Neither Sofia Coppola nor Marc Jacobs were convinced a documentary was a good idea. Jacobs wasn’t sure he wanted to be the subject of one and Coppola wasn’t sure she wanted the pressure of being the person behind the camera. This was her friend of over 30 years, after all. What if the film wasn’t good?
Yet the idea, which they credit to producers R.J. and Jane Cha Cutler, started to take hold. Coppola has always been interested in fashion and the creative process. Jacobs knew that if anyone could make him feel less self-conscious, it would be her. And they decided to jump into the unknown. At least it would be together.
“There was no off limits,” Jacobs said in an interview, alongside Coppola, with The Associated Press before the Venice Film Festival in September. “It was just like come as you are and you get what you get and that’s the way it’s going to be.”
“Marc, by Sofia,” which opens in theaters Friday, is an evocative, and very Coppola, collage of Jacobs’ influences, his biography and his team at work putting together a ready-to-wear collection.
“I’ve never done anything like this where there isn’t a plan or a script,” Coppola said. “What I was trying to do is show his creative process around this one collection and then interweave inspiration and references and artists who collaborated with him to have this full portrait.”
Creating ‘Marc, by Sofia’
It was a very lo-fi production, they said. Sometimes it would just be Coppola coming into the office with her own handheld camera. Sometimes her brother Roman Coppola would come to help. Coppola had never done a feature length documentary before and found the process exciting, though she said it’s not signaling a new phase or director for her as a filmmaker.
She also got to see some of the behind the scenes things she’s rarely privy to, including being backstage at a runway show.
“I had total freedom, which was great. I was just filming what interested me,” she said. “It was really the same as like taking snapshots, which wasn’t unfamiliar to me.”
The two met in the early 1990s in New York, when Coppola asked her mother if she could go see the Perry Ellis show that Jacobs was working on. They quickly hit it off, bonding over shared loves of art, music, fashion and movies, and have collaborated many times, on handbags, dresses, commercials and more. Jacobs has visited her film sets and even provided clothes for some of her characters, including some of the coats Scarlett Johansson wore in “Lost in Translation.”
While Coppola wanted to acknowledge their friendship, even making a little cameo in her film, she also didn’t want it to be about her or even them, necessarily. The focus would remain on Jacobs.
“I didn’t want it to be too much about me,” Coppola said. “But I wanted it to feel that it’s personal and made by me and that I’m part of it and in that way it’s not just a generic interview or portrait.”
