Maybe she was burned by the critical reception of Marie Antoinette, or maybe she's just spent the last three years gallivanting around in those luscious costumes. But we haven't heard much from Sofia Coppola since that movie came out in 2006, so it's very good news to hear that she's setting up her next project at Focus Features, and a homegrown one at that.
Her film Somewhere, which she wrote and will direct, will star Stephen Dorff as a troubled actor and Elle Fanning as his 11-year-old daughter. Variety reports that Coppola got special permission to film at the Chateau Marmont, the Los Angeles hotel infamous for the troublesome celebrities who find their way there.
Regardless of your feelings about Coppola and Marie Antoinette or Lost in Translation or even her performance in Godfather III, it's impossible to view this news with anything but excitement. Coppola is one of a tiny handful of female filmmakers whose movies get wide release, and her ideas and visual style are always striking even if the movies don't come together as a whole. I'm especially excited to see where she'll take a story set in Los Angeles, given that she's a child of the movie industry. In the same way she treated Tokyo as a magical foreign dreamscape, I'm hoping she has similar insights into a city far more familiar.
