by Gill Pringle at San Sebastian International Film Festival
Last year, Gia Coppola and Pamela Anderson swept into the San Sebastian Film Festival with their film The Last Showgirl, receiving the prestigious Special Jury Prize amidst standing ovations.
This year, it’s Coppola’s turn to hand out the gongs, returning to the festival as a jury member, joining Jury president J. A. Bayona and fellow judges Laura Carreira, Zhou Dongyu, Lali Esposito, Mark Strong, and Anne-Dominique Toussaint.
Looking back on her formative years in the film business, the Palo Alto director reveals how she almost turned her back on Hollywood. “I feel like I always was kind of too intimidated to be a director, given my family background, but it was always around me.
“I’m a shy person and I didn’t really excel in school, so I gravitated towards photography because I could just be an observer and look and take pictures, and technically it was interesting. I followed that path, and went to college for photography,” says the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola.
“I was raised very bohemian, and I didn’t feel very part of the Hollywood system where you make movies for movie’s sake. I feel like I’ve been raised to follow my heart and make things that I feel connected to,” she says, citing The Last Picture Show as one of her all-time favourite films.
If nepotism goes a long way, then her theatrical debut Palo Alto in 2013 was a turning point, proving that she was the real deal.
Featuring Emma Roberts, James Franco, Nat Wolff and Val Kilmer, it was an eye-opening experience for her. “We made it very small, and it was with all the sort of interns at my uncle’s [Roman Coppola] office or my friends or my family,” she says.
Mainstream – her 2020 dramedy – was a different story.
“I’d seen A Face in the Crowd [1957] and it really impacted me just how relevant it felt about our culture and what we value. I was feeling a lot of that in my own relationship to the world, with the internet and what gets valued and feeling like a very introverted person.
“How do you operate in a world that I think really emboldens extroverts? I was grappling with that kind of feeling, of how do I take something that feels so cyber and unattractive and put it into a cinematic landscape? And it was very challenging to make that movie, but I learned so much that was really important for me,” she says of Mainstream, starring Andrew Garfield and Maya Hawke.
“I had met Andrew Garfield in an acting class, and I sort of knew his acting coach. I wanted him for the part because he’s always such a charming, nice guy – and then to see him play more of a villain would make it more empathetic with an audience, you’d understand that lure. He’s such a wonderful, intelligent human being. I really wanted his guidance on how to shape this narrative, and this character,” she recalls.
“I also had to deal with more business and unions,” she says about her sophomore film. “After that experience, I wanted to go back to what I felt close to with Palo Alto, which is to just keep it small. I don’t want to wait around for the financing to come. And if I keep it small, then I don’t have the same pressure, and I can have more creative autonomy,” says the writer/director whose next project is a documentary about extreme fan groups entitled Superfans: Screaming. Crying. Throwing Up., co-produced with Jason Bateman.
Later, she is set to direct Millie Bobby Brown in Perfect, a biopic about US gymnast Kerri Strug as she battled to overcome a debilitating injury prior to the 1996 Olympics.
But The Last Showgirl was possibly her most joyous experience, so when we ask if she’d like to work again with her Showgirl stars Pamela Anderson and Jamie Lee Curtis she smiles, saying, “Both of those women are incredible in very different ways. Pamela is so inspiring in how she just lives life authentically. I feel so lucky that I got to have this opportunity to work with her and just get to know her as a human being, because she’s just a wonderful person.
“And Jamie is a total force. I was very intimidated to get to work with her after she’d just come off winning an Academy Award. I was like, ‘there’s no way she’s gonna want to do this small movie in Las Vegas, but she’s such a lover of independent film, and she was also very excited to have the opportunity to get to work with Pamela,” says Coppola, 38.
“That was really eye-opening to me to see someone of that kind of legend come work in the confines of our guerrilla filmmaking. She was moving gear around and setting up lights and would sit on set the whole time. She was so generous to all the other actors with the performance, I learned so much just by being in her presence.
“I always had a fantasy that the sequel to The Last Showgirl would be Shelly [Anderson] and Annette [Curtis] go rob a casino, and it’s now a heist film!” she laughs.
Boasting one of the most storied family trees in Hollywood, when Coppola talks about her various cousins, it’s often hard to keep up with the plot.
The only child of film producer Gian-Carlo Coppola and Jacqui de la Fontaine, her father tragically died in a speed boating incident while her mother was pregnant with her, and she frequently refers to the influences of being raised by a single mum.
Then, of course, there’s her aunt Sofia Coppola, cousin Jason Schwartzman and great aunt Talia Shire.
One family member she has yet to work with is her great-uncle Nicolas Cage.
“He’s just so busy,” she says. “But he’s one of my favourite actors and I would love to work with him.”
Main photo by Ulises Proust
