Sofia Coppola Talks Somewhere Soundtrack. Photos by Merrick Morton Like Lost in Translation and Marie Antoinette before it, Sofia Coppola's impressionistic new film Somewhere deconstructs fame to reveal a core loneliness.
And, like in her other work, the film's music-- including songs by Phoenix, the Strokes, Foo Fighters, Gwen Stefani, and more-- is an integral part of the package. But instead of using the soundtrack to amp up the emotions of a scene, Coppola aimed to use songs that her characters would actually listen to in the moment. Somewhere IMDB. Somewhere AlloCiné. Somewhere Trailer. Soundtrack. First Clip. Phoenix Talk Soundtrack. Earlier this year, fresh off winning a Grammy for Best Alternative Album (and having an interesting exchange with "Jersey Shore" star Snooki on the red carpet, frontman Thomas Mars told BBC Radio that his band has written a "very minimal" soundtrack for his girlfriend Sofia Coppola's upcoming film "Somewhere.
" "It was more about trying to make a sound that fits with a Ferrari and the city of Los Angeles," Mars told the BBC about the soundtrack. "It was more of an engineer work than a composer. " It sounded intriguing, so when MTV Radio caught up with Mars' Phoenix bandmates, they asked about the "Somewhere" score — which, according to press release from Focus Features, stars Stephen Dorff as a "bad-boy actor" who gets an unexpected visit from his 11-year-old daughter — they tried to pry some additional details out of 'em.
First Look. Elle Fanning and Chateau Marmont Star in Somewhere. Why Phoenix and why Stephen Dorff. New photos. Venice First Impressions. The Guardian. Like Monet returning to his lilies, though with perhaps diminishing effect, filmmaker Sofia Coppola has returned to the daddy-daughter theme and to the world of flat, blank, affectless movie actors in flat, blank, affectless hotel rooms.
Weirdly, the movie looks like an acidly satirical comedy about LA celebrity but with all the acidly satirical comedy removed, so that all that is left is a skeleton outline, a series of scenes and locations – hotel rooms, lobbies, swimming pools, luxury automobile interiors – in which essentially gentle, forgiving dialogue takes place.
In her tremendously funny breakthrough movie Lost in Translation (2003), Bill Murray played an ageing, lonely actor on a trip to Tokyo, who finds fleeting companionship and even a kind of redemption in the friendship he strikes up with young and vulnerable Scarlett Johansson; their relationship morphs from platonic flirt to a touchingly paternal care. Empire. Variety. Coppola hits the right note in Somewhere. This quiet and restrained portrait of Hollywood star Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) and his on-off relationship with his 12-year-old daughter Chloe (Elle Fanning) is not the noisy showbiz chronicle other directors might well have made it.
Johnny, divorced, lives in a suite at the Chateau Marmont Hotel. He drives a Ferrari, can pull any girl he likes, drinks a bit too much and takes the usual pills. We first see him in bed as two nubile blondes perform a pole-dancing number. He’s too tired to do anything but watch with a lazy smile. He is, however, not a brash or a bad man. Venice Early Review. Write what you know.
And Sofia Coppola knows Hollywood. The last time I interviewed the writer-director, for Lost in Translation, we talked in the lobby of the Chateau Marmont, which plays a major role in her new movie, Somewhere, which world-premieres in Venice Friday night, its only fall-fest showing before Focus Features opens the film on December 24. (Paris-based Coppola just gave birth to her second child.) REVIEW. Time Out on twitter. TImeOut Review. Time Out says Posted: Tue Dec 7 2010 Playing it more low key and less brash than in ‘Marie Antoinette’, Sofia Coppola is back in another rarefied world for her fourth feature and her first on home turf since ‘The Virgin Suicides’.
This time she swaps Versailles for Sunset Boulevard and the French queen for Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff), a movie star living in limbo in a Hollywood hotel. Not any lodging house either, but the Chateau Marmont, a haven for upscale decadence where one is likely, as Johnny does, to bump into the likes of Benicio del Toro in the lift (a nod to Scarlett Johansson’s joke that she had a steamy encounter with him in one of the hotel’s elevators). Johnny does little apart from feel like a spare part at his own parties, lie in bed watching strippers slide down poles as he recovers from a broken arm and occasionally obey orders to attend press conferences.
Award's controversy. On Suchablog. Interview Sofia Coppola. You could say Sofia Coppola's work is primarily concerned with stories of lives playing out in the heady glow of fame or notoriety: the talk-of-the-town death-wishers in "The Virgin Suicides," the lonely wife lounging in the fancy hotel while her husband hobnobs with celebs in "Lost in Translation," the mercurial public and private life of the young queen of France in "Marie Antoinette.
" Now comes "Somewhere," a film set at the famed Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles, where a restive hotshot actor (Stephen Dorff) whiles away his time until his adolescent daughter (Elle Fanning) shows up and forces him to reassess his ways of emptiness and agony. The settings might change — 18th-century France, modern-day Hollywood — but the themes and the existentially troubled atmosphere of Coppola's films remain the same. MTV: The title is "Somewhere. " Did you come up with it early on? The Minimalism Of ‘Somewhere’ Sofia Coppola's latest effort, "Somewhere," tells the story of a partied-out action star (played by Stephen Dorff) who hangs out at the chateau marmont, gets laid at will and basically lives a fleeting, empty existence, until he's forced to deal with his daughter (Elle Fanning) full time, and he reassess his life.
There's not much else to the film, and we noted that in our review but that's what Coppola was striving for. "I think after Marie Antoinette, I wanted to take a shift from what I’d just done that was so decorative, so many characters, I was interested in how simply you could tell a story," she said when we recently sat down with her to discuss the film. "Somewhere" certainly stands out in a year where some of the most highly-praised American films -- "Inception," "The Social Network," "Black Swan" -- feature complex narrative structures and almost wall-to-wall music.
The Oscar-winning writer/director has a reputation for light scripts as well.