THE AIR THAT I BREATHE

I didnt know what I wanted to do next, but I knew I wanted to do something that was really beautiful.

Sofia Coppolas movies reveal her contradictions. She is a director whose Hollywood inauguration was a birthright, thanks to an illustrious family tree and a luckless child-acting stint she never wanted. Fleeting youthfulness lies at the center of her stories: the troubled teens in The Virgin Suicides and The Bling Ring, the aging actors adrift in Lost in Translation and Somewhere, the callow duchess thrust into notoriety in Marie Antoinette, and now the repressed boarding-school denizens in The Beguiled. Her characters seek better horizons, but Coppola is nothing if not resolute, sophisticated, singular.

In the words of Bling Ring star Israel Broussard, Coppola has a motherly essence and gracefulness. According to Virgin Suicides matriarch Kathleen Turner, who also co-starred with Coppola in the 1986 comedy Peggy Sue Got Married, She gives you a lot of freedom, but you feel she knows what she wants. Stephen Dorff, the Somewhere headliner in whom Coppola spotted a vulnerability that no other director saw, waxes about her observant and confident disposition. Bill Murray, who netted his only Oscar nomination to date for Lost in Translation, has been known to call her the Velvet Hammer.

Not many filmmakers can claim palettes or personas as idiosyncratic as Coppolas. She is known for getting the performances she wants from her actors and the sun-splashed aesthetics she wants from her cinematographers. She can take on the gravity of the French Revolution or the Civil War, imbuing a contemporary milieu that might make you forget youre watching a period piece. She has tackled the insularity of suburbia and the disconnectedness of a metropolis, ensuring you relate to both. Every time you think you know Sofia Coppola, she challenges your assumptions, while still maintaining a fixation on adolescences ephemerality and the inhibitions that accompany maturity.

The Beguiled , which opens in limited release June 23, is more contained than her previous features, taking place entirely at the Miss Martha Farnsworth Seminary for Young Ladies. The institutions resources have grown scarce as the Civil War roars on, invoking a malaise that defines the Coppola catalog.

Somewhere was an exercise in how minimal we could make that movie and still have it be a movie, she said during our recent interview in New York. The script was not even a script it was like 30 pages and it was just very, very simple. After Marie Antoinette was so decorative and so many people, I wanted just to strip down how simply you could make a movie. That was the thinking. And then after Bling Ring was such an ugly world, I wanted to do something beautiful. That was the starting point for The Beguiled.