white religious angelic outfit and then the very specific beaded bracelets that I imagine her making at home by herself, maybe with her sisters. So she's got the virginal outfit from her parents. But with this one little symbol of defiance, a symbol of herself. Yeah. That is definitely what I'm getting at. It's that sense of trying to find a way to do both. Because you're being forced into what other people expect for you and you're trying to just do one thing that is about you. Now, that seems like too small a detail on which to base a unifying theory of Coppola's costume choices. Well, two movies later, the theme was hard to miss because like much else in it, the clothes were cranked up to 11.<i>This is ridiculous.</i><i>This...</i><i>Madame...</i><i>is Versailles.</i> Obviously <i>Marie Antoinette</i>, like 14 years old, married off to the Dauphin of France and sort of placed onto this track to be the royal wife. You're stripped away from your family and you're in a new place and you have to be a figure, like primarily you are a figure to your husband and to the people and that's it. Yeah, it's like sit in this gorgeous palace and create a baby, create an heir and that's all you're needed for. Yes. The gilded cage, right? I mean, so primarily in this film, the costumes are just getting more and more elaborate. Like, it's just bigger and bigger ball gowns. They are like a riot of color and detail. They get more and more absurd and frilly and girly. Because it's like the one thing that she could do, she can't, she can't leave the castle for the most part. She can't do anything else. The one thing she's got is to just get bigger and bigger dresses. Yes, bigger and bigger. And I think it's like cosplaying as herself, like, if I'm going to be queen, then I'm going to take up the most space. I'm going to do the most things. I'm going to be the queenliest queen, right? Everything is just more and more maximalist, I think. Again, the very small amount of control she has is over what she wears. Of course, ironically, the most celebrated piece of clothing in Antoinette was the least maximalist. According to the movie's second unit director Roman Coppola, completely unplanned. There's a pretty well known shot of the girls trying on shoes and then in the background you see some converse all stars that are purple. And that was something I shot and it wasn't scripted, but the photo double who was putting on the shoes, those were her actual shoes. And we thought just for fun to put them in the background and that was a fun little kind of Easter egg. It ended up being one of many anachronistic touches that made this 18th century costume drama the Coppola flick most embraced by 21st century fashionistas. I mean, the entire approach to this film was that Marie Antoinette was a teenage girl and you know her. Raissa Bretaña is a fashion historian at the Fashion Institute of Technology. And it kind of fits within the timeline of the teen film of the early aughts, like the <i>Mean Girls</i> of the time. And so a lot of the clothing actually has a lot to do with what was happening in fashion at the time.- Like?- Definitely the color palette. I mean, when you think of Millennial pink, that color is very present in the film. I've never heard of Millennial pink. Millennial pink it's this distinct shade of like baby pink. I know one of the legends from the film is that Coppola gave the designer Milena Canonero a box of Ladurée macrons and said this is your color palette. And they became, my understanding is those macrons became kind of a thing after that movie, right? Because you see her eating them. Yes, I remember them being immensely popular and you had Manolo Blanik designing the shoes. And so in that fabulous getting ready scene when you see all of the shoes lined up, I mean, it's meant to generate a sense of desire. And that absolutely makes you want to go out and buy a pair of Manolo Blanik shoes. Which makes for a second irony. There's just a couple of films later, Coppola would make a satire about a gang of oughties kids who covet high fashion. We unstitched the curious case of the <i>Bling Ring</i> and turn Coppola's personal style inside out. Coming up in just a minute, stay with us. All right, everybody MUBI is the curated streaming service that champions great cinema. Wherever we find it, from any country, whether it's made by legendary auteurs or brilliant first timers, we have always got something new for you to discover. And actually let's talk about a first time director, maybe one of the heirs apparent to Sofia Coppola, actually that would be British filmmaker Molly Manning Walker. Her debut feature <i>How to have Sex</i> is in select theaters in the US now and is also already on MUBI in the UK and elsewhere. Like a lot of Coppola's work this is a story about a young woman in search of identity, but in a way more raucous kind of world, a modern day party town in Greece. That's where a UK teenager goes on a holiday with her girlfriends in search of bonding and to lose her virginity, which ends up happening in a very confusing and life altering way. This thing is full of color and energy. It is a real rush, but then it deals with issues of consent in a way that was actually very sobering to me. Actor Mia McKenna-Bruce just won the Rising Star Award at the BAFTAs in England for her work in the main role. You are gonna want to keep an eye on her. So let me humbly suggest you go back a few episodes and listen to my interview with Molly Manning Walker about <i>How to Have Sex</i>. Again, it is now streaming in the UK and Latin America. And if you're in the US, you can catch it in theaters now or streaming on MUBI starting April 5th. We have got all the info you need in the show notes of this episode. Speaking of which, let's get back to it. So it's 2013 and Sofia Coppola puts out her seventh film. It's the one that most explicitly makes fashions part of the story line. The movie where her main characters are most obsessed with clothes and yet if you ask Sofia... it's also her least pretty. That one was the hardest for me visually because it's not a beautiful aesthetic. So that part was hard but it was... You don't think that it's an aesthetic world? I mean, in some ways, I think it's an alluring world. Oh yeah, I guess though it has appeal, but it's also not attractive at the same time. It's not beautiful. I wouldn't say. It was called the <i>Bling Ring</i>. A super entertaining outlier in Coppola's canon. And one I think is kind of key to understanding her personal take on fashion.<i>Ok. So these are her sunglasses</i><i>and that's her bathroom, and there's her closet.</i><i>The Bling Ring</i> is based on a true story circa 2008 about a group of teens at a SoCal quote/unquote dropout school who scoured the internet to figure out when celebrities like Paris Hilton were out of town. Then traipsed into their mansions...<i>Oh my God!</i> And looted their designer clothes and jewelry. Around 3 million bucks worth.<i>Look at all her Louis Vuittons.</i><i>Oh her feet are so big!</i> Coppola has some sympathy for these people. Her main character Nick is, yes, the shy new kid at school looking for a way to shine. And along with the kids, her camera gets practically drunk on the piles of decadent outfits and accessories in Paris Hilton's actual palatial closets. Plural.<i>Oh my God!</i> But even so... we did think of it as a cautionary tale. It was like if you went to the movies and ate an entire bucket of popcorn, it kind of felt good going down. But then you felt sick. That is Stacey Battat. She has done the costume design for all Coppola's films since 2010, including this one. It's more than just about fashion. It's also kind of a social commentary on people's desire to be noticed and to be attention grabbers and to emulate what somebody like Paris Hilton in the early 2000s was like, she was famous for being famous and I think like they just wanted that notoriety and that wealth and then they wanted to dress the part. Yeah, when Sofia says the movie's visual aesthetic isn't beautiful. I think this is a big part of what she's talking about. Like she's not interested. I think Sofia likes clothes a lot, but she's also not interested in labels necessarily or like status. And I think in <i>The Bling Ring,</i> like what they're after is status and how that status is expressed through clothes. They wanted the thing that was the most recognizable the bag with the biggest CCs on it. Then I like just knowing Sofia as well as I do, she's not interested in status. She's interested in a beautiful French seam on the inside of her shirt.- What is a French seam?- I don't know, that clueless... it's like a nice, like they basically fold it under and sew the seam so it looks really nice on the inside. You could flip the shirt inside out and wear it. It's just a beautiful tailoring and I think that's what Sofia is interested in. She is interested in the delicacy and the artistry, but not in the status. Like, you can't see the inside of her shirt to get an idea of this subtle look just check out Scarlett Johansson in 2003 <i>Lost in Translation</i>. Made towards the end of Coppola's marriage to director Spike Jones. You know, the script was kind of about Sofia and Spike. And so I think we were dressing Scarlett a bit like Sofia. That is Nancy Steiner. She was the costume designer. And she never said that to me. She never said it. But I mean, I was dressing her similar and Scarlett was 17 or 18 and so she felt like it was very conservative what we were doing. Yeah, you can spot other young American characters in the movie wearing standard 2003 style. Low cut jeans, skirts or hip hop puffy vests, but ScarJo wanders Tokyo in tasteful slacks or skirts, a dress shirt and sweater, a dark pea coat. Even the film's infamously revealing opening shot of Scarlett inspired by a photo from artist John Kacere goes for something classic. Of course, I always get questions about the underwear in the first scene.- That's a big one.- I forgot. Thank you for reminding me. I mean, that might be the most iconic piece of clothing in her entire oeuvre. But as far as choosing the underwear, we had a plethora to choose from and some were transparent and some weren't and some had lace and some didn't. And Sofia picked the beautiful see-through just very simple. Simple. That's a phrase people I talked to used a lot to describe Coppola's style sense. Also timeless. On her sets she's known to wear a uniform of just a well made Charvet dress shirt and pants. And I tell you this because in her new film, <i>Priscilla</i>, that's kind of what Coppola's main character wears. Eventually.<i>Oh, wow...</i><i>We have a winner right here.</i><i>I like you in blue, blue's your color.</i> You remember this scene from the top of the episode? Right? Elvis circa 1963, telling 17 year old Priscilla Presley how he wants her to style herself. Blue dresses, no brown or prints, and...<i>Black hair, and more eye make up.</i><i>It'll make your eyes stand out more.</i> She is a little bit of like a little bit of a kept doll. That's Vulture's Roxana Hadadi once again. And she says at this point, you can almost turn the sound down on the movie and still track this relationship just through Stacey Battat's costumes, which on Priscilla herself follow a familiar pattern at first. Elvis sort of gives her what her look is going to be. And then most of the film is her doing that. And as we saw Marie Antoinette do, it's getting, like the look is getting bigger and bigger because her amount of influence in her own life is smaller and smaller. So like, the hair gets bigger, the makeup gets more elaborate. The gowns are always beautiful, but they're pretty much always blue because that's what he wants. And we have that for, I'd say probably like two thirds of the film. But then suddenly...<i>Oh come on Lisa.</i><i>We're gonna take a picture with daddy.</i> There's an almost disorienting cut to the mid 1970s. Priscilla, now with a toddler is doing a magazine photoshoot with Elvis at Graceland.<i>- Nice!- Ha ha!</i> He is in full Vegas mode, shimmering blue suit, a giant chin high shirt collar, a scepter like walking cane. But her? It's clear that Priscilla is like ready to leave him. She has washed the black dye out of her hair. It has returned to the shade like her natural brunette shade. She is no longer wearing only blue. She's wearing pants, which is a big deal because he was very anti-pants.<i>Ok, I think we got it.</i><i>Lovely!</i> And at the very end, she leaves Elvis in this outfit that is very similar to what Sofia herself wears, but also to a woman who is trying to project a certain sense of self awareness. So she leaves him in pants and like a button down Oxford shirt and a blazer. It's like if the project of a lot of the characters in her films is to express themselves through clothes here that means you got to pare the clothes away. Yep, yep. This I think is Sofia Coppola's fashion statement. Not that liberation comes from putting on a shirt and pants, but that it starts by stripping off everything that doesn't come from you. Until you find the French seam underneath. And that's the MUBI Podcast for this week. Follow us for more stories about great filmmakers and their films. Next week, we close out this season with a sort of companion piece to today's episode. It is my full interview with Sofia Coppola about pretty much everything except the costumes in <i>Priscilla</i>. From its source material to its soundtrack. It's really not my era. So some of it can sound corny to me and feel like <i>Happy Days</i> or something. I grew up with Elvis Costello, like that's my Elvis. Musicheads take note and follow us so you don't miss it. Til then this episode of the MUBI Podcast was written hosted and edited by me, Rico Galiano. Ciara McEniff is our producer. Beth Schiff is our booking producer. Stephen Colon mastered it. Our original music was composed by Martin Austwick. Extra thanks this week to Rachel Yang and especially Karina Lesser. This show is executive produced by me along with Jon Barrenechea, Efe Çakarel, Daniel Kasman and Michael Tacca. If you love the show, tell the world by leaving a five star review, wherever you listen, won't you? let them know we're something special. Also, if you've got questions, comments or you want to rage about the Coppola movie we didn't talk about but should've, sorry guys, she's made like a dozen of them, email us at podcast@mubi.com And of course to stream the best in cinema, including some of the films we talk about on this very podcast just head over to mubi.com to start watching. Thanks for listening, be safe and may all your movie outings be worth dressing up for.