By Ray Pride Pride@moviecitynews.com
At least Harold Pinter likes it: Coppola on Marie Antoinette
“Sofia Coppola could easily be a character in one of her own films,” writes Sean O’Hagan in a lengthy profile in the Observer, capturing the 35-year-old director’s affect in a few words, “a day-dreamy, slightly disconnected but immaculately stylish waif who seems all at sea in a world of extraordinary privilege…. If her vagueness and her sulkily beautiful Mediterranean face combine to make the 35-year-old Coppola seem like a slightly out-to-lunch teenager, I suspect this may be a way of keeping the world at bay. And keeping control… Lady Antonia Fraser, who has become friends with Coppola since the director purchased the rights to her… biography, can’t see what all the fuss is about either. ‘I love it… it doesn’t deviate from the story, but nor does it copy the book slavishly. It’s Sofia’s vision of Marie Antoinette… I enjoyed it enormously and so did Harold [Pinter].’ This is indeed the case. ‘He liked the film. He wrote me a sweet letter,’ says Coppola, smiling. ‘ That meant a lot. I mean, he’s so honest. I don’t think he’d write a letter if he didn’t mean it. It’s like, if it turns out that nobody else likes it, I can still say, “Well, at least Harold Pinter did”.’ And the source of a Sofia esthetic? “Well, um, when I was growing up, it was Godard, Truffaut, the French New Wave. The style was so cool to me.’ So, your own aesthetic is essentially about style rather than, say, story or drama? ‘Um, I guess. I mean, I’ve always been drawn to individuals really, people with their own distinctive but identifiable style that no one else has. That’s all I try to do, find my own distinctive way of doing things.”