Sofia Coppola On 'Priscilla'

Fresh Air

NPR

Tv & Film, Arts, Society & Culture, Books

4.4 • 34.4K Ratings

🗓️ 6 November 2023

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Sofia Coppola's new movie is about the relationship between Priscilla and Elvis Presley -- from Priscilla's point of view. The two met when she was 14 and he was 24. Coppola makes films about the internal lives of young women, including The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, and Lost in Translation, which she won an Oscar for in 2003. This fall she published her first book, Archive, which covers her career in film.

Also, rock critic Ken Tucker has an appreciation of a musician you may never have heard of: singer-songwriter Dwight Twilley.

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	News is a public service. That's why NPR never puts a paywall in front of our journalism.
0:05.5	NPR.org, our free website promises to stay that way so that you get all of it, breaking news, pop
0:12.0	culture, award-winning journalism wherever you are to
0:15.8	stay connected head to mpr.org. This is Fresh Air I'm Tanya Mosley.
0:23.0	When Priscilla met and married Elvis Presley,
0:26.0	she was living every teenage girl's dream.
0:28.0	And for years in films, television, and music,
0:31.0	their relationship was romanticized, even after their divorce
0:35.3	in Elvis's death.
0:37.1	But in most depictions, Elvis was at the center of the story, with little interrogation
0:41.5	of their age difference,
0:43.0	Elvis being 24 and Priscilla just 14 years old when they met.
0:47.0	In the new movie Priscilla,
0:49.0	filmmaker Sophia Coppola uses her signature style
0:52.0	to look at their love affair from Priscilla's vantage point,
0:55.1	a teenager who comes of age during her romance with Elvis.
0:59.4	Coppola adapted the story from Priscilla Presley's 1985 memoir Elvis and Me. This is Copala's eighth feature film. Some of her others include The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, and Lost in Translation, what she won an Oscar for in 2003 for Best Original Screenplay.
1:17.0	Sophia Coppola, welcome back to Fresh Air.
1:20.3	It really seems like we can never get enough of the phenomenon that was Elvis.
1:24.5	I mean, we just keep telling variations of his story over and over, but there is something so
1:30.0	fresh about what you have done here by centering Priscilla and I just want to start
1:35.4	with talking a little bit about what it was about this story that made you
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from NPR, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of NPR and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.