A few Mondays ago, I had occasion to hear a Q&A with Sofia Coppola at the Harvard Film Archive, about which I may write more later. Or not. Most of what was said about her film The Beguiled that evening had been said before elsewhere, as a cursory tour of other Q&As on YouTube dating back to the film's Cannes debut can confirm. You can't expect a director's answers to why she did x or y to change, but fresh questions might lead in fresh directions or at least offer a filmmaker the gift of surprise and more of an opportunity for her sly sense of humor to shine through.
Coppola has long embraced the word "girlie" to describe her aesthetic, but she was also once what I'd term "x-Girlie," as these three episodes of her 1990s Comedy Central show—a riff on which can be seen on the Criterion Beastie Boys disc—with Zoe Cassavetes make clear. Or the wonderful moment where she tries to sell an infant Jon Stewart her trashed GTO in this painfully awkward clip below.
Stewart: "What do you watch?"
Cassavetes: "O.J."
It's all eyeliner and baby tees.
Jon Stewart
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