Sofia Coppola on reuniting with Bill Murray for On the Rocks: ‘He always brings magic and unexpectedness’
- The Lost in Translation director and star team up again for a touching father-daughter comedy co-starring Rashida Jones and set in New York
- Like the actor’s collaborations with Wes Anderson and Jim Jarmusch, Coppola believes Murray brings something special to her films
Sofia Coppola’s new film – the seventh of her career – is called On the Rocks. The title is a pointed reference to a marriage heading for disaster.
The film may be of the moment – it starts streaming this week on Apple TV+ – but the way Coppola sees it, the flirtatious, hard-drinking Felix is pure old school.
She says: “There is a kind of generation of men and they were the ones that drink martinis and smoke cigars and are connected with kind of old world way of life that you don’t see as much now and, of course, their perspectives are different … it comes just from our parents’ generation and characters that I’ve met along the way.”
My father started as a writer and always encouraged us to try to write. People all work in different ways, but I feel like I can connect most making my own story
Naturally, the moment she says this, it’s impossible not to think of her father – legendary filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, the director of The Godfather and Apocalypse Now – who grew up in that era she refers to. Whatever she did – or did not – draw from her relationship with her father, Coppola’s latest is a touching and wryly amusing tale of the father-daughter dynamic.