By Out promoting her “Priscilla” film this week, filmmaker Sofia Coppola spoke to Rolling Stone where they asked her about two major projects she was once linked to but ultimately seemed to either pass or dropped out of the running.
One was “The Little Mermaid,” but not the Disney live-action take that hit cinemas this year. Rather she was directing a new take on the original Hans Christian Anderson fairytale for Universal Pictures and Working Title back in 2014.
It was said at the time Coppola left that project after a clash with the studios over budget. A few years later she revealed she wanted to shoot it “really underwater” and they ran some camera tests at the time.
In the new interview, she says she reached a breaking point after a studio executive mentioned the film should appeal to older men:
“I was in a boardroom and some development guy said, ‘What’s gonna get the 35-year-old man in the audience?’ And I just didn’t know what to say. I just was not in my element. I feel like I was naive, and then I felt a lot like the character in the story, trying to do something out of my element, and it was a funny parallel of the story for me.”
The other film in question was the final “Twilight” film “Breaking Dawn” which was ultimately split into two and released in 2011 and 2012 with a gross of $1.5 billion at the worldwide box office. Coppola says:
“We had one meeting, and it never went anywhere. I thought the whole imprinting-werewolf thing was weird. The baby. Too weird!
But part of the earlier ‘Twilight’ could be done in an interesting way. I thought it’d be fun to do a teen-vampire romance, but the last one gets really far out.
I think it’d be fun to do sci-fi and I think it’d be fun to do, not like gory, but I like gothic horror. I don’t have an idea, though.”
Ultimately “Dreamgirls” and “Gods and Monsters” director Bill Condon took the helm for the final two “Twilight” films. Coppola’s “Priscilla” opens in theaters nationwide on November 3rd.
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