Sofia Coppola’s Creative Process to Write and Visualize “The Beguiled”

Sofia Coppola sixth feature film made her the first Woman Filmmaker to get the Best Director Award at Cannes. Just like Wes Anderson Coppola has, in two decades, built a body of work that is recognizable, cohesive and still manages to renew itself and expand.

During a conversation at the Film Society, the filmmaker talked about her creative process to adapt The Beguilded from a book to a screenplay and depart from its first film adaptation.

“I think about the visual world like when you read a book you imagine it, so I went to the book and I started marking things that stood out and trying to decide which character I would focus on.

Then just the kind of atmosphere, the palette of it comes to mind and I would find photo references and paintings to illustrate that because I knew I would be talking to my team about what it’s going to look like.

And I start to think about what they would wear and all these things and then sometimes I listen to music, this one not as much.

I think after I wrote the script I watched all the Ken Burns documentary and I looked at portraits of the time, especially a lot of portraits of women and children just to imagine what it was like. Our costume designer, Stacey Battat, had a book about how they had to carry themselves as ladies just to try to figure out what it was like for them, and journals of the time.

It really struck me this idea of how isolated they were and how they were raised to be in society and interacting and attracted to men and all of a sudden everyone’s gone and they’re just happy to learn how to survive.

The writing process is always the hardest part for me. It’s always a relief to get that finished. Adapting is easier than an original script because you have a road map, something to turn to so you don’t have the panic of the blank page.

Writing is hard for me, you’re alone and it’s hard to edit the self-doubt but when you’re adapting something you feel like it existed and somebody somewhere enjoyed it probably so it’s not totally coming from your imagination. But then it’s fun because it’s a puzzle to figure out how to turn it into a film from a book. I always try to connect the characters with real people I know so that they become more human and I can bring details from people I know and love. “