Alongside her new Jacob Elordi-starring film Priscilla, Sofia Coppola will be dropping her very first self-authored book sometime this September, titled Sofia Coppola Archive: 1999-2023. The filmmaker par excellence and illustrious chronicler of girlhood announced the upcoming release yesterday in an interview with Vogue: apparently the result of years of wrapping films and tossing all associated ephemera into a memory box. Examples, according to writer Keaton Bell, include “script drafts, magazine clippings, Polaroids from costume fittings. Anything that took up space on her desk or got pinned to a bulletin board during filming.”
Sofia finally had time to sit down and sift through all the “junk” she’d accumulated during the first COVID lockdown in 2020. “I stepped back and realised, oh wow, I guess I have a body of work now,” she told Vogue. “I realised that if I was into a particular filmmaker, I would be interested in seeing all of those behind-the-scenes tidbits.” And don’t we just! Said tidbits will include nostalgic fare like the poster from the Sundance premiere of The Virgin Suicides, and a marked-up copy of the Vanity Fair article that inspired The Bling Ring.
“I wanted it to feel more like a scrapbook than a coffee table book,” Sofia said. “I love to see artists in their creative spaces, so for me this book is like the closest version of visiting my office and seeing all the stuff piled up around my desk.” At 488 pages, it’s one hell of a desk pile to get to see, described as “a treasure trove for anyone with even a passing interest in the filmmaker’s work, featuring hundreds of never-before-seen photographs shot by Coppola and her collaborators over the years.”
The book was designed by Joseph Logan, but personally edited and annotated by Sofia herself, offering an “intimate encounter with her methods, references, and collaborators and an unprecedented insight into her working processes,” according to The Film Stage, as well as an extended interview with Coppola, conducted by celebrity journalist Lynn Hirschberg. Now all we have to wait for is… autumn. For the time being, you can pre-order Sofia Coppola Archive: 1999-2023 here.