Over a few months during 2003, two movies opened about Americans abroad, getting very different receptions from critics and the public. The first arrived with a fancy pedigree: Merchant-Ivory’s Le Divorce, adapted by acclaimed screenwriter Ruth Prawer Jhabvala from Diane Johnson’s bestselling National Book Award finalist. It boasted a flavor-of-the-month actress, Kate Hudson, and a star on the rise, Naomi Watts, as American sisters in France. The story of their romantic misadventures and the underlying clash of cultures was timely, coming at a time when Americans were changing the name of french fries to “freedom fries” because of France’s refusal to support American policy toward Iraq and the resulting war. Whether that hurt or helped the film at the box office is hard to say, but in any event the film met with tepid reviews and attracted little attention from audiences. By Oscar time it was forgotten.
Not long after, though, Lost in Translation arrived in theaters. This film’s pedigree really belonged to its writer/director, Sofia Coppola, the daughter of The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola. Lost in Translation also featured a star on the rise, Scarlett Johansson, and it paired her with a long-established actor loved by baby boomers, Bill Murray. Johansson played a young newlywed, Murray an aging movie star, both visiting Tokyo and both feeling disconnected from, well, pretty much everything. Lost in Translation went on to become both a rare crossover indie hit (grossing around $120 million on a production budget of around $4 million) and an award-season darling. Coppola eventually took home a Writers Guild Award and an Academy Award for Original Screenplay.
At a glance, the two films seemed to have a lot in common. Both started as indie art-house releases, though Lost in Translation proved popular enough to get wider release. Both featured Americans in a foreign capital, grappling with the customs of a friendly but profoundly alien country. And both feature a relationship between a younger woman and an older man.
As anyone who saw both films can attest, though, the experience of watching them feels entirely different. In a time when the studios have all opened specialty arms to make and distribute “independent” films, “indie” has come to signify a style of filmmaking more than a financing method. By that standard, Lost in Translation is a true indie: an intimate, offbeat, intensely personal film with a unique style and point of view. It’s almost all atmosphere and subtext, something no studio would have made, yet its fans found it tense and compelling—even though it’s almost entirely plot-free. (To be fair, some critics found it slight and self-indulgent, and consider it overpraised.)
Next to Lost in Translation, Le Divorce seems very much the well-made play, filled with plot contrivances: a stalker, a suicide attempt, and a denouement featuring a well-timed murder and a conveniently discovered fortune. It all seems very old-fashioned, at least compared to Coppola’s film. It’s like comparing Ibsen to Chekhov: One’s chockablock with melodramatic plot devices and twists, while in the other, on the surface, little seems to be happening at all.
Like Chekhov, however, Coppola doesn’t tell her story through plot. “[Plot] is just not what I feel like writing,” she said by phone from her New York apartment. “You just have to do what you’re into. That’s just not what I feel compelled to write.” She set out from the beginning to write a script where what is left unsaid is far more important than dialogue. “That was part of the lost-in-translation thing, that people don’t really say what they mean. There’s just a lot of confusion, not just between the Americans and Japanese but between men and women.
“I just thought of everyone kind of missing each other, everyone’s busy, or not speaking the same language—and then to have this brief moment of connection with someone you wouldn’t expect, a stranger.” It’s almost the opposite of a high-concept premise. “It’s hard for me to even pitch it,” confessed Coppola. “It’s two people; nothing happens.”
Coppola’s two Americans—the middle-aged movie star and the young wife of an up-and-coming photographer—find themselves staying at the Park Hyatt hotel in Tokyo. Both are in quiet crisis: Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is in a midlife crisis, while Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is drifting through her twenties, trying to find a direction. Neither really wants to be in Tokyo. Both are jet-lagged and can’t sleep, which gives them hours of silent nighttime with nothing to do but think. In time they strike up a friendship, each recognizing the same sense of utter dislocation in the other. And they quickly form a bond that isn’t exactly a romance, but is somehow still deeply romantic.
It’s a delicate film, mostly mood and atmosphere, a far cry from the elephantine, plot-heavy tentpoles that sweep through multiplexes like storm fronts all summer. It’s certainly a far cry from the kind of spec scripts that most screenwriters learn to write in hopes of selling a script to a major studio—though its logline, “Two baffled Americans hook up for an interlude in Tokyo,” sounds like the jumping-off point for a romantic comedy.
“It’s such a specific genre, romantic comedy, and I don’t feel like it’s really like that,” said Coppola. “It’s romantic more in feeling and atmosphere. When you listen to a certain song, that kind of melancholic romance, just a brief connection or moment that doesn’t last.”
It’s not all atmosphere, of course; things actually do happen. Bob makes a Suntory whiskey commercial and is bewildered by the direction he gets. A Japanese woman, apparently a prostitute, is sent to Bob’s room to give him a “premium fantasy” that goes comically awry. Charlotte meets a vapid young movie starlet. An insipid jazz trio serenades the hotel bar, where Bob and Charlotte hook up. The two go out on the town a couple of times. Charlotte injures her foot and Bob takes her to the hospital. The real action is in the subtext: What’s not happening and what’s not said give the story its power.
Coppola said that the story is not strictly autobiographical, but when the film opened, the unkind portrayal of Charlotte’s too-busy husband raised some eyebrows, and when Coppola split with husband Spike Jonze some months later it seemed to confirm the sense that Coppola was drawing on her own life. Coppola herself would say only that most of the events and people in the film come from her own memories of Japan. “Aren’t all writers eavesdroppers?” she mused. Of course…but if a writer wants to draw on her experiences, it helps to have had some, as David Franzoni observed. And Sofia Coppola has had her share.
As Francis Ford Coppola’s daughter, Sofia grew up around movie sets. (She’s the infant who was baptized on-screen during the climactic sequence of The Godfather.) And from childhood on she absorbed storytelling lessons from her father. “He was talking to me about screenwriting as a little kid,” she remembers. “He would talk about the three acts: ‘In the first act you have to have this.’ Just being around that, you’re being encouraged, but also learning about writing.”
Unlike some directors, the elder Coppola would take the whole family along with him on his shoots; Sofia’s childhood included a stint in the Philippines during the shooting of Apocalypse Now and time in other locales away from the family’s California home. “Maybe it was the Italian thing; it was so important to keep the family together. That’s why we all went on location; otherwise we would never have seen him,” Sofia recalls.
At first, she seemed destined to go into acting, like her cousin Nicolas Cage. She played small parts in several of her father’s films, including Peggy Sue Got Married (with cousin Nic) and Rumble Fish. At eighteen, she got what looked like her big break: With filming about to start on the long-anticipated Godfather III, Winona Ryder dropped out of the key role of Michael Corleone’s daughter Mary. The elder Coppola, needing an actress in a hurry, turned to his daughter, who had performed ably in those earlier films.
The rest is unhappy history: The movie was trashed by the critics, and much of the blame seemed to fall upon Sofia, who was lacerated by critics and fans alike. (Years later, even after Lost in Translation, she was still taking abuse for it: Slate’s 2006 review of her Marie Antoinette, a pan of the film and of her entire oeuvre, called her Godfather III performance “amateurish.”)
A small handful of observers, this writer among them, felt her performance was not so much bad as wrong. The characters of the Godfather saga had been larger-than-life, even operatic; Sofia’s Mary Corleone was underplayed and naturalistic. In Lost in Translation, Scarlett Johansson gives a similarly low-key performance; in a different context, the style works beautifully. Whatever the case, Sofia Coppola’s Godfather III turn remains one of the famous misfires in American film history, her casting a symbol—unfairly or not—of misplaced Hollywood nepotism (though her father maintains that it was actually she who did him a favor by stepping in at the last minute so he could get his movie made).
Today, Sofia Coppola says she’s too uncomfortable in front of the camera to imagine ever being an actor. As for Godfather III, she reflects, “I’m glad that people didn’t like it, because then I might not have found something I liked doing as much.” But she did not immediately follow her father’s path into writing and directing films.
Instead she kept acting, with parts in Inside Monkey Zetterland and Star Wars: Episode I. She also hosted a show on Comedy Central and became a popular performer in music videos. (Her future husband, Being John Malkovich director Jonze, directed her in the video for “Elektrobank” by the Chemical Brothers.) She also started her own clothing line and designed the costumes for the film Spirit of ’76, produced by her brother Roman. It was this interest in fashion and clothing that first brought her to Japan.
She was still in her early twenties, in the midst of what she calls “that I-don’t-know-what-I-want-to-do-with-my-life thing,” when she was invited to Tokyo to produce a fashion show. When she started her clothing company with a friend, the trip to Tokyo became an annual event. “I loved the way the cities looked, and the feeling of it, and the isolation of being so far away from home.
“It’s definitely inspiring just seeing new things and different things. And I think you are more reflective when you’re away from your regular life, because you don’t have the distractions.”
A few years later, she also began writing and directing short films and collaborated with her father on a segment in New York Stories. On the strength of those shorts, she got the chance to write and direct her first feature, adapting the novel The Virgin Suicides. That film established her as a writer-director, if not a particularly commercial one. The question now was, what next?
She had long wanted to do a movie in Japan; something about those isolating Tokyo trips nagged at her, with the emotions they stirred and those memories of sleepless hours. “I love going to Japan, but it was at that time where I didn’t know what I wanted to do. Having this jet lag, contemplating your life in the middle of the night—What am I going to do? It came out of being at that point in my life, and then in such a strange place.”
There was more on her mind as well. “I wanted to try to write an original script, which seemed kind of scary, not to have a book to be working from. I wanted to make a romantic movie, something I would think was romantic. And I wanted to do something with Bill Murray. So I tried to piece together how to fit those things together.
“I was kind of curious about the whole midlife crisis—a man trying to figure out what he was doing. I thought there was something similar between that and being in your twenties—what are you going to do, rather than looking back on what you’ve done. That was just based on people I know, or friends who are in that phase of [their lives]. And I just pictured Bill Murray in Japan in a kimono that’s too small. That’s what I was thinking about when I was writing that. And I also liked the Humphrey Bogart–Lauren Bacall kind of romance.”
She took the setting from her own visits. She’d stayed in the Tokyo Park Hyatt on a publicity tour for The Virgin Suicides, and that provided fodder for her story as well. “There’s something about how a hotel becomes its own world. You walk in one room and there’s a press conference going on and in another room there’s an ikebana flower class. It’s all the things that go on in this hotel…. It is sort of surreal, [when you] walk into a room and that whole world is going on.” She even drew on her press conferences there. “You find yourself giving these stupid answers about your favorite food. And it’s always funny to hear the translation back, with partial English words in it.”
Actually writing a script, though, is something of an ordeal for Coppola. “It’s so hard. Writing and all the procrastinating involved, I find it really isolating, too. I think the thing that helped a lot was not writing it in a script form.” She started with a suggestion from her brother Roman, who told her to try writing in the style of beat poet Richard Brautigan. “He writes these little paragraphs. It’s easier to write a paragraph than a whole scene or a whole page.” So she wrote down her memories of Tokyo, not worrying about how they’d fit together. “I find that helpful. It takes the pressure off to say I’m just going to write a couple of sentences about what I want the scene to be like.
“If you keep doing it, then you have a whole pile of pages with just a couple of sentences on each one. Then you put those in script form. As opposed to sitting down and saying ‘I’m writing a script,’ you’re just writing little paragraphs.” It worked, she said, “because there’s no plot to chart out, it’s more just these little moments, which hopefully add up to this feeling or atmosphere.”
She works at home and prefers to write late at night, when there are no distractions. “When you’re a little bit tired, you get better ideas when your brain isn’t on all the way. My dad says to get up and do it first thing in the morning, but I’m just not a morning person.”
She started working on Lost in Translation in spring 2001, but the script didn’t come together very fast. “I think there was only one draft, because I don’t like rewriting. For me that’s like cleaning your room or something. I like to write and be done with it. Maybe I made revisions, a couple of different drafts, but I didn’t rewrite the whole thing.
“I think I spent a year writing the script and finishing it up. But I started writing it in this other form. Whenever I get stuck I talk to my brother Roman, and he encourages me to not write it in script form—just to write these little scenes or little ideas.”
Because she found writing so lonely, and to keep her from procrastinating, she even arranged for screenwriter David Russell (Flirting with Disaster) and his writing partner to come over for an informal “writing club.”
“They were just in the other room writing, and we had lunch together. And that helped, because there was someone in the other room writing so you’d better be writing.”
She would get stuck, but when she did, she’d talk to her brother and get back to basics. “I thought about this story in the back of my mind for a while before I sat down to write it, and then going back to Japan when I was working on it gave me ideas for little observations. It helped that I knew what the ending was going to be.
“I knew it was a simple story, more just about the feeling or the mood between these two characters. That’s what I was trying to do.”
On learning that we had read a draft of the screenplay (marked “Second Draft, April 12, 2002”) she admitted being a little embarrassed, maintaining that what we read was “like notes for when you’re making the movie.” Certainly she didn’t write this script to sell it: Punchy, it’s not. On the surface, it looks like the collection of disconnected observations of Japan it started out as—and yet that ends up working perfectly for the film, since it forces the reader to feel as disconnected as Charlotte and Bob.
At length, some themes do emerge from the script: Bob and Charlotte’s longing for connection, and the difficulty any two people can have communicating. What isn’t clear from the screenplay, though, is just how funny the movie turns out to be. (In that respect, Coppola’s writing really is a little like Chekhov’s. There’s plenty of humor, but it comes across in the playing, not always on the page.) In the script, Bob’s encounter with his “premium fantasy” woman is odd; on-screen, it’s hilarious. It also advances Coppola’s themes: Any chance that this could actually be a turn-on for Bob is torpedoed when the woman can’t pronounce the fantasy she wants him to play out with her. Even eroticism is lost in translation.
The film is also structured a bit differently from the script. The script spends many pages following Bob at the outset, not bringing Charlotte into the story for a long time. In the released version of the film, our first glimpse of Charlotte and her husband comes much earlier.
“We moved her story forward. My dad gives really good editing advice, when he sees the early cuts. He gives good writing advice, too. But I wrote it on my own and then I showed him the rough cut. He always tells young filmmakers to make it clear in the beginning. You think it’s obvious because it’s your thing…. You want to be subtle or mysterious, but I feel like if the audience is confused in the beginning they can’t really get into it. So we added some narration there too, just to make it clear where they’re coming from.”
One scene that plays very differently on the screen is a scene where Bob and Charlotte lie on her bed, fully clothed, and simply talk. It’s an honest and intimate conversation, shot from directly above, mostly in one static shot, so we see their entire bodies. On the page, it just seems like talk—good talk, but still talk. On-screen, the scene aches with tension; while they aren’t touching, we feel the attraction between them, and the moment could turn sexual at any moment. And unlike such scenes in typical romantic comedies, that doesn’t necessarily seem like a good idea.
“I like seeing their body language in that scene. But I guess it’s sort of hard to describe on paper…. I wanted there to be that kind of tension. She’s in his hotel room, and right there, something could happen. I like those moments where they’re both aware of something but aren’t really saying anything about it. They’re talking about other things. In those situations, when you like someone, there’s a lot of tension over simple things. I like these epic moments, which seem like nothing if you’re not in the moment. Just those little things in life that seem like a big deal, though they [may not] sound like it to someone else.”
When Coppola finally assembled her script, though, it was less than seventy-five pages long. That’s not unheard of in a script with long stretches with little or no dialogue and where much of the action is meant to be improvised, but it’s still uncomfortably short for a feature script. “I was always trying to make it longer because it was so sparse. I remember screenwriter friends telling me I could make it longer if I put the pages in a certain way, and this and that.” It also became an issue with getting financing. Would someone put up money for such a slender script? Especially one that was virtually unpitchable? Having The Virgin Suicides to show helped, but it was still hard to get Lost in Translation financed.
The solution to the financing problem turned out to be foreign sales. “The Japanese distributor for Virgin Suicides was one of our early financiers. It wasn’t super easy. It wasn’t just like, ‘This is what I want to do.’ We had to work with my agent to go around and get it together.” Some chipped in because they’d liked The Virgin Suicides. Others related to the details of Lost in Translation. “[They] said they could relate to it, that they’d had an experience like that, that they’d had this connection with someone.”
Having Bill Murray attached might have helped, but at that point he hadn’t signed on, so she could say only that he was the actor she wanted. “He was kind of elusive. He never signed a contract or anything. He just said he’d do it at one point. So I went to Japan not knowing for sure—wondering if he was going to show up. But Wes Anderson had told me that when he worked with him, you don’t know, you won’t hear from him for a while, but if he says he’s going to do something, he’ll show up. And they didn’t have any signed contracts or anything, so that put me at ease. But I really wanted him to play that part, and I couldn’t picture anyone else doing it.” Murray, of course, showed up.
She shot with a Japanese crew, which provided more than its share of lost-in-translation moments, and she kept finding moments to add into the picture even as she shot: One long shot of two women laughing at Bob in the hospital waiting area is actually two extras cracking up during the take. “Somebody [on the set] was worried. They said, ‘Should we stop? They’re ruining it.’ But that’s what would really happen in real life.”
Yet as offbeat as Lost in Translation is, its disconnected protagonists hit a nerve with more people than the American sisters at the core of Le Divorce. Where Le Divorce is about expatriates trying to make the best of life in their adopted home, Lost in Translation is about travelers, people who are just passing through for a few days, far from home, cut off from everything they know and without hope of putting down roots where they are. It’s an experience almost any business traveler can relate to.
Still, Sofia Coppola says she doesn’t enjoy writing. It’s directing, which lets her bring her visual sense and acting experience together, that she really loves. But after adapting The Virgin Suicides and now penning an original with Lost in Translation, she said she couldn’t imagine directing someone else’s script. And by spring 2006 she had completed another film about a culturally displaced young woman, this time with ten times the budget: Marie Antoinette. Once again, she wrote the screenplay, directed, and produced, and once again, the film was light on plot and long on atmosphere.
In 2003, though, she was happy to have her first original screenplay behind her.
“For me, writing’s hard, to sit down and actually do it. I’m motivated to do it, because I want to make the movie.
“But I’m not looking forward to doing it again.”
Black Hawk Down
CREDITS
DIRECTED BY Ridley Scott
SCREENPLAY BY Ken Nolan
BOOK BY Mark Bowden
PRODUCERS: Jerry Bruckheimer and Ridley Scott
EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS: Branko Lustig, Chad Oman, Mike Stenson, Simon West
PRODUCTION COMPANIES: Revolution Studios, Jerry Bruckheimer Films, Scott Free Productions
ORIGINAL MUSIC BY Hans Zimmer
CINEMATOGRAPHY BY Slawomir Idziak
FILM EDITING BY Pietro Scalia
CASTING BY Bonnie Timmermann
PRODUCTION DESIGN BY Arthur Max
ART DIRECTION BY Pier Luigi Basile, Gianni Giovagnoni, Ivica Husnjak, Keith Pain, Cliff Robinson, and Marco Trentini
SET DECORATION BY Elli Griff
COSTUME DESIGN BY David Murphy and Sammy Howarth-Sheldon
MAJOR AWARDS
ACADEMY AWARDS: Michael Minkler, Myron Netinga, Chris Munro—Sound; Pietro Scalia—Editing
CAST
Josh Hartnett…EVERSMANN
Ewan McGregor…GRIMES
Jason Isaacs…STEELE
Tom Sizemore…MCKNIGHT
Eric Bana…HOOT
William Fichtner…SANDERSON
Ewen Bremner…NELSON
Sam Shepard…GARRISON
Kim Coates…WEX
Tom Guiry…YUREK
Charlie Hofheimer…SMITH
Danny Hoch…PILLA
Zeljko Ivanek…HARRELL
Glenn Morshower…MATTHEWS
Jeremy Piven…WOLCOTT
BUSINESS DATA
ESTIMATED BUDGET: $90 million
RELEASE DATE: December 18, 2001
U.S. GROSS: $108.6 million
FOREIGN GROSS: $65 million
REVIEW HIGHLIGHTS
“The film manages to pull off the remarkable tightrope walk of remaining scrupulously noncommittal in its attitude toward the conflict…. In this respect; pic is unusually mature, in that it doesn’t tell you what to think. Unfortunately, it also refrains from giving you anything to feel other than general revulsion for war…. The pummeling viewers get—which can be rationalized intellectually as ‘putting them through’ the firefight as vividly as possible—makes the film more rewarding to think about afterward than to actually experience.”
—TODD McCARTHY, VARIETY
“Films like this are more useful than gung-ho capers like Behind Enemy Lines. They help audiences understand and sympathize with the actual experiences of combat troops, instead of trivializing them into entertainments…. The movie avoids speechmaking and sloganeering, and at one point, discussing why soldiers risk their lives in situations like this, a veteran says, ‘It’s about the men next to you. That’s all it is.’”
—ROGER EBERT, CHICAGO SUN-TIMES
“Black Hawk Down wants to be about something, and in the midst of the meticulously staged gunfire, the picture seems to choose futility arbitrarily…. The lack of characterization converts the Somalis into a pack of snarling dark-skinned beasts, gleefully pulling the Americans from their downed aircraft and stripping them. Intended or not, it reeks of glumly staged racism…. The actors are mostly called upon for the kind of ‘it’s a man’s man’s man’s man’s world’ sloganeering before heading off to fight that characterizes most Bruckheimer films: dated martial wisecracks of the ‘Let’s rock ’n’ roll’ variety.”
—ELVIS MITCHELL, NEW YORK TIMES