In her 25 years of making films, Sofia Coppola has always found the poetry behind the headlines, the banality in the glamour, the soul in the superficial. Her dreamy, lyrical portraits of girl culture and gilded cages have brought her to 18th century Versailles, 1970s suburban Michigan, the 1860s South, noughties Calabasas and modern-day Tokyo, West Hollywood and Manhattan.
In Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir “Elvis and Me,” Coppola saw something that was glamourous and wild, something that would provide an opportunity for beautiful filmmaking in a setting she had yet to explore — the world of 1960s American rock royalty. But even she was a little surprised to find in this wholly unrelatable tale something, well, relatable: A young woman, isolated, figuring out who she is, in the shadow of a powerful man.
