TSPDT

Key Production Countries: USA, Japan
Key Genres: Drama, Period Film, Comedy of Manners, Historical Film, Slice of Life, Psychological Drama
Key Collaborators: Sarah Flack (Editor), Anne Ross (Production Designer), Kirsten Dunst (Leading Character Actress), Bill Murray (Leading Actor), Youree Henley (Producer), Phoenix (Composer), Elle Fanning (Leading Actress), Ross Katz (Producer), Roman Coppola (Producer), Philippe Le Sourd (Cinematographer), Lance Acord (Cinematographer), Harris Savides (Cinematographer)

"The case against Coppola usually revolves around such complaints: that she is frivolous, that her movies lack heft,that they look good but communicate little. There is some basis for these criticisms in all of Coppola’s films—her style is ethereal, sometimes to the point of insubstantiality—but it is hard to miss the archly condescending tone with which some critics dismiss her, and hard not to wonder why exactly the most prominent female American director of her generation elicits it." - Jesse Fox Mayshark (Post-Pop Cinema: The Search for Meaning in New American Film, 2007)

"Sofia's spare style could hardly be more different from the baroque grandiloquence of her father. And yet she has taken from him the risky art of personal film-making, of working out the big issues of her life in her movies, of just going ahead and doing it, even when you're not sure what "it" is. If The Virgin Suicides distilled the hopeless longings of adolescence to their essence, Lost in Translation is about how the most unexpected, even temporary human bonds can make you take stock and grow up." - Ella Taylor (The Guardian, 2003)

"As the daughter of venerated filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, Sofia Coppola faced a sizable challenge establishing her own identity as a director when she first started making feature films in 1999. Since then, she has not only emerged from the shadow of her famous father, but become a standard-bearer for quality and integrity in the moviemaking industry." - Todd Gilchrist (IGN, 2006)

"Todd Haynes has been a cornerstone of the American independent film world since the early 1990s and remains one of the groundbreaking artists of our time. In films such as Safe (1995), Velvet Goldmine (1998), Far from Heaven (2002), Carol (2015), and his latest, May December (2023), Haynes refracts queer cultural and social history through an artist’s lens, creating indelible films of an extraordinarily tactile nature… From the 1980s to the 2020s, from music videos to television series, from early shorts and breakthrough features such as Dottie Gets Spanked and Poison, to recent films such as Wonderstruck and The Velvet Underground, Todd Haynes has consistently pursued his own path, taking on projects that few filmmakers would dare attempt, both utilizing and subverting storytelling conventions." - Museum of the Moving Image, 2023

"There’s no doubt that family ties have helped her, for she is nowhere near as articulate, forceful, or ambitious as her father (or her husband, Spike Jonze—though that relationship ended in 2003). So I think it’s notable that already she has moved from filming a book she liked, Jeffrey Eugenides’s The Virgin Suicides, to thinking up a film of her own, Lost in Translation. The latter is her best work yet, though it’s a slight, truly modest work, feeling its way toward a sensibility that is not grasped yet, and which might slip away." - David Thomson (The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, 2010)

"Aside from Coppola's refined taste in clothing - Milena Canonero was the costume designer for the ravishingly attired Marie Antoinette - it's the music that best accentuates Coppola's work. She anachronistically injected Gang of Four and Bow Wow Wow into Marie Antoinette to give the 18th-century contemporary punk resonance. She also placed the majestic slow burn of The Jesus & Mary Chain's 'Just Like Honey' in the coda to Lost in Translation to make the audience feel the dull ache of her characters' world-weary melancholy." - Andrew Bailey (Cinema Now, 2007)

"Some show business folk claim to be born in a trunk. Sofia Coppola was baptized on a movie set: she is the infant christened in the penultimate sequence of The Godfather (1972), directed by her father Francis Ford Coppola. Over the past 14 years, she has delivered two daughters of her own, as well as five feature films that have won acclaim; including a DGA and Oscar nomination for directing Lost in Translation; for her nuanced portraits of teenagers and young adults losing and finding themselves." - Carrie Rickey (Directors Guild of America, 2013)

"Everyone in my family is in the film business; I knew I wanted to be creative and it was important in my family to be artistic." - Sofia Coppola