NEW YORK — When Sofia Coppola When she was 20 and trying to figure out who she wanted to be in the world, Anjelica Huston offered some advice: “Not everyone is going to love you. Don't waste your time with people who don't,” Coppola recalled Wednesday night in New York City. Benefit performance of the Museum of Modern Artwhere she was awarded for her films.
Coppola was surrounded by family, friends and colleagues such as Bill MurrayJosh Hartnett and Elle Fanning For Event presented by Chanelwhich helps raise funds for the museum's collection and preservation efforts.
“She's not just the daughter of a great director,” Murray said. “She's a great director.”
But this title was earned with great difficulty. Just over 27 years after her father Francis Ford Coppola Encouraging her to make her first short film, Coppola reflected on starting a film career at a time when she was considered “a nepo kid before they were glamorous” and “the amateur actress who single-handedly ruined the Godfather films.”
“Most people didn’t think I had anything important to say,” she said. “But I found a few people who did.”
Since her feature debut in The Virgin Suicides, Coppola has written and directed seven narrative features and one documentary about Marc Jacobs, which A24 plans to release next year. She was simultaneously celebrated by winning an Oscar for her screenplay for Lost in Translation, which also earned her a nomination for best director, and fired. Marie Antoinette was ignominiously booed at Cannes, but over the next 20 years it became beloved and famous.
Fanning recalled meticulously planning her outfit for her first meeting with Coppola at age 11, where she was to play the famous movie star's daughter in Somewhere. A few years earlier, she had convinced her grandmother to take her to see Marie Antoinette, and she immediately became a fan.
“Living for a few hours in that movie theater, in Sophia’s world, would have changed my childhood forever,” Fanning said. “It was a place where I felt safe and seen, and I wanted to live in it a hundred times over.”
In Somewhere, Coppola made Fanning feel like an equal on set, seeing the beauty in things like her glasses and brace, and making them “cool” with her approval. At 18, she reunited 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 teen heartthrob in The Virgin Suicides. He recalled being in awe of her, the mixtapes she made for actors and her “incredible calm” under enormous pressure when she was just 26 years old and directing her first feature film.
“Sophia showed me at a young age what it meant to be an artist,” Hartnett said.
Those unable to attend the event in person, including her father and Kirsten Dunst, recorded video messages of support. Dunst has called her her creative sister for more than 20 years.
Coppola, a longtime Chanel ambassador and collaborator since her internship days, attended the event with her husband Thomas Mars and daughters Romy Mars and Cosima Mars. She also had many champions to thank: her father for being a great film teacher and always wanting his kids on set; Her late mother Eleanor Coppola who loved modern art and was the one who told her that she could have a family and a career; To her husband for his assistance in the creation of this work and for his musical contributions to her films; Her brother Roman Coppola advised her to make the film she wanted when the studio pressured her to change the ending to Lost in Translation.
The landscape has changed for female directors since Coppola entered the industry when an executive told her that she couldn't make films aimed at women because boys wouldn't go see films about girls. However, obstacles still exist along the way.
“I hope we now understand how much we need more women in leadership positions and in finance to support these filmmakers,” Coppola said. Chanel, which sponsored not only the evening but also MoMA Film, a collection of more than 30,000 films, has a long history. support for women in film productionincluding last week at a dinner with representatives of the film academy.
The program ended with a performance by Elvis Costello, which she said was her childhood dream.
Earlier in the evening, Murray joked that when he heard Coppola, just 54, was being honored, “all I could think was, 'Is she okay?'
Although Murray said to “lower expectations” when he took the stage to talk about Coppola, whom he has worked with several times, including in the father-daughter film On the Rocks, he spoke of her unique vision and ability to see everyday moments in life and turn them into art.
“The films she makes and the person she has become, the woman she has become, is a product of thoughtfulness and self-awareness,” Murray said. “She somehow understood the reason for her career, her driving force is the accumulation of moments… I feel like I paid attention when I said, 'I want to work with this girl.'
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AP reporter John Carucci contributed.
