Sofia Coppola’s New Book Offers a Glimpse Inside Her Mind
Like many artists, Sofia Coppola has been slowly amassing a collection of ephemera from her years of filmmaking that, upon closer inspection, have turned out to have lasting value. Fortunately for her legions of fans, she’s offering up her personal scrapbook for the forthcoming Sofia Coppola Archive: 1992-2023—an intimate look at her inspirations, artwork, and muses, including her frequent collaborators Elle Fanning and Kirsten Dunst.
Archive covers the entirety of Coppola’s career in film, mapping a course from The Virgin Suicides (1999) through Lost in Translation (2003) and Marie Antoinette (2006), to The Beguiled (2017) and her upcoming Priscilla (fall 2023), which will explore Priscilla Presley’s early years at Graceland. Featuring her personal collection of photographs, reference collages, annotated scripts, magazine covers, and other previously unseen behind-the-scenes moments from all eight of her films, Archive provides a deeply intimate look into the director’s creative mind.
Sofia Coppola on set
In addition, the book features an extended interview with W’s own Lynn Hirschberg. In 2021, Coppola, who is the second female to ever win Best Director at the Cannes Film Festival, spoke with Hirschberg about some of her inspirations for W’s annual Directors Issue. She recalled flipping through magazines as a child and being drawn to “society hostesses posing in their glamorous settings, in those ballgown skirts.” It’s an aesthetic that has been meticulously crafted in much of her work—and become a mainstay on Tumblr feeds and Pinterest boards in her honor. With Archive, fans will now have a fresh crop of images to populate their mood boards.
Jason Schwartzman and Kirsten Dunst on the set of Marie Antoinette
A tablescape from the set of Marie Antoinette
Sofia Coppola and Kirsten Dunst
Paris Hilton and Emma Watson from the set of The Bling Ring
“I love to see artists in their creative spaces, so for me this book is like the closest version of visiting my office and seeing all the stuff piled up around my desk,” Coppola told Vogue. “I realized that if I was into a particular filmmaker, I would be interested in seeing all of those behind-the-scenes tidbits.”
Archive will be published in September by MACK books and is available to pre-order now.
