The Virgin Suicides

Sofia Coppola

 

Contrary to most people's expectations, Sofia Coppola didn't always plan to follow in her father s footsteps. "Maybe it was because of who my dad is, it was intimidating," she says, "so I think I sort of denied it to myself for a long time." The spur finally came when Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore handed her a copy of Jeffrey Eugenides' 1991 novel, a rites-of-passage story about five middle American sisters whose lives are transformed when the youngest attempts suicide. The novel unfolds from the viewpoint of the boys in the neighbourhood, for whom the sisters - whose lives shift axis after this harrowing event - become a strange and exotic focus of obsession.

"I didn't know I wanted to be a director until I read The Virgin Suicides and heard somebody was doing a movie of it - but it sounded like they were doing it all wrong," Coppola recalls. "I felt protective of it so I started to put down how I saw it and eventually had a script." Warned by her father not to write a script before properly securing the rights ("I'd get my heart broken"), Coppola Jr went ahead anyway. When she'd finished, her father read the script, liked it and bought it for his American Zoetrope company.

Kirsten Dunst - who was brought to the public's attention as a child by her role in Neil Jordan's Interview With The Vampire - plays Lux Lisbon, the aloof goddess of teenage love. Dunst is still only 16, which is quite a significant measure of Coppola's vision for the film. "I was really glad to have actors the same age as the characters - it's a pet peeve of mine that in movies they usually have 24-year-olds playing teenagers. There is a huge difference between a 16-year-old and someone in their 20s. There's a whole different look in their eyes."

Handling a mixed-age cast - James Woods and Kathleen Turner co-star didn't faze her either, and the actors commented on her low-key working methods. "Sofia surprised me," says teen pin-up Josh Hartnett, who plays one of the boys next door. "I didn't know her as a person so I didn't expect anything out of her, and I certainly didn't expect her to be as great as she was.

"She has her father' s intuition as far as working with actors and whatever, but she also has something else. Kind of a - I don't want to say a female quality because that's ridiculous - but she's very nurturing. She doesn't really get into technical aspects as far as I saw. Working behind the camera she left to technical people. And to me she was just very warm." Douglas Brodoff