Gia Coppola is of pure Hollywood blood, generations of film-making coursing through her veins. So who set the wheels in motion for her impressively soulful debut feature? Her grandfather, Francis, who helped raise her and let her visit The Godfather Part III and Dracula sets when she was a child? Her aunt, Sofia, whose films Gia idolised as a teenager? Her uncle Roman? Her cousins, Jason Schwartzman or Nicolas Cage? Well, no.
The answer, as it often is in 2014, is James Franco. Born in 1987, Coppola was raised not only by her mother Jacqui but by many of the Coppola clan, after her father – Francis’s son Gian-Carlo – died in a speedboat accident before her birth. She wasn’t drawn to film-making, recoiling from it when people presumptuously asked her if she wanted to be a director, and graduated from college with a degree in photography. After that, she got a bar job to size things up. Then Franco showed up.
Coppola’s mother knew him, and knowing that Gia was a big Freaks And Geeks fan, introduced them at a party. Coppola, 22 at the time, told him about her degree and he asked her to send him some photos. He loved them and encouraged her to get behind a film camera; together they decided to adapt his 2010 short story collection Palo Alto, inspired by his teen experiences in the Californian city. “There’s a bit of a girly side to my photos, and he liked the idea of having a feminine perspective to his book,” she says of the mutual appreciation. “And I was at that place where I was thinking about those years anyway. I had enough distance to feel nostalgic and appreciate the awkwardness of being a teenager. But I was still very close to it to understand that James’s book was really realistic, and I related to it in a lot of ways.”
To begin honing her film-making chops, Coppola tapped up her family for some fieldwork. She was costume staff assistant on Sofia’s Somewhere in 2010, shadowed Francis on his Val Kilmer-starring thriller Twixt in 2011, then directed some short fashion films as practice. Eventually she decided to make Palo Alto a full-length feature, expanding and interweaving those of the book’s stories she felt would translate best. Funding it, however, proved difficult: she was a first-time director who, for authenticity’s sake, wanted to cast some unknowns in lead roles; neither of those things are attractive to financiers, regardless of your surname.
Eventually, a frustrated Franco asked his agent to find a film that would pay him enough money to fund Palo Alto himself, and took on a role in wonky Jason Statham drama Homefront. Kudos to him for putting his money where his mouth is, rather than pulling a Zach Braff and begging his fans to cough up. “Yeah, he really was a complete hero,” says Coppola. “He gave me such a chance and an opportunity, it was life-changing.”
Franco was hesitant to star, but Coppola wanted him for the role of the high-school American football coach with dubious designs on impressionable young student April (Emma Roberts), and he’s perfect as the charming scumbag.
The film is awash with such emotional abuse. The girls are exploited by immoral adults and reckless boys, who in turn are spiralling into self-destruction. Mostly, they’re all just trying to find their way, stumbling through the grey area between childhood and adulthood. On paper, it’s your average teenage wasteland, a sea of stock characters: the virgin, the stoner, the slut, the punk. Indeed, Franco’s book got tepid reviews, but Coppola has turned it into a ruminative film, inquisitively prodding at the promiscuity, stripping down the stereotypes and examining the humanity underneath. It’s a sensitive snapshot of adolescence in which we view things as they happen: awkwardly, rather than through overly dramatic filters. It brings to mind not only her aunt’s films (particularly The Virgin Suicides and Lost In Translation) but Richard Linklater’s gentler outings. Coppola credits her old photography mentor Stephen Shore with helping her to develop her visual style: “Just capturing what’s around you and viewing things that normally people would think are ordinary or mundane in an interesting way.”
Down the phone from Los Angeles, Coppola speaks dreamily, laughs nervously and sounds as introspective as her film. “It’s such an interesting time in everyone’s life,” she says of the teenage milieu, “because you’re experimenting and you kind of have to abuse things to understand what it is you like and what you dislike, and it’s really hard to communicate your feelings. I remember having crushes and longings, but there were all these missed opportunities or things that seemed like such a big deal, but you really don’t understand what the other person is going through. It was just a lot of figuring yourself out.”
Other than the largely unknown young cast, extra authenticity is provided by the use of real locations. Some scenes were filmed in Coppola’s old childhood bedroom which, somewhat bizarrely, her mum – who plays Emma Roberts’s mother in the film – had left untouched since Gia left home. “When I went to college my mum was really sad, so she preserved my bedroom, like a weird time capsule,” she laughs. “So yeah, all of that stuff was mine.” That stuff includes a Virgin Suicides poster; Coppola was 12 when her aunt’s film was released. “Virgin Suicides was such a big movie to me as a teenage girl. It blew me away. So I felt like that was a memento to my youth, and I imagine that April would have really had that in her room.”
Coppola loved how the film’s pensiveness reflected her aunt’s own demeanour, and that its characters felt like real teenagers. She also cites The Last Picture Show, American Graffiti, The Outsiders and Rumblefish as influences, the last two, of course, directed by her grandfather. She speaks fondly of Francis, who helped out on the film: as well as providing an uncredited voice cameo at the beginning – she recorded it on an iPhone – and lending his editing suite for post-production, he gave her some priceless tips when she was writing the script. “He was excited about me having this opportunity, and he very much likes to be a teacher, so it was a special moment when he showed me The Godfather and his strategy and techniques for adapting a screenplay. That was really, really helpful.”
On the other hand, Coppola is understandably keen to play down the involvement of her famous relatives. “I have wonderful people to turn to for advice, but I definitely didn’t do this through [Francis’s company] Zoetrope,” she asserts. “My family was obviously very supportive, but they also wanted me to do this on my own and weren’t being intrusive about it. They were there when I needed them, but you know, it’s not fun to have someone hold your hand the whole way through and tell you how to make your movie. I guess people really wanna say that my family just made the movie for me, which is so silly, because why would they do that? Why would I want that?”
Ultimately, Gia was right to be bold: Palo Alto is the finest film by a Coppola in years. Say what you like about James Franco, but he’s not a bad talent scout.
Palo Alto is in cinemas on Friday
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