Sofia Coppola (Lost in Translation) Lost in Translation (2003)
Sofia Coppola was thirty-one when she shot Lost in Translation in the fall of 2002, four years past her debut feature The Virgin Suicides (1999), the daughter of Francis Ford Coppola and the cousin of Nicolas Cage and Jason Schwartzman. Lost in Translation was her second feature, her first original screenplay, and the picture that won her the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and made her, in the spring of 2004, the first American woman ever nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director.
Born into the Coppola family
Sofia Carmina Coppola was born in 1971 in New York during her father's production of The Godfather. She appeared as the infant being baptized at the climax of that film, and as the teenage Mary Corleone in The Godfather Part III (1990) — a casting decision made under emergency circumstances when Winona Ryder withdrew, which earned her a Razzie and made her, in the late-1990s movie press, a kind of public test case for the question of nepotism in Hollywood.
She moved between Tokyo, Paris, Milan, and New York in her late teens and twenties, working in fashion design (a clothing line, Milkfed, with Stephanie Hayman), in photography, and as an apprentice in her father's circle. The Virgin Suicides (1999), her debut feature, adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides's novel, was generally well-reviewed but read by many critics as a curiosity — a daughter of the Coppola compound shooting a moody suburban art film with the Air soundtrack and the right young cast.
How Lost in Translation was written
Coppola has described the script as drawing on a decade of her own intermittent stays in Tokyo — the Park Hyatt as a recurring backdrop, jet lag as a recurring state, the Shibuya crossing as a recurring image. The Bob Harris role was written for Bill Murray from the first draft.
"I had been going to Tokyo for years, staying at the Park Hyatt for fashion stuff, for visiting my brother. There's something about being there alone — the jet lag, the space, the way you're so visibly out of place — that I wanted to put in a movie. And I had been wanting to write something for Bill Murray for a long time." — Sofia Coppola, The New York Times (2003)
The script was about seventy-five pages and Coppola has said she deliberately left the dialogue underwritten so that scenes could be improvised on the day. The midpoint floor conversationb25 is largely as scripted; the karaoke sequenceb18 is largely as scripted; the bar exchanges and the elevator material were heavily improvised around outlined beats. The street whisper at the climaxb37 was not written; Murray improvised it.
The screenplay won her the Oscar
Coppola won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in February 2004 — the first American woman ever to win that award. She was also nominated for Best Director (the third woman ever, after Lina Wertmüller and Jane Campion) and the film for Best Picture. The win is widely cited as the inflection point at which the public conversation about her stopped being about nepotism and started being about her work.
"Sofia Coppola has the rarest kind of confidence — the confidence to be quiet. Lost in Translation would be unwatchable in the wrong hands; in hers it is the most accomplished American film of the year." — David Denby, The New Yorker (2003)
After Lost in Translation
The Coppola filmography since has been largely concerned with the same set of subjects — interior loneliness, women in luxurious enclosures, the texture of bored time — sometimes more successfully than other times. Marie Antoinette (2006) was divisive at Cannes and now widely defended; Somewhere (2010) won the Golden Lion at Venice; The Bling Ring (2013), The Beguiled (2017) for which she won Best Director at Cannes, On the Rocks (2020) again with Bill Murray, Priscilla (2023). She has not, since Translation, attempted a film as structurally minimal.
"Coppola has spent twenty years making variations on Lost in Translation — the woman in the room, the time that does not move, the bounded experience that ends. The variations are not failures of imagination. They are the work." — Justin Chang, The Los Angeles Times (2023)