Patron saint of teen girls Sofia Coppola feels like the “villain character” now that she has her own teens
Sofia Coppola reflects on her teen daughter's viral TikTok moment while promoting Priscilla
Aux News Sofia Coppola
Sofia Coppola’s upcoming Priscilla is slated to be another intimate portrait of teenage girlhood, this time filtered through the eyes of Priscilla Presley, who was just 14 years old when she met her future husband Elvis Presley, 10 years her senior. Their complicated love story may have been something out of a teen dream, but it left her parents “confused and bewildered” and, understandably, reluctant to leave their young daughter in the care of an adult man (and an ultra-famous one at that).
Coppola may be a master at accessing the messy, sometimes problematic feelings of her teen subjects, but these days she might relate more to the “confused and bewildered” parent in the situation. “Now I can see the mother’s point of view also,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter of making the film now that she has teen daughters of her own. “And I see all these teen-girl objects in my house that look like set dressing from one of my movies. In my life, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, now I’m the villain character.’ That’s new. I can’t believe that.”
Nothing about Priscilla’s story is black and white, though audience members might have their own opinions on who the real villain is. (It may just be the grown man grooming a young girl to be his wife.) From the perspective of a teen, though, the villain is usually the parent setting reasonable and healthy boundaries for their child. Priscilla, for one, thinks she probably would have run away if her parents had stopped her from seeing Elvis. “My parents were really beside themselves,” she says to THR. “I basically threatened them and told them, ‘If you don’t let me go, I’ll find my way.’”
Coppola’s kids have found their own ways to rebel, too—her daughter Romy Mars infamously went rogue on TikTok earlier this year, explaining how she was grounded “because I tried to charter a helicopter from New York to Maryland on my dad’s credit card because I wanted to have dinner with my camp friend,” she explained in the video.
“We were raised to be so private, and social media is so the opposite of how I grew up,” Coppola explains of her household social media ban in the THR interview. “I got lots of compliments on [Romy’s] filmmaking. And comedy. She’s funny. But people discussing my parenting publicly is not what I would’ve hoped for.” You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the parent setting those dreaded boundaries for your kids, apparently!
18 Comments
Elvis liked to have pj parties with teenage girls, he was a very strange dude.Also I’d like to take this spot to say that Agent Elvis is a better series than it had any right to be.
Michael Jackson liked to have kid pj parties too. That level of famous makes people strange. I’m sure Madonna has pj parties and Prince looked like he lived in pjs. Elvis pj parties don’t seem that strange if taken in context. Madonna, of course adopted her kids. She didn’t marry one. But Elvis’s friend Jerry Lee Lewis did. So there you go. Oh and yeah, he was a strange dude.
Prince is the only one who made pancakes though.
I think Madonna birthed one of her kiddos.
Look, say what you like about Elvis, at least he didn’t fucking ruin Godfather III.
C’mon, be fair. Sophia was only one of many things wrong with G3. A helicopter gunship hit on the family?
“What Would Jay Leno Do?”
I think if you’re looking for a Coppola to blame for the ruin of The Godfather Franchise, we need to start with Francis Ford. Was her acting on the same level of everyone surrounding her? Nope. It would also have been better if FF wasn’t just shitting another one out so he could finally get out of the kind of debt that One From The Heart brought on? That would’ve been a better start!
Sofia: Who taught you to behave like this??
Romy: You, alright? I learned it by watching your movies!
Parents who make movies about teens have children who become teens.
…Is Sophia Coppola considered the “patron saint of teen girls”?Like, are her movies considered especially popular with teens?
Her publicist who mailed this brief and quotes to the AV Club said that was the branding they were trying to establish.
For that matter, are her films even especially about teen girls? I mean, several of them have teen girls in them as main characters, sure, but they don’t generally seem to be especially about themes specific to teen girls, and there’s many she’s made which aren’t really about teenagers or teen issues at all.You might as well say she’s the patron saint of Bill Murray, she’s made almost as many projects with / about him as she has about teen girls.
Films about/focused on teen girls: The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, Somewhere, The Bling Ring, The BeguiledFilms with Murray: Lost in Translation, On the RocksShe is definitely interested in the worlds of teen girls, particularly young white privileged ones.
Fair enough, but I didn’t count Somewhere because the child character in that is ten or eleven or something, which is more pre-teen, and given that they’re historical dramas which happen to involve girls we’d now consider teenagers it’s not like Marie Antoinette and The Beguiled are exactly about modern teenagers and their interests; those ones aren’t exactly, I dunno, Clueless or Mean Girls or films specifically about being a modern(ish) teenage girl. So while I won’t argue that she’s clearly interested in depicting a kind of privileged experience enjoyed by a range of young girls and women, describing her as ‘the patron saint of teen girls’ still seems like kind of a stretch based on her actual filmography. She clearly has a range of interests she enjoys exploring.Also, I was counting A Bill Murray Christmas because she was credited as a writer-director on that and I was feeling snarky.
Nope! It was a weird thing to say.
We all get old.