It’s 9:30 pm when I meet Gia Coppola over Zoom. 

She’s in the breezy grey of a Los Angeles winter afternoon, I’m in a late-at-work greasy slicked bun at the desk of my Lisbon apartment, cyclone hammering outside. I’m wondering if her pair of pink and white smiley-faced slippers from her photoshoot are just out of frame.

“I didn’t think they were my style,” she laughs. “Now I love them,” telling me how her whole family was gifted matching pairs for Christmas. “I’m a homebody. I like to be at home and decompress.” I get it.

It feels important, somehow, that image. Hollywood director, cinematic dynasty, sliding into something so synthetic and domestic after days spent inside the relentless demands of the film industry. She has a kind of quiet refusal built into her presence, a softness that doesn’t announce itself, and yet there it is, a small act of rebellion against a world that always wants you performing. She is, it seems, always more interested in what happens after the camera is meant to stop rolling.

A WAY OF SEEING

Gia Coppola. The name carries gravitational pull, but in many ways that’s the least magnetic thing about her. Here is a woman (granddaughter of Francis, niece of Sofia) who works against the grain. Whose films inhabit a space that most of us would prefer not to have to think about. In an industry that still expects female directors to perform with absolute certainty, she turns toward the ambiguous and the unsaid. 

Before directing, Coppola, 39, studied photography and fashion, shooting   editorials and campaigns, honing her signature intimate aesthetic. She leaves the camera running when others would cut, forcing us as viewers to sit in discomfort while we work out our own answers. “That’s just what life is like though, isn’t it?” she says. It’s late. I’m existential. She’s right.

You may know her from her debut film, Palo Alto (2013), adapted from James Franco’s stories about teenage drift and American suburban vacancy. Girls in parking lots; boys pretending to be men; the ache of almost going somewhere and almost getting what you want – all that familiar shit about high school you grew out of and tried to forget. Dev Hynes, Mac DeMarco and Coconut Records map the soundtrack, which tells you all you need to know about taste and nostalgia.  We are suddenly right there in that passenger seat, hoping the hot person notices us, hoping we are enough.

Then came Mainstream (2020), a queasy satire of internet fame starring Andrew Garfield and Maya Hawke, released just as the jaws of the algorithm gaped wide and AI nudged its way in. We follow the rise of an internet sensation and are left wondering what the hell it’s all for. Fame is framed as intoxicating, degrading and a pointless form of self-broadcast, yet a strange, necessary evil too, this desire to remain relevant.

Most recently, Coppola directed The Last Showgirl, a raw portrait of an ageing Las Vegas performer, played by Pamela Anderson, who returned to the screen after decades off it. We watch a grown woman wrestle with being told she’s past her best, reflecting the type of shit both Anderson and Coppola, as women in the film industry, have to put up with.

“She [Anderson] was really willing to take big swings that I don't think many actors her age would be doing,” says Coppola. I was so grateful because I wanted the character to just be really raw. And because of her, I think that really set the tone for everyone.” Anderson has since won a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of the film's protagonist, Shelly.

ON THE PRECIPICE

 “I feel like I see things that are percolating and I want to nab them,” Coppola says when I mention that a lot of her casting seems to feature talent at a pivotal moment in their career trajectory. “In my mind they’re already off on a big trajectory. I just try to wedge myself in there just in time.”

Regardless, there’s a through line in her work: characters either on the edge of glamour or demise, and actors on the precipice of a major breakthrough. Maya Hawke stepping out of Stranger Things adolescence; Garfield before franchise sainthood; Anderson returning after decades of projection. Coppola's films are drawn to that unidentifiable edge, where something is becoming or unbecoming.

It’s a sense of timing that’s uncanny, this being present at the exact moment of flux. Watching the director work is like being allowed into a secret physics of emotion: the slight tremble of anticipation; the residue of performance just after it stops; the exact amount of pause between dialogue that makes a room feel lived-in.

THE COMEDOWN AFTER THE APPLAUSE

We get talking about the comedown after a creative project wraps. Gia says there’s an emotional toll in filmmaking. After months of intense intimacy with   a crew and actors, all of a sudden it just ends. “With a film, you’re so meshed with a group of people,” she says. “It’s so nice to have that camaraderie. That’s the way I can handle being social.”

THEN BEGINS THE COMEDOWN.

“You feel kind of lonely while everyone sort of moves on,” she says. “I don’t have a method for that withdrawal. You just have to go through it. You have to feel that floundering panic of, ‘I don’t feel right in any space right now.” It reminds me of returning home after a book tour and only being able to watch crime dramas and eat rice crackers for a month, trying to find the right part of the planet to tip myself back on to without the gravity of family nearby to help me do it gracefully.

“I’m so grateful to have a family life that can balance that,” she adds. “Playing with your kid, that childlike play, it’s such a grounding experience.” 
There’s an intimacy to these admissions, a softness, a recognition of the messy emotional architecture of being a creative adult. Coppola talks about needing her private world as much as a collaborative one: “I’m an introvert, so too much human interaction exhausts me. I really need to be in my inner world. Having to share your work is also a really exhausting experience. It’s nice to absorb in order to produce.”  

It’s this kind of humanness that makes her films worth watching. They carry a pervasive melancholy that’s difficult to look away from, like your dumb, worst feelings are being reflected back at you in a way that reminds you they’re normal. People are waiting. People are hovering. Women backstage or on stages. Girls in bedrooms, wondering why the phone isn’t ringing. For someone who grew up so adjacent to Hollywood, Coppola seems less interested in spectacle than in erosion, in the quiet ways life strips us down and leaves us with ourselves.

“I don’t feel like I have any sort of answer,” she says, speaking about her work, her process and life. “I like to just be an observer. I don’t want to dictate anything. I don’t feel like I have that right necessarily.”

THE HAMSTER WHEEL
OF VISIBILITY

On social media, algorithms, relevancy: Gia is repelled. “Mainstream was grappling with that. We’re heading in a direction where you have to generate constantly. Then there’s no point to relevancy.” I make a note to bring this up in the next commercial meeting, where this is the first thing on the agenda. 
She says she recently heard that younger generations are growing up so transfixed by the future and staying relevant (“like Andy Warhol said about everyone being world famous for 15 minutes”), that they’ve stopped studying the past. “But isn’t that all there is? To look back and understand what happened before?” The signature family craft runs deep.

She admires filmmakers who prioritise community over noise. “I mean, you look at directors like Ryan Coogler and Sean Baker — they’re creating their communities. The pressure of the outcome is not the point. It’s about the experience. 

I want to make things with the people that I feel are my collaborators. Is it still art if it doesn’t have an audience? For me, if I get the opportunity to express myself creatively in a way that feels good to me, I don’t want to just make things to make things.”

I want to know what’s happening next, but I don’t ask. Perhaps this is the same feeling she wants all her audiences to experience, resisting the temptation of tidy resolutions in favour of open, slightly mysterious endings.

About her films, she says, “I think it’s just more lifelike. Nothing ever feels wrapped up in a perfect bow. Stories feel bittersweet. That’s adult. Emotions entwined. You can have both.” But as a takeaway feeling from her film? “I hope people feel a little seen. It hits a nostalgic chord. That it lasts.” 

BITTERSWEET AS AN ADULT EMOTION

Watching Gia speak, it’s easy to imagine a scene from one of her films: a quiet, unremarkable room, the hum of air conditioning, a character alone, waiting in some slightly liminal space where life happens in its unvarnished, complicated, beautiful way. And maybe that’s the whole point: noticing, sitting in it, letting life happen without chasing so much of the like-tracked, shimmery spectacle (guilty). Her work, an unexpected reminder that it is at these edges where the story happens. Where life happens.

Playing with your kid,
that childlike play,