Scene and Heard: Gia Coppola
Photo Credit: Eric Charbonneau/Invision/AP
Image courtesy of Tribeca Film
Image courtesy of Tribeca Film
Image courtesy of Tribeca Film
Image courtesy of Tribeca Film
Image courtesy of Tribeca Film
Image courtesy of Tribeca Film
Image courtesy of Tribeca Film
Image courtesy of Tribeca Film
Image courtesy of Tribeca Film
Image courtesy of Tribeca Film
“It’s super exciting to be here in L.A. where I lived when I was a teenager,” said Gia Coppola at the Los Angeles premiere of her first feature film, Palo Alto (Tribeca Film), hosted by Farfetch and held at the Directors Guild of America on Monday, May 5. The 27-year-old granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola adapted the film from James Franco’s 2010 short story collection of the same name, and Franco joined her onstage to introduce the film. Gia, the daughter of Jacqui Getty and Gio Coppola, studied photography at Bard College and got her start as a director by making some short films for Rodarte, Diane von Furstenberg, and Opening Ceremony. Her movie focuses on the attempted connections and false starts at relationships between high schoolers as well as the hours between school, parties, and gatherings spent in solitude. The moody tone and sun-saturated look of the film brings to mind the work of Gia’s aunt, Sofia, but Gia tends to favor an unflinching depiction of fraught interactions between characters in her work.
Gia cast a number of promising young actors to play the disaffected teens in her film including Jack Kilmer (the son of actor Val Kilmer who also appears briefly in the film), Emma Roberts, Nathalie Love (the daughter of Vogue’s Lisa Love), Margaret Qualley (actress Andie McDowell’s daughter), Zoe Levin, and Nat Wolff. Collectively, they lend the project an unrehearsed freshness that’s rare among films with this subject matter. Though the movie looks as though it were filmed in the San Fernando Valley (production took place in Woodland Hills) rather than in the Bay Area city where Franco was born and where the short story collection is set, the seriousness with which it treats each character lends the movie the credibility it needs to hold our attention. Like her grandfather (with The Outsiders) and aunt (with The Virgin Suicides), Gia has added a worthy look at the world of high school students to the pantheon of bildungsroman films.
By Elizabeth Varnell
Pictured: Gia Coppola at the premiere of her film Palo Alto in Los Angeles.
Photo by Eric Charbonneau/Invision/AP
