Auteur A La Mode

Movie director and Hollywood royalty SOFIA COPPOLA explains why you won’t see her directing a blockbuster any time soon and why fashion photography was her first love. VINCENZO LA TORRE meets her in the city that she immortalised in her most famous work

- Vincenzo La Torre

IF THERE’S A FILM that has come to define the urban sprawl and throbbing energy of Tokyo, at least to Western eyes, it would have to be Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. Only an auteur like Coppola could have captured the sense of alienation and displacement that every visitor to the metropolis experiences. The neon-lit streets, karaoke nights, crowded crosswalks and traffic jams that make up the visual language of the Academy Award-winning movie have greatly contributed to the world’s fascination with Tokyo, and with Japan in general.

It thus felt quite surreal when, on a chilly evening last autumn, we met Coppola in a bar overlooking Tokyo’s skyline at one of the city’s swanky hotels (it wasn’t her beloved Park Hyatt, another benefactor of the still-strong influence of the film, whose most poignant scenes take place within that property).

The diminutive Coppola, who was in Tokyo to participate in the unveiling of a high-jewellery collection from Cartier, is fashion’s favourite filmmaker. Whether it’s her friendship with Marc Jacobs, her widely copied, Parisian-inflected personal style, or her industry credentials (as a young girl, she interned for Karl Lagerfeld at Chanel and decades later guest-edited an issue of Vogue Paris), Coppola has always straddled the worlds of the silver screen and high fashion with great aplomb, keeping a kind of aloofness and indie cred that make her stand out as a director’s director.