Dying young

>> With The Virgin Suicides, director Sofia Coppola moves out of her father's shadow

by MATTHEW HAYS

It's rare to come across a film as striking and haunting as The Virgin Suicides. It's even rarer that a film this solid also happens to be a directorial debut. It might not seem so odd, however, when one considers that the film's director, Sofia Coppola, had an ongoing apprenticeship with her father, Francis Ford Coppola, having grown up on the elder Coppola's film sets (including projects as varied and celebrated as The Godfather, The Conversation and The Outsiders).

It already seems a bit unfair, however, to launch into this article with a list of her father's considerable achievements. The Virgin Suicides stands on its own, a truly impressive bit of work, beautiful, melancholic and efficient in its use of its source material, the eponymous Jeffrey Eugenides bestselling novel.

The story is devastating. A strict, religious couple (math teacher James Woods and homemaker Kathleen Turner) is shocked after one of their five daughters attempts suicide by slashing her wrists. When their child psychiatrist (Danny DeVito) suggests that the girls may have been too sheltered, these oddball parents decide to bridge the gender divide and invite the neighbourhood boys and girls over for an innocent soirée. The wrist-slashing Cecilia, clearly intent on doing herself in, throws herself out of an upstairs window, managing to impale herself on a fence post during the party. The suicide becomes big news about town, with local media focussing on the family and speculating about the reasons behind the teen suicide.

Opposites attract

But The Virgin Suicides is never really a social-issue film. Instead, we're left with a series of bizarre vignettes, all told from the perspective of a group of boys, who are fascinated with the blonde, dreamy sisters. The film captures the '70s period in which it is set stunningly, from the soundtrack to the fashions of the day. It's also a heart-wrenching look at coming of age. With the film, which Coppola adapted herself, the director manages to embrace a series of opposites. The Virgin Suicides is at once hilarious and painfully sad, realistic and other-worldly, libidinous and repressed, revelatory and mysterious.

Coppola may not have proven herself as an actor (she admits her turn in her father's The Godfather III, a role that was originally intended for Winona Ryder, was a bit of a bust), but this film marks her as a director to be watched. On a personal note, she's also married to Spike Jonze, whose directorial debut, Being John Malkovich, turned a few heads too.

I caught up with Coppola at her L.A. boutique, Heaven 27, where she sells her own line of clothing. We discussed the film, her aesthetic influences and dad.

Mirror: You've obviously been getting a lot of great press with this film...

Sofia Coppola: Yeah, I've been trying not to read too much of it. It's exciting though, when you work on something for so long and the response is positive. That people are connecting with what you're connecting. Guys have said to me, "That was me in the film!"

M: When I was a kid, someone I knew took their own life. It was really big in the neighbourhood, very much the way it is in the film. It really struck me when I was watching your film, that perhaps you'd had some kind of similar adolescent or childhood experience with suicide...

SC: Not with suicide, but I remember some kid doing some crazy thing and getting killed. Not suicide, just a reckless thing. They almost became mythic, at that point. I was about 13 or 14. Just the idea of death was such a new idea, you become fascinated. Yes, something about him became mythic to us at that point.

Unsolved mysteries

M: Something that struck me about The Virgin Suicides is that it's a film so full of revelation, so full of minute detail about the adolescent experience, especially of that period, and yet you still manage to preserve the mystery surrounding the central characters' suicides.

SC: Well, in the book they were these kind of icons, and there's the whole idea of how mysterious girls are to boys, and the confusion between them. I decided I wanted to keep that. I didn't want them to be real girls, because then that would mean getting into the psychology of it and that was something I wanted to avoid. The story wasn't about that. I wanted it to be more symbolic.

M: Something else that struck me is that you've managed to evoke a sense of realism while maintaining a surrealism throughout. It's an interesting stylistic tension you've created, between two things we tend to think of as opposite.

SC: Oh cool. Thank you.

M: Was that something you were very conscious of?

SC: I wanted to make sure that it wasn't real, that it was a memory. So the girls are more perfect than reality. In the book when it describes how Cecilia died on the fence, it says that she looked like she was just floating like a circus trick. There wasn't blood gushing out, but rather it was romanticized, because it's drawn from memory. I definitely wanted it to have a surreal edge, but I tend to like things that are a bit more subtle, so that you can be surrealistic without being over the top. I knew I wanted the film to be really restrained, but I also wanted it to explore collective memory and neighbourhood folklore.

M: You leap between several first-person narratives, which means we never actually know precisely who we're supposed to be identifying with.

SC: The story to me was always told from the boys' points of view. But it has this collective narration, and you never actually know who he is. The book was very anonymous that way. You could sort of put yourself there. You become the narrator. And it's also very unclear where the town is, so it could be your town.

Shampoo cues

M: The dream sequence where Kirsten Dunst is running around in the tall grass really blew me away. You've talked about your influences in that scene, including the photography of Sam Haskins. But to me, it felt like you were shooting her as though she was in the middle of a '70s Coca-Cola commercial or a shampoo commercial. That was brilliant--it was so evocative of the period.

SC: We talked a lot about Breck commercials when we were doing that. Those are certainly my references from that era, old photos and advertising. It was important to wash out the images, to make them soft. We wanted them to be whatever the fashion was at the time. A lot of that style came from the Playboy shoots of the time, with the back-lit hair, with a girl in nature. That was the fantasy girl of that era.

M: You said in one interview that when you first read the book you could really see how the major studios, were they to get their hands on it, could royally screw up the film version. And that was one of the reasons you wanted to do it in a good way. Could you ever see yourself working on a studio film?

SC: I didn't mean that as an attack. I was just afraid that it wouldn't be made in a professional way, that it might end up being made by committee. I enjoyed making this as an independent, on a low budget. I don't want to say that I'd never do a studio project, though.

M: The story you tell about your father's involvement in the film is that he showed up on the set but once and had a small bit of advice: he told you to yell "action" louder. Which is hilarious. Here's the cliché question: having watched your father for so many years, what's the main thing you walked away with in terms of directing film?

SC: It's hard to say, because I learned so much. My whole education was growing up on his sets. I would say his emphasis is always on the story, the writing. He also stresses performance. I learned a lot about the way he works with actors. He's really always been very hands-on with his casts. He rehearses extensively and works with them on improvisations as well. :

The Virgin Suicides opens Friday, May 26