If anyone has the potential to make special-edition DVDs cool again, it’s Sofia Coppola. On April 24, Criterion Collection will release the Academy Award winner’s macabre directorial feature debut—a dreamily shot, deeply unsettling meditation on loss, voyeurism, and the enduring mysteries of teenage girlhood, centered on the brief lives of the elusive Lisbon sisters and adapted from Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 novel—via a special-edition Blu-ray.

“It’s really thrilling to me,” Coppola said by phone Tuesday afternoon. “I was so excited to be included in their collection, because I love what they do. Obviously, it was my first film, and it didn’t have much of a release at the time and there wasn’t a good DVD of it. So to be able to have a really nice one, with all the content—it’s a thrill.”

Beyond the restored edition of the film itself, the DVD includes new interviews with Coppola, cinematographer Ed Lachman, and Eugenides, actors Kirsten Dunst and Josh Hartnett, and Tavi Gevinson, as well as Lick the Star, a 1998 short film by Coppola that set the tone for the director’s interest in exploring the micro-dramas and heightened emotions of youth.

Coppola says she felt compelled to write her first feature-length script soon after falling in love with Eugenides’s novel. Now, as Criterion essentially enshrines the film as a classic in its own right, she joked that she recently asked the distribution company whether anybody buys DVDs anymore. “And they said, yeah, there is this small niche of people that collect them—like vinyl.”

Coppola remembered the film’s summertime shoot as a family affair. “I have fond memories of that time,” she said. “We had a lot of enthusiasm from the young cast and the crew. I had my brother [Roman] and my husband [Spike Jonze, at the time] helping me. It was definitely scary, but there was so much to do, so we just figured it out.”

The Virgin Suicides also marked the start of Coppola’s ongoing collaboration with a then 16-year-old Kirsten Dunst, a partnership that continued through 2006’s Marie Antoinette and The Beguiled in 2017. “I loved working with Kirsten. I mean, obviously I guess. That’s when we met and had our first connection,” said Coppola. “We just clicked right away, and she knew what I had in mind . . . she was really there for me.” And of course, she added “it was fun to have Josh as Trip Fontaine.”