Sofia Coppola on Priscilla: ‘People imagine you escape tragedy and loneliness and sadness if you can be rich and famous’

Hello, Sofia Coppola. It has been a while. The last time we met, when she was promoting Marie Antoinette, she was on the brink of a life change.

“Seventeen years ago,” she says, smiling. “I was pregnant at the end of that with my daughter. So that’s how I know how long ago it was. Anyway, nice to see you.”

Coppola hasn’t changed much. Dressed in an impeccably fitted dark-blue shirt (unquestionably by someone significant), the director of The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation and, now, Priscilla still radiates waves of tasteful elegance. She is awfully nice, even if she speaks only in shortish California sentences that are rarely at home to the meander. Does she like these conversations? Maybe it is a drag having to explain her film to cloth-eared journalists.

“No, it’s okay. I’m excited it is coming out,” she says. “And it’s fun to be in different countries and have it come out. I’m proud of it. So it’s fun to talk about how we made it.”

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“It” is the touching, subtle, beautifully acted Priscilla. Cailee Spaeny deservedly won best actress at Venice International Film Festival for her lead performance as Priscilla Presley in a film that treads delicately around her marriage to the most famous man in he world. We begin with the 14-year-old protagonist, then living with military parents in Germany, meeting Elvis at a party and being finessed into a long – dubious at first – relationship that ends in separation 14 years later.

The sense of period is perfect. Spaeny visibly matures as Elvis gives in to pill-popping indulgence. Coppola and her team have taken on some challenge here. We are now a great deal less tolerant of what looks like the grooming of a minor. Right?

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“I’ve really had to suspend the parent-and-adult side of my brain and focus on her perspective and her point of view,” Coppola says. “I felt her story and her experience was interesting. We could all learn something from it. ‘How do I show her experience without judgment? And then we can talk about things.’ It’s always interesting to have conversations around films. But I felt my job was to just show her experience.”

The film is derived from Priscilla’s book, Elvis and Me, from 1985, and the author has been an approving presence throughout the production. She was there in Venice to share the applause. She had some hand in the measured treatment of Elvis. As played by Jacob Erlordi, the King is unpredictable, immature and uncultured, but he is not any sort of monster.

“It was important not to vilify him and to be sensitive to all the characters,” Coppola says. “He obviously struggled with things, but it’s a balance. How do you not condone something but treat it with sensitivity? I just kept going back to what her experience was. I felt like it was valid for her to have her story told. And we can always learn things from people’s experiences, and then talk about our opinions after.”

Coppola has always been interested in the romantic progress of girls and young women. You saw that in her 1999 debut, The Virgin Suicides. You certainly saw it in Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette. For all the weirdness of her predicament, the heroine of Priscilla is going through the universal traumas that accompany first love.

“Definitely. That is what I was really struck with in the book, that it was so relatable,” Coppola says. “I never thought I had anything in common with how Priscilla Presley grew up. But she goes through all these moments that all girls – most girls – go through growing up. Your first kiss. Your first crush. But in this very unusual setting.”

It is time to acknowledge that Coppola herself grew up in an unusual setting. Born in 1971, she is the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola, director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now, and of the distinguished documentarian Eleanor Coppola. That also makes her the niece of Talia Shire and first cousin of Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman. I assume she had Robert Duvall and James Caan calling around for doughnuts as a kid. So she might not have been so shaken by celebrity if placed in Priscilla’s position.

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“Yeah, maybe. But I guess this interested me because it’s the backstage story – what it’s like behind closed doors. I’ve seen the difference between people at a film festival and at home. I’ve seen my dad in a public way and in private. And I know what people’s perception is: that somehow you escape tragedy and loneliness and sadness if you can be rich and famous. There’s the human side. So I’m always interested in that, in the fairy tale versus the reality of her situation.”

I wonder to what extent the young Sofia grasped the pressures her father was under. She is too young remember The Godfather – indeed, she plays Michael’s infant son in the Baptism scene – but she was upright for the endless chaos of Apocalypse Now and the financial calamities of his lavish musical One from the Heart. It is a wonder the man survived all that. Did she understand what was afoot?

“Not really as a kid,” she says. “I guess you’re always partially aware that stuff is going on. You can feel it more. But I always thought it was fun and magical to visit the set. And he always made it look exciting. And so I wasn’t aware as much of the stressful part as a kid.”

Raised largely on her parents’ farm in the Napa Valley, she dallied with painting, photography, fashion and music as a teenager. It seems as if she stumbled into acting as the child of a decorator might stumble into holding ladders. She pops up in a full eight of her dad’s films, including The Cotton Club and Peggy Sue Got Married. Her first full-on encounter with fame came, however, when Francis cast her as Michael Corleone’s daughter in The Godfather Part III after Winona Ryder dropped out. The reviews were eviscerating. The always tedious Razzie awards named her worst supporting actress of 1990. One could understand if she had then fled the film business.

What I love about movies is seeing different experiences, and you want to be able to see characters that you relate to

—  Sofia Coppola

“I was 18 and was open to trying things,” she says. “It was definitely hard to be in magazines: ‘She ruined this beloved movie series!’ I can’t say that wasn’t hard, but I never really wanted to be an actress. It wasn’t my dream. I didn’t know I wanted to be a film-maker. I was going to art school and trying different things. I spent my whole life on film sets, and I was trying to do something different [than] my family – as young people do. Then, when I read the book of The Virgin Suicides, I loved it so much, it made me want to make the film. I feel lucky that I’ve found a way to express myself.”

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She has had her ups and downs, but Coppola has remained a presence in world cinema ever since. The Virgin Suicides was lauded. She won an Oscar for writing Lost in Translation. Her 2010 movie, Somewhere, won the Golden Lion at Venice. Along the way she became one of the few directors who can claim to be a genuine celebrity. Spike Lee would be one. Her old pal Quentin Tarantino, whom she dated in the early noughts, would certainly be another. That must be a bit of a trial.

“I guess so,” she says, amused. “I feel like a part-time one, but then I have a normal life where no one notices me. And there’s nothing like teenage children to really keep you level-headed, not thinking you’re special. Ha ha! But I definitely grew up around show business. So I have a sense of how people act differently in that world.”

There are bonuses to that visibility. Over the past 20 years Coppola has emerged as a role model for many younger film-makers – and not just women. She acknowledges her advantages. But not every sprig of a dynasty has managed to develop such an interesting career. She has a voice. There is a Sofia Coppola sensibility. Something about restraint. Something about soft-cornered style. She has had a chance to commune with fans when talking about a recent, lavish book derived from the archives of her own films. She’s an inspiration.

“It’s hard to believe that when I’m just making my stuff,” she says. “I was really touched by that when I made this book recently and I was meeting all these young people. They were coming up and saying that they want to be film-makers and that they’re touched by my work. It was really touching, because you make things to connect to people. To get to see that is encouraging and moving. It gives your work some meaning.”

In a recent interview she bemoaned the fact that the people in charge of allocating money in the movie business are still “straight men”. She feels it remains more of a struggle for young women than young men to get hold of budgets. Yet things have surely improved since she made Lost in Translation. We have seen the first, second and third women to win best-directing Oscars. As we speak, Greta Gerwig’s Barbie seems guaranteed to become the highest-grossing film of the year. There has been some sort of shift. And she has been a part of it.

“Yeah, I think that’s exciting,” she says. “There are more and more women film-makers. Tons of young girls come up to me and say they’re at film school. So I’m sure there’s going to be a whole new generation, but we are still a minority. I’m just glad that it’s improving – and, hopefully, quicker and quicker. What I love about movies is seeing different experiences, and you want to be able to see characters that you relate to.”

It’s hard not to think of Sofia Coppola as a youthful spirit. But we must reluctantly admit that she is now almost a veteran. Married to the French musician Thomas Mars since 2011, she has added two teenage daughters to the wider Coppola clan. Youngsters now gather at her ankles for advice. Yet there is still something sedately optimistic about her presence. Nothing about her suggests the need to hurry. All sounds seems ambient in her presence. Does she have a life scheme?

“No. I’ve just finished this movie,” she says merrily. “I’m excited to get it out and then catch my breath. But I’m not sure what my plan is.”

Priscilla is in cinemas nationwide from New Year’s Day. It screens exclusively in 35mm at the Light House Cinema, Dublin, from Wednesday, December 27th