Eleanor Coppola didn’t feel well. So rather than flying from the French Riviera to the next European destination with her famous filmmaker husband, she decided it best to drive back to Paris and wait for him there.
The journey was supposed to take eight hours. It wound up taking almost three days and provided the experience of a lifetime. Decades later, it provided the inspiration for Paris Can Wait, a breezy drama that marks her feature directorial debut.
“It was a great awakening for me,” Coppola said during the recent South by Southwest Film Festival. “I felt completely free to elaborate and fictionalize and make the trip much more interesting. I don’t speak a word of French, so it was an intriguing mystery.”
Diane Lane stars as Anne, the wife of a workaholic filmmaker (Alec Baldwin) whose car trip to Paris turns into an adventure with her driver (Arnaud Viard) that covers two days’ worth of impulsive sightseeing, fine restaurants, exotic wines, and increasingly personal stories.
“My host and guide was a fantastic gourmand. That was one of the high points,” Coppola. “He knew all the places with the best food.”
An avid photographer, Coppola’s filmmaking experience had been limited to documentaries, such as the acclaimed Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, which chronicles the behind-the-scenes turmoil on the set of the seminal war epic directed by her husband, Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather).
She knew she wanted a woman’s voice at the helm of Paris Can Wait, But at 80, she had no plans to start directing features. Despite the filmmaking connections in her family, she couldn’t find the right fit. Francis cautiously suggested she do it herself.
“I couldn’t find a female director who had the aesthetic I wanted to achieve. I just thought I’d give it a try,” she said. “My husband wasn’t too encouraging, because I think he felt that I was never going to raise the money and he didn’t want me to be hurt and disappointed. Then at the last minute, when it was ready to go, there were some glitches with the financing and he really stepped in with his experience and saved the production. He was extremely helpful.”
So after it took six years to secure financing, Coppola spent 28 days retracing the steps of her journey, this time behind a camera. She persuaded Lane, who had roles in four of her husband’s films, to play the lead.
Coppola was inspired in part by Lost in Translation (2003), the Oscar-winning film directed by her daughter, Sofia, which was based in part on Sofia’s true-life adventures as an American making frequent business trips to Tokyo in her twenties.
“She just made this film out of her personal experience plus a lot of imagination,” Coppola said. “I could really see the connection between real life and her film.”
