11 min read
Jacket, earrings, slingbacks, Chanel. Watch, ring, Cartier.
Sofia Coppola, rebel director, was born on a New York sidewalk. On a chilly day in April 1994, a 22-year-old, hoodie-clad Coppola and then-boyfriend Spike Jonze produced an “outlaw” fashion show for the femme skater label X-Girl, sending models including Chloë Sevigny, with a pink-crowned bowl cut, and Padma Lakshmi, braless beneath her baby tee, down Mercer Street. Drawing on her backstage experience as a teen intern at Chanel, Coppola told them to walk slowly—a strategic effort to capture the crowd spilling from her friend Marc Jacobs’s runway debut nearby.
The pair first clicked when the director visited the designer’s New York studio with her mother, Eleanor, circa 1992. Coppola, a cinema scion and girl-about-downtown in slip skirts and Stan Smiths, became a muse for Jacobs, who’d just elevated flannels to the runway with his grunge collection for Perry Ellis. Somewhere in this Gen X fever dream, Coppola and Jacobs hit the taping of Nirvana’s MTV Unplugged together. You can almost smell the teen spirit.
They shared a playful, Peter Pan sensibility: One analog Halloween, Jacobs dressed Coppola in a child-size police officer costume. More than 30 years, three fashion labels, eight feature films, and three marriages later, “we’re not ever really grown-up,” a Cheshire Cat-grinning Coppola, now 54, tells me of Jacobs, 62. Listed in the credits of his latest collection: X-Girl 1994. The guerrilla production, now fashion lore, led to Coppola jetting to Japan for another X-Girl show, then working as a photographer for Dune magazine, “which helped me start to find my point of view behind the camera,” she says.
The Oscar-winning auteur and I are sitting at a café table at her film editor’s office in New York, sipping green tea and discussing the cherry bomb of nostalgia that is Marc by Sofia, Coppola’s first-ever documentary and a “portrait love letter,” she says, to Jacobs, charting his ascent from ponytailed Parsons School of Design prodigy to Louis Vuitton creative director and beyond. Coppola follows fashion’s greatest showman as he meticulously prepares for his 40th anniversary collection in spring 2024, but the director brings all the whimsy and punk spirit of her Marie Antoinette. There are no talking heads in A24’s Marc by Sofia. Instead, Coppola creates a mood board sprung to life, exploring the glamorous references behind Jacobs’s paper-doll silhouettes: The Supremes, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand.
Coat, skirt, Marc Jacobs. Earrings, Cartier. Shoes, Manolo Blahnik.
Coppola’s philosophy: “Let’s just get lost in Marc’s world,” she says in her soft, easy way. Unlike a droning male director getting played off the awards show stage, the filmmaker who cracked the Hollywood boys’ club with a killer canon of Oscar gems (Lost in Translation), cult classics (The Virgin Suicides), and reframed feminist biopics (Priscilla) does not seem to relish the sound of her own voice.
When she was first approached to helm a Jacobs doc, Coppola politely turned it down. Making her first documentary about one of her best friends? “Too much pressure.” Still, the idea lingered in her mind that the film could be the latest flower in their long, creative daisy chain. “I have this lucky advantage,” she says. “I was thinking, I’d like to see it if Betty Catroux made a documentary on Saint Laurent,” name-checking the French model and muse.
Over the years, as Coppola directed Jacobs’s Daisy ad campaign and he designed the serene satin dress she wore to accept the Oscar for her Lost in Translation original screenplay in 2004, she would attend his runway shows and feel their minds had melded. “Weirdly, I felt like…there was something that I had in mind, and then he made it,” she says. Marc by Sofia gave Coppola the chance to know him even better, holding deep conversations about his difficult childhood they’d never had before. “It was very emotional to go back in time through Sofia’s eyes,” Jacobs tells me, noting that she never fished for details about sensitive topics, like his father’s death when he was only six. “There was no equation,” he says. “She was there to take whatever it was that I was going through.”
Digging through Jacobs’s archive, Coppola couldn’t not see her younger self. To Gen X peers and elder millennial little sisters, she was, and is, a paragon of cool. (Coppola is so cool, she makes the orthopedic boot she’s wearing after tripping on stairs look cool.) A 1997 Seventeen feature about her preferred L.A. shopping spots still circulates on Instagram. At least one think piece has been written about a photograph of her artfully disheveled L.A. office, as shot by Bruce Weber in 2000, a pink copy of Valley of the Dolls strewn on the floor.
Pullover, slingbacks, Chanel. Earrings, Cartier.
Behind the scenes, Coppola says, she was plagued by self-doubt through much of the ’90s. “I was awkward and I didn’t know what I was doing, and I was trying different things and felt really frustrated that I couldn’t pick one,” she tells me. “I wasn’t, like, taken seriously.” She’d dropped out of CalArts, declaring herself a “lousy painter.” Acting seemed less viable after Coppola was widely panned for her performance in The Godfather Part III, directed by her father—this is the part when we mention him—Francis Ford Coppola.
She didn’t want to follow her dad into directing, but Coppola’s restless years would serve her once she did. Like so many of her eventual heroines, she was a young woman searching for herself.
“I don’t know how to make a documentary,” Coppola protested before beginning Marc by Sofia, but her late mom, Eleanor Coppola, did.
Eleanor filmed her famous husband and daughter as they filmed their movies. Her footage from the making of Apocalypse Now in the jungles of the Philippines led to Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, an acclaimed documentary that did not shy away from Francis’s unraveling on the grueling shoot (Coppola’s earliest memories are of being with her family in the jungle). Eleanor died of a rare cancer in 2024, at age 87. “She was the most allergic to BS, which I got from her,” Coppola tells me.
As Coppola dove into Marc by Sofia, it was impossible not to think of Eleanor, who was in her final months: “I remember shooting and being really ashamed of my shaky camera work, because she is famous in our family for having the steadiest camera.” Since Eleanor’s death, Coppola has been fulfilling one of her mom’s last wishes: turning Eleanor’s footage from the set of Marie Antoinette into a documentary, which is slated for release this October, the film’s 20th anniversary. “I am looking at it, now that she’s gone, through her eyes,” Coppola tells me, her own eyes ever so slightly glassy. “I’m glad that I could—it sounds corny, but honor her in that way.”
Their creative mother-daughter relationship had its complexities. In the foreword to Eleanor’s posthumous memoir, Two of Me, published last year, Coppola recalls her mom on the set of her first film, The Virgin Suicides. “I was having a hard day and was upset, and she kept filming me when I didn’t want to be filmed,” Coppola writes. “In that moment, that was more important to her than being a mother to me—that irritated me at the time, and I admire it about her now.” For her own part, Eleanor wrote about the awe she felt watching Coppola command sets, but also the “jealousy of my daughter living in a time freed from the expectations of women of my generation.” It’s an admission Coppola calls “brave,” especially now that she’s parenting a famous daughter herself.
Slingbacks, Chanel.
Earrings, bracelet, ring, Cartier.
She’s Hollywood’s patron saint of adolescent girls, a director who has immersed herself in their inner lives, from The Virgin Suicides’ Lisbon sisters to the brats of The Bling Ring. Now Coppola is a mom to two teen daughters with her husband, Phoenix lead singer Thomas Mars: 15-year-old Cosima Croquet (Mars’s given surname) and, duh, 19-year-old Romy Mars, the dryly clever Gen Z TikToker and budding pop star. Given her body of work, “I feel like I would’ve been better at being the mom of teenagers. But somehow it doesn’t really apply,” Coppola says with a laugh.
As the mom of a 12-year-old daughter, I beg for advice, but Coppola says only, “Buckle up.”
“It’s such a complex relationship. I mean, it’s so intense. There’s nothing deeper, I don’t think,” she says of mothers and daughters. “Anything that deep, it’s painful the way that nothing else is, but then so gratifying.”
Since Romy’s viral TikTok three years ago—in which she claimed she was grounded after trying to use her dad’s credit card to charter a helicopter from New York to Maryland to have dinner with a friend—Coppola’s eldest daughter has done the impossible: become a nepo princess people love. All she had to do is embrace her privilege (see: her “Expensive & Difficult” baby tee), find the humor in it (calling her gecko, Calvin Coppola, a “terrifying mob boss,” while The Godfather theme plays), and mine her charmed life for content (the gift of TikTok dances with Jacob Elordi, who played Elvis in Coppola’s Priscilla).
Dress, Prada. Ring, Cartier.
“Thank God she has a really funny sense of humor, because I was so uptight about being the daughter-of,” Coppola says. “I would never lead with that. I was wanting to make it on my own, where she is relaxed about turning it on its head. It’s just a totally different attitude.” Dissimilar as they are, her brazen daughter “cracks me up,” Coppola says, smiling. “She’s a performer in a way that’s really fun for me to see.” She refers to Romy’s online “persona,” a subtle reminder that TikTok is a performance. A friend told Coppola: “I think you would be doing TikToks if you were that age.” She doesn’t disagree. She likens the platform to the fanzines of her youth.
One of the coolest things about Coppola now is that she doesn’t scoff at her daughters’ generation. “I love that she’s so part of her era,” she says. Last year, she directed Romy in the video for her new single “A-Lister,” a satirical shrug at fame shot at the Coppola winery. When I ask if Romy took direction from her seasoned mother, Coppola demurs: “I was trying to take direction from her.” In a sense, both Coppola and Romy have directed Elordi. “I can’t believe she gets him to dance,” Coppola says with a laugh. “I’m like, ‘Don’t take advantage of him!’ He’s such a good sport.”
Elordi is a new addition to the Sofia Coppola Cinematic Universe, a collection of films known as much for their dreamy melancholy as the group of stars who boomerang back to her, including Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning (Somewhere, The Beguiled), and Bill Murray (Lost in Translation and 2020’s On the Rocks). Dunst and her Marie Antoinette co-star Rose Byrne have credited Coppola with showing them calm, cool—there’s that word again—female leadership, an antidote to hostile Hollywood sets. “Sofia is a force while maintaining grace and softness,” Elle Fanning, who was 11 when Coppola directed her in Somewhere, tells me in an email. “At an age when I was navigating girlhood, I had a role model who valued my opinion and treated me with respect. She embraced my funny glasses and retainer. If I was being made fun of in school, I would often think, Well, Sofia thinks this is cool.”
Skirt, slingbacks, Chanel. Necklace, ring, Cartier.
Jacket, Chanel. Earrings, necklace, bracelet, watch, rings, Cartier.
Coppola said she learned from her mother “how to be in charge without being loud.” I beg for more advice—how?
“Being really clear on what you want and sticking to it,” she says simply. “You can do that without yelling.”
The upcoming 20th birthday of Marie Antoinette and last year’s 25th anniversary of The Virgin Suicides—and the way new audiences embrace them, including via TikTok—has sparked overdue appreciation for Coppola’s body of work. Reviews for Marie Antoinette were mixed in 2006, including some boos at its Cannes Film Festival premiere, but the hip period piece has aged as well as Coppola herself. Two decades ago, Coppola says, the industry “didn’t think of girls being an audience. It was like, ‘It has to have a boy as the central character.’ They actually told me that you can’t make a movie that a boy wasn’t going to go to.” Now it makes me so happy that, yes, the girls are out there. They have buying power. Even before Barbie, she says, “I think the shift was when Fifty Shades of Grey was a hit. It was like, ‘See, women do matter.’”
Coppola (and her dog, Gnocchi) with Jacobs at his SoHo, New York studio earlier this year.
Yet there hasn’t been enough advancement for female filmmakers since Coppola made history in 2004 as the first American woman nominated for Best Director at the Oscars. According to the USC Annenberg Initiative, women directed only 8 percent of last year’s top-grossing films. “There need to be more women bosses in the industry, but there also needs to be more cultural support,” Coppola says, noting that European countries often fund films directly (also of note, many of these funds mandate gender equity). She observes more women in film school now than 20 years ago, and she’s helping them break in with the launch of her Young Filmmakers Association, which runs programs to help close the opportunity gap. “I feel like, having grown up in it, how do you bring more people in who aren’t connected?”
As for her own next job, Coppola isn’t sure what comes after her foray into documentaries. Days before our interview, news broke that Sydney Sweeney would star in an Apple TV adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country. I cringe bringing it up to Coppola, who was previously developing her own version of her favorite Wharton novel for Apple, reportedly starring Florence Pugh as social climber Undine Spragg. Now, an unruffled Coppola clarifies, “I really wanted Jennifer Lawrence to play that character. In my head, she’s Undine. I think it required a big star and a big budget, so that iteration didn’t happen.” She’s also put aside a much-anticipated yet mysterious new project with Dunst, which stays mysterious in our interview. “It felt too sad,” she says. “It’s confusing in these dark times. I want to offer some hope and beauty in the world, but then you also don’t want to do something shallow, because it feels like a time for deep things.”
Coat, Marc Jacobs. Earrings, Cartier.
Lately, the director has been going down a new rabbit hole. Coppola is “kind of obsessed” with Britney Spears—watching documentaries; reading her memoir, The Woman in Me; retroactively reeling over the Diane Sawyer interview. (Coppola had been in Paris, focused on Marie Antoinette, during the pop star’s mid-aughts crises.) The image of a bald Spears, umbrella in hand, attacking a paparazzo’s car? While terribly sad, Coppola says, “I thought it was such a punk moment.…She’s become this symbol of women’s rights. That would never happen to a man.” She doesn’t specify what “that” means, but I think she means all of it.
“Supposedly Jon Chu is doing it,” a tentatively grinning Coppola says, “but I hope—yeah, I would love to do that story.”
She’s too gracious to say it, as I start dream-casting, but I’m getting too excited too soon. “I try not to analyze it too much, when I’m into something,” Coppola says. She shares one of her favorite stories about her mom: A multimedia artist, Eleanor had been obsessively drawing straight lines before filming Hearts of Darkness. When she arrived in the Philippines, she found she could hold the camera steady for hours. “It turned out she was preparing for something she didn’t realize,” Coppola says. She thinks about the lesson all the time: “You have to always do what you’re drawn to and not wonder why.”
Hair by Orlando Pita for Orlo Salon; makeup by Dick Page at MA+ Group; manicure by Eri Handa at Home Agency; set design by Elaine Winter; produced by GTS Production; photographed at the Hotel Chelsea; Polaroids photographed by Nick Newbold.
This story appears in the April 2026 issue of ELLE.