by Erin Free

Few directors have had as disastrous a major big screen debut as Sofia Coppola. The daughter of towering cinematic icon, Francis Ford Coppola, the occasional actress (she had appeared in cameo roles in many of his films as a child) was thrust into the middle of a personal nightmare when her father made the bold decision to cast her in 1990’s The Godfather: Part III. Left in the lurch when Winona Ryder dropped out of the film, Coppola promptly pushed his daughter into playing the pivotal role of mobster’s daughter, Mary Leone, in her place. One of the starkest and most foolish examples of Hollywood nepotism ever seen, Sofia Coppola was miscast and woefully out of her depth in the role, and her dire performance nearly sank the whole film. As an actress, her career was over, but Sofia Coppola had a few surprises in store.

Nine years after the casting disaster of The Godfather: Part III, Sofia Coppola returned to public life as a film director, and the results were far sweeter than they had been when she was in front of the camera. The 29-year-old’s The Virgin Suicides is an auspicious first film. Taking as her subject Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel, Coppola fashioned an engaging and thought provoking tale of a group of teenage boys whose lives are changed forever one summer due to the death of the adored and dreamy Lisbon sisters by suicide.

Thought un-filmable by many commentators, Coppola kept the book’s fragile sense of time, space and character wholly intact, while also infusing it with passion, empathy, grace and style. With a superb cast headed by James Woods and Kathleen Turner, and great turns by Kirsten Dunst, Josh Hartnett and Scott Glenn, Coppola easily dodged any charges of riding on her famous father’s coattails by delivering a mature, insightful, and engrossing film with a directorial signature all her own.

1999’s The Virgin Suicides, however, was just a warm-up. Coppola followed it up in 2003 with the modestly budgeted but much loved Lost In Translation, and announced herself as a major talent. In this beautifully realised comedic drama, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) finds herself lonely and adrift in Tokyo, until she meets burnt out (and much older…) Hollywood actor Bob Harris (Bill Murray). The pair strike up an unlikely friendship that signals a massive shift in both of their lives. “I was really surprised by her,” Scarlett Johansson told FilmInk of her director. “She’s very conscious of all of us actors. Bill is very instinctive, and he comes to the table with a lot. Sofia was very respectful and responsible with that. She really let us burn a lot of film, which is unusual on a low budget production. She never told us it was going to be the last take, or that we had to move on. She always allowed us our own space.”

Lost In Translation was a critical and commercial success, and Coppola created her very own watershed moment when the film saw her become the first American woman ever nominated for a Best Director Academy Award, and only the third woman (after Jane Campion and Lina Wertmuller) nominated in the ceremony’s history. She didn’t win that gong, but Coppola did pick up the Best Adapted Screenplay Award, and paved the way for a move into bigger budget filmmaking. An ambitious dream project, 2006’s Kirsten Dunst-starring Marie Antoinette was an unconventional portrait of the brattish French monarch, and a major box office and critical disappointment. It was an early career low point for Coppola, and the director’s two quiet follow-up films – 2010’s forcefully emotional but cruelly underrated Somewhere and 2013’s stellar finger-on-the-pulse true story, The Bling Ring – suggested a further slide from the top of the directorial tree.

With her latest film, however, Sofia Coppola looks like she may very well have clawed her way back courtesy of an unlikely remake. A fascinating treatise on gender politics, Don Siegel’s 1971 Civil War-set Clint Eastwood-starrer, The Beguiled, is perfect for Coppola, who adapted Thomas Cullinan’s source novel herself. The director has also assembled a brilliant, spot-on cast, with Colin Farrell in the Eastwood role of John McBurney, an injured Union soldier who hides out in a girls’ boarding school in The Deep South. Frequent Coppola muse, Kirsten Dunst, also stars as an angelic schoolteacher, with Nicole Kidman as the school’s fearsome headmistress. Young Australian actress, Angourie Rice (The Nice Guys, These Final Hours), and Elle Fanning, meanwhile, play students at the school.

Flipping the story to the women’s perspective, Coppola has created a moody slice of Southern Gothic, and recently picked up the Best Director Award at The Cannes Film Festival. “The original film just stayed in my mind,” Sofia Coppola told The Hollywood Reporter. “I thought that it’d be interesting to tell the same story, but flip it to the women characters’ point of view — the idea of these women cut off during that time, left behind during the war. It doesn’t appeal to me to make someone else’s movie. But I just thought the premise was so interesting or loaded, and it would be interesting to tell this story from the other side.”

The Beguiled is released in cinemas on July 13, 2017