Interview (Written): Sofia Coppola

The writer-director talks about her newest movie The Beguiled.

A Little White Lies interview with Sofia Coppola whose movie credits include The Virgin Suicides, Lost in Translation, and The Bling Ring. In this interview, she discusses her latest film The Beguiled.

LWLies: When you’re preparing a script you listen to a lot of music. What you were listening to while writing The Beguiled?

Coppola: You know what, usually I do, but I didn’t so much on this one, maybe because it was period. So I don’t have a good story about something I was listening to. I guess I started writing it when we were on vacation in the Italian countryside two summers ago and I’d just gotten the book of ‘The Beguiled’. I was just going through it marking it up while my kids were swimming. I wasn’t in the isolated professional writing world. It was just a little summer project. I was going through it making notes and then when we came to back to New York where we live I would go to my office and write it. But it’s funny as I didn’t really have a soundtrack and the music is very, very minimal.

When you were going through the book choosing the passages, were they coming alive to you visually?

I guess you picture what you’re reading. I’d known about the story from the movie that I saw a couple of years before, and then I got the book and I tried to forget about the movie and look at it freshly, or just get more information, and then I filled it in with what I could add from imagination and life and stuff. That movie is from the soldier’s point of view and the book was written by a man in the ’60s — each chapter is a different one of the girls telling the story. It’s not really worth reading, I have to say, as a book, so I was just going through and editing down which characters I wanted to have, because you have to cut — there were too many and pare down the characters. I started to write the story from a female point of view.

Here is a trailer for The Beguiled:

For the rest of the interview, go here.

Twitter: @LWlies.