NEW YORK (AP) — When Sofia Coppola was 20 years old and figuring out who she wanted to be in the world, Angelica Huston offered some advice: “Not everyone’s going to love you. Don’t waste your time on the people who don’t,” Coppola recalled Wednesday night in New York at the Museum of Modern Art Film Benefit, where she was being honored for her films.
Coppola was surrounded by family, friends and collaborators like Bill Murray, Josh Hartnett and Elle Fanning for the Chanel-presented event, which helps raise funds for the museum’s film collection and preservation efforts.
“She’s not just the daughter of a great filmmaker,” Murray said. “She’s a great filmmaker.”
But it’s a distinction that was hard earned. Just over 27 years after her father Francis Ford Coppola encouraged her to make her first short film, Coppola reflected on starting a filmmaking career at a time when she was thought of as “a nepo baby before they were charming” and “the amateur actress who had single-handedly ruined ‘The Godfather’ films.”
“Most people didn’t think I had something to say that mattered,” she said. “But I found a few who did.”
Since making her feature debut with “The Virgin Suicides,” Coppola has written and directed seven narrative features and one documentary, about Marc Jacobs, that A24 plans to release next year. She’s been both celebrated, winning an Oscar for writing “Lost in Translation,” which also earned her a best director nomination, and dismissed. “Marie Antoinette” was infamously booed at Cannes, but over the next 20 years would become beloved and celebrated.
Fanning remembered meticulously planning her outfit to meet Coppola for the first time at age 11, where she would go on to be cast as the daughter of a famous movie star in “Somewhere.” A few years prior she had convinced her grandmother to take her to see “Marie Antoinette” and she immediately became a fan.
“Living in that cinema, in Sofia’s world for a few hours, it would change my girlhood forever,” Fanning said. “It was the place that I felt safe and seen, and I wanted to live in it a hundred times over.”
On “Somewhere,” Coppola made Fanning feel like an equal on set and saw beauty in things like her glasses and retainer and made them “cool” through her approval. At 18, she’d reunite with Coppola to play the “bad girl” in the Civil War era film “The Beguiled.”
Hartnett also thanked Coppola for giving him one of his first big roles as a teenage heartthrob in “The Virgin Suicides.” He recalled being in awe of her, the mixtapes she made for the cast and her “incredible chill” under the immense pressure of directing her first feature at only 26.
“Sofia showed me at a young age what it is to be an artist,” Hartnett said.
Those who couldn’t be at the event in person, including her father and Kirsten Dunst, recorded video messages of support. Dunst called her a creative sister for over 20 years.
Coppola, a longtime Chanel ambassador and collaborator going back to her days as an intern, attended the event with her husband, Thomas Mars, and daughters Romy Mars and Cosima Mars. She had many champions to thank as well: Her father for being a great film teacher and always wanting his kids on set; Her late mother Eleanor Coppola who loved contemporary art and was the one who told her she could have a family and a career; Her husband for helping to make that work and for his musical contributions to her films; Her brother Roman Coppola who told her to make the film she wanted when the studio was pressuring her to change the ending to “Lost in Translation.”
Things have changed for female directors since Coppola began, when an executive told her that you can’t have movies focused on women because boys won’t go to see films about girls. Yet there are still roadblocks.
“I hope we now recognize how much we need more women in positions of power and finance to support these filmmakers,” Coppola said. Chanel, which not only sponsored the evening but MoMA Film as well — a collection that includes more than 30,000 films — has a long history of supporting women in filmmaking, including just last week at a luncheon with the film academy.
The program ended with a performance from Elvis Costello, which she said was her childhood dream.
Earlier in the evening Murray quipped that when he heard Coppola, who is only 54, was getting this kind of honor, “all I could think was, ‘was she OK?’”
Though Murray said to “lower expectations” when he took the stage to speak about Coppola, who he’s worked with several times including in the father-daughter film “On the Rocks,” he spoke about her unique vision and ability to see the mundane moments of life and make them into art.
“The movies that she makes and the person that she has become, the woman that she has become, are a result of paying attention and a self-awareness,” Murray said. “She somehow figured out the reason for her career, the drive of it is this accumulation of moments … I feel like I was paying attention myself when I said, ‘I want to work with this girl.’”
AP Reporter John Carucci contributed.
