Bay Area filmmaker reveals the secrets of controversial new film

When Sofia Coppola was a teenager growing up on her parents’ farm in Rutherford, about 60 miles north of San Francisco, she remembers going for long drives at night and blasting music. A student at St. Helena High School, she found peace in solitude as she spent hours alone in her bedroom, thinking, decorating her walls, taking photos and listening to her family’s distant conversations waft upstairs.

There were people around, but she was on her own. 

The filmmaker didn’t know it at the time, but the seemingly mundane memories of her early years in the Bay Area would go on to inspire some of her most influential dramas and coming-of-age works. Her feature length debut “The Virgin Suicides” confronted the desires of young women constrained by the beliefs of their paranoid parents, while the Oscar-winning “Lost in Translation” traced the fleeting relationship of a lonely wife and a forgotten movie star. “Marie Antoinette” curiously centered on the isolation of a privileged royal, while “The Bling Ring” explored the rise of social media and the tailspin of celebrity worship. But Coppola’s latest biopic, “Priscilla,” an adaptation of Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir “Elvis and Me,” uniquely captures the nuances of fame and power and the alienation of growing up within those circumstances, firmly planting itself in the perspective of the woman closest to the King of Rock ’n’ Roll, whom she met when she was just a freshman in high school.  

Years later, Coppola demurred when asked about crafting her millennial pink aesthetic of the adolescent experience. “I think I probably have to grow up,” she said with a grin. But her vision continues to be one of the most captivating in the genre, evident during a sold-out screening of “Priscilla” at Mill Valley Film Festival earlier this month, where she was presented with the prestigious MVFF Award for filmmaking. (The A24 film is out in theaters this Friday.) 

“I felt like I didn’t see a lot of films with teenage girls that felt relatable or beautiful,” Coppola told SFGATE during a Q&A after the film. “A lot of them were corny or the actors were in their thirties. And so that was something I just cared about. I just felt like teenage girls deserve to have something beautiful and poetic … I never thought I would just keep doing it, but I do have a connection to that age.”

Even now, Coppola admitted she goes back to the headspace of her teenage years in the Bay Area when exploring the dialogue and behavior of her characters, as well as the crucial soundtrack curated for each film.   

“I feel like at that time, I just remember everything being epic and important. Your senses are more heightened or something,” she said. “When you’re creative, you always want to get back to that stage of life in your bedroom as a high schooler.”

The opening shot of “Priscilla” lingers on the titular character’s perfectly polished pink toenails traipsing along a plush matching carpet that looks straight out of the Madonna Inn. Her footprints barely leave a trace. Joey Ramone’s voice howls in the background to the band’s cover of the Ronettes’ “Baby, I Love You” as Priscilla stares at herself in the mirror, applying the perfect flick of winged eyeliner, and Graceland — or Coppola’s dreamy version of it — comes into view. Controversially, the Elvis estate did not give Coppola permission to use his music, but the creative challenge works to the film’s advantage as Priscilla’s point of view takes precedent, a stark contrast to her character in Baz Luhrmann’s “Elvis.”

Cailee Spaeny, 25, of “Mare of Easttown,” is a revelation, portraying Priscilla from ages 14 to 27 with ease while using the subtlest gestures and piercing facial expressions to convey what her character is thinking and feeling. It’s at a diner on an Air Force base in West Germany in 1959 when the shy, solitary teenager is courted not by Elvis for the first time, but by one of his friends, who asks her if she likes his music. 

“Who doesn’t?” the 14-year-old retorts, like just about any high schooler would today if they were asked about Harry Styles or Taylor Swift. He invites her to a party to spend time with the 24-year-old rock star, who has just been drafted into military service, insisting he loves to talk to people from back home. Though Elvis acknowledges their marked age difference — “Why, you’re just a baby,” he says when they meet, to which she replies with a terse “Thanks” — he makes it clear he doesn’t mind. Before the night is over, he kisses her for the first time, and later convinces her parents to allow them to continue their relationship, assuring them his intentions are honorable. It’s disturbing to watch. But through Priscilla’s perspective, we see how a young girl bored out of her mind and far from home gets carried away by the legendary entertainer’s enchanting yet destructive world.

“It was the first time I was in the position that I could relate to the teenage character and the parents,” Coppola, a mother of two teenage daughters, said during the Q&A. “I was trying to approach each character with sensitivity and humanity, all of them. It was a balance, but I just kept coming back to Priscilla’s point of view, and we’re telling her story, and I’m going to try not to put judgment on it.”

With her parents’ reluctant blessing, she moves to Memphis to be with him while she navigates her final years in high school and is forming her own identity as a young woman, but that process is stifled by her beau’s domineering personality as the relationship remains strictly on his terms. (Elordi is about 5 inches taller than the real Elvis and towers more than a foot over Spaeny, which serves as a constant visual reminder of that power dynamic.) 

“When I call you, I need you to be there for me,” he says.

Shots of Priscilla’s whirlwind romance and glamorous getaways with Elvis’ entourage are powerfully juxtaposed with scenes in her gloomy Catholic school, where she’s surrounded by whispering peers and struggles to stay awake in class. When her lover is around, life is a party accentuated by late-night romps through amusement parks, quick kisses stolen in the glow of 4th of July sparklers and glamorous makeovers topped off with a hiss of Aquanet. But he’s also off on tour or on Hollywood sets for long stretches of time, during which she only captures glimpses of him in tabloids and fan magazines.

As Priscilla reaches adulthood, she has to reckon with the loneliness of a life where she’s not allowed to have a job or friends, to wear what she wants, or even to spend time on the front lawn of her own home without being told she’s making a spectacle of herself to the fans clamoring outside. She’s expected to be at Elvis’ beck and call whether he shows up or not, match his enthusiasm as he pursues a litany of quickly changing interests and ignore his ongoing affairs with other women as he refuses to sleep with her until they’re married. Cinematographer Philippe Le Sourd brilliantly captures Priscilla’s claustrophobic days draped in melancholy as she grows more and more disillusioned by her husband’s fast-paced lifestyle and finds the courage to leave him — a poignant moment accompanied by “I Will Always Love You,” a song Dolly Parton notoriously refused to let Elvis record. 

“I was really impressed that she was able to leave Graceland and find a life of her own outside of that, especially at that time,” Coppola said. “I think it was a huge deal for a woman to get divorced from such a powerful man at a time when she didn’t have an income in the early seventies. I wanted to make this into a film because it’s so visual. But really, I was struck by her story.” 

There’s a sensitivity to “Priscilla” that feels personal, perhaps because Coppola could relate to the gilded-cage lifestyle herself as the daughter of “The Godfather” and “Apocalypse Now” director Francis Ford Coppola, and like her subject faced her own share of criticism in the spotlight from a young age. Notably, the film is dedicated to her mother, Eleanor (director of “Hearts of Darkness”) who was born nine years before Priscilla and similarly had trouble with finding fulfillment in a beautiful home and successful husband. (It’s an extremely privileged vantage point, sure, but this is a Sofia Coppola joint — you should know what you’re in for.) 

The film is drenched in surreal details from Priscilla’s memoir, down to the pistols she matched to her glittery dresses to the false eyelashes she applied before going to the hospital to give birth to her daughter. However, people familiar with the book may be surprised to find some of the grittier content was omitted from the film: In the book, one of Elvis’ friends tasked with chaperoning Priscilla attempts to assault her early on in their relationship. An amphetamine-fueled pillow fight leads to the rock star giving her a black eye, which his friends later joke about. And when Elvis flirts with another woman right in front of her, Priscilla retreats to their bedroom and attempts to take her own life by overdosing, but not before donning her prettiest camisole and dramatically fanning her dark hair over her pillow so she will appear perfect to him, even in death.

It would have been interesting to see how Coppola would have addressed these moments, but it’s possible they may have been left out due to mounting pressure she faced to make cuts in scenes that presented the megastar in a negative light. 

“The book came out in the ’80s, but nobody seems to know what [Priscilla’s] experience was,” Coppola said, noting her intent was never to frame Elvis as a villain. “It’s [as if] when it came out, it was a different time and was looked at differently, and then I think some people were surprised, like, ‘How could you reveal these things?’ And I thought, well, it’s been out for years in her book. But I thought it was really courageous that she went into detail about what this was like and didn’t smooth over it.”

The omissions may also have been made for sake of time — the director had to “cut a week’s worth of scenes” from the script after some of the film’s financing dropped out shortly before shooting was about to begin — or due to the fact that the real Priscilla Presley served as a consultant on the film and may not have wanted them included. 

“It was the first time I ever worked on something where the subject was alive and I could call them up and ask them, ‘What were you thinking here? ’” Coppola said. “I wanted to make a film that respected her story, that she felt good about … There’s a little bit of a balancing act of how she wanted her story [told.] And she thinks about it differently now than when she wrote the book.” 

Yet, the film isn’t afraid to shatter any idealized version of the couple, ultimately capturing a first love found too soon, and the evolution of a young woman who learns to exercise her own autonomy after living in someone else’s shadow for far too long. It’s a fascinating look at the dark underbelly of a teenage fantasy, and the power imbalance of one of the most iconic celebrity couples of all time. 

When Priscilla Presley saw the film for the first time, she was emotional. 

“She said, ‘That was my life. I just saw my life,’” Coppola said. “It was so moving because it meant a lot to me that we got it right.”