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It’s hard to imagine a scroll through Tumblr in the 2010s without the worlds of Sofia Coppola. Stills and behind-the-scenes shots of her transportive films were the fodder for hundreds of reblogs. You might know the shot of Jason Schwartzmann and Kirsten Dunst in costume for Marie Antoinette while cameras weren’t rolling, holding a severely out of place MacBook. Archive, a new tome from English publisher MACK, presents this iconic photo among so many more behind-the-scenes images from Coppola’s 24 years of filmmaking, accompanied with notes from the director about the process of making each of her eight films.
“After each project, stuff ended up in boxes: a mix of references, notes, scripts, and photos from set. I took photos with my Contax T3 and asked photographer friends to come visit. As the boxes started to pile up over the years, and enough time had passed, I finally opened them up and started to look through them,” Coppola writes in Archive. “I decided to make a book to have them all in one place. I hope you enjoy this scrapbook of my film work and maybe find it helpful to see how these projects come together.”
Collaboration is an essential part of filmmaking, and the book offers Coppola an opportunity to highlight the people who’ve helped create her celebrated worlds. She remembers Harris Savides, the late cinematographer she worked with on Somewhere and The Bling Ring; she credits her friends Hiroko Kawasaki and Fumihiro Hayashi for helping her to explore Tokyo, which informed Lost in Translation; and she hat tips the many people at work on her sets throughout. The book presents artworks that Coppola used as inspiration alongside shots of the productions—a photo from Bill Owens’s Suburbia for The Virgin Suicides, John Kacere paintings for Lost in Translation’s opening shot, Guy Bourdin’s fashion photography for Marie Antoinette—helping to crack open the rich visuals they were creating.
The sense of conviviality on Coppola’s sets comes through in her photos of surprise visitors and actors throughout the book—Kirsten Dunst, Elle Fanning, and Bill Murray are mainstays, of course, but surprise guests like Pedro Almodóvar and Wes Anderson appear too. The feeling of community extends with frank notes from Jeffrey Eugenides, Jacob Elordi, and Elle Fanning, among others.
Coppola’s own family appears throughout. Her mother, Eleanor Neil, is shown documenting production on many of her sets. “She has hours of footage of the making of all the beautiful costumes and flowers,” Coppola writes alongside a photo of Neil and herself at Versailles. Her daughters Cosima and Romy are photographed with The Bling Ring clapboards as young children, and Romy appears as a teenager on the set of Priscilla as well. All of this adds to the sense that this isn’t merely a closer look at the films themselves, but at the periods of time they each represent.
For those of us who’ve been watching Coppola’s films for years, peeling through Archive feels as nostalgic as a flip through a typical scrapbook might. At 488 pages, there’s a lot to pore over. Designers Joseph Logan and Anamaria Morris presented much of the ephemera (whether it be notes, photos, or moodboards) at full bleed. Rather than simply scanning every selection, pictures were also splayed upon desks or within stuffed binders. The tactility of their presentation mirrors what’s so delightful about Coppola’s films—even when depicting extreme opulence, her textured environments feel inviting.
“We started the process of making the book by going through the boxes and documenting every object and photograph just using our iPhones with the intention of rescanning or professionally photographing things later,” designers Anamaria Morris and Joseph Logan share with AD by email. “We designed a rough version of the book with those placeholder photos and found that we liked their informal look so we ended up keeping many of those shots as the final images in the book, or else used them as inspiration when they were professionally photographed later.” The book cover and text pages are kept simple with a sans serif type on a pink backdrop. “The chapter openers on pink paper are designed to be a pause between all the rich imagery, and it was Sofia’s idea to use a few different shades of pink throughout. As we all know, she is great with color and materials,” they add.
Coppola is filmmaker whose career ramped up just as online fandom did, and whose aesthetic was definitive of certain online spaces in the 2010s. The book saves the iconic behind-the-scenes imagery of her films from the trap of internet ephemerality. You might not have your Tumblr login forever, but we’ll always have Sofia Coppola’s Archive.
Archive (2023) by Sofia Coppola published by MACK
