Sofia Coppola Talks About Walking Away From Her Vision of THE LITTLE MERMAID for Weird Themes and Executives
Sofia Coppola is best known for helming films like The Virgin Suicides, Lost In Translation, Marie Antoinette, and On the Rocks. But she was close to directing a couple of other films that could have been big for her, had she not backed out on moral grounds. She recently talked with Rolling Stone on her press tour for her upcoming biopic, Priscilla, and she touched upon two high-profile projects that didn’t work out for her for one reason or another. The first was the final Twilight movie, Breaking Dawn, which Summit Entertainment split into two films that were released in 2011 and 2012 and grossed a combined $1.5 billion at the worldwide box office. Coppola revealed her journey with the final Twilight movie lasted only a single meeting.
“We had one meeting, and it never went anywhere. I thought the whole imprinting-werewolf thing was weird. The baby. Too weird! But part of the earlier ‘Twilight’ could be done in an interesting way. I thought it’d be fun to do a teen-vampire romance, but the last one gets really far out.”
It is a really weird storyline! I understand not being able to get past it. Another project Coppola discussed with Rolling Stone was her live-action The Little Mermaid, which she developed with Universal Pictures and Working Title around 2014. Coppola was planning to side-step the famous Disney animated film and return the story to its darker roots in the original Hans Christian Anderson fairytale. She left the project after clashing with the studios over the budget required to bring the underwater world to life, but she told Rolling Stone that she knew hit a breaking point with the film after a studio exec mentioned the film should appeal to older men.
“Yes, there was [a breaking point]. I was in a boardroom and some development guy said, ‘What’s gonna get the 35-year-old man in the audience?’ And I just didn’t know what to say. I just was not in my element. I feel like I was naive, and then I felt a lot like the character in the story, trying to do something out of my element, and it was a funny parallel of the story for me.”
Coppola told IndieWire back in 2017 that her Little Mermaid was not the Disney version, adding:
“It was actually the original fairy tale, which is much darker. I thought it would be fun to do a fairy tale. I’ve always loved fairy tales, so I was curious about doing that… It became too big of a scale. I wanted to shoot it really underwater, which would have been a nightmare. But underwater photography is so beautiful. We even did some tests. It was not very realistic, that approach. But it was interesting to think about.”
It’s nice that Coppola has had the luxury of walking away from the projects she didn’t feel connected to, or ones she wasn’t going to be able to realize her full vision with. Priscilla opens in theaters nationwide on November 3rd.
via: Variety