Interview: on the Ghostly Costume Design of "The Beguiled"

 by Nathaniel R

The costume designer Stacey Battat has, to date, worked mostly in female-oriented contemporary indies. That's quite a perfect niche to build a design career from. Or at least it is when the women who've visually helped define your early work are such stylish talented icons themselves. Battat first made her mark on two Parker Posey features in the late Aughts (Broken English, Happy Tears). Soon after she was deep in the Julianne Moore business (Still Alice, Freeheld, What Maisie Knew). Other credits include The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby: Her and Him and Mozart in the Jungle but it's been her partnership with writer/director Sofia Coppola that's come to define her young career.

The two began working together on the LA dreamy Somewhere (2010). Battat proved invaluable to all the fashiongasms of Coppola's arguably most underrated feature The Bling Ring (2013). Then came an atypical challenge: a forgotten girls school deep in the Civil War era.

I spoke with Battat recently by phone to talk about one of the most visually striking films this past year, The Beguiled, and what she brought to it. Our interview, edited for clarity and length follows...

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Sofia Coppola's Filmography Thus Far

By Spencer Coile 

Sofia Coppola's films belong inside a dream. Her unique blend of warm (yet vibrant) colors, stunning cinematography, and complicated characters, were on display from her debut feature onward. Although many cite Lost in Translation as her magnum opus, to ignore the rest of her stellar filmography would be a disservice to one of the most eloquent contemporary filmmakers. 

Since The Beguiled opens wide next week (it's now playing in LA and NYC) and with her historic Best Director victory at Cannes this year fresh in their mirror let's look at the filmography...

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Women's Pictures - Sofia Coppola's Somewhere

Anne Marie's Sofia Coppola chapter of 'Women's Pictures' has reached its finale. Next month: Agnes Varda!

Sofia Coppola month has been enlightening. I don't know that we've tackled a director as polarizing as Ms. Coppola on Women's Pictures to date, and I've enjoyed reading the varied reactions readers have had to her films. For that reason, and because of the more prominent autobiographical inspirations, the final movie of Sofia Coppola month is Somewhere, the often-overlooked 2010 dramedy.

Somewhere distills the themes Coppola has employed throughout her career, putting them in service of a story that rings clearly from the writer/director's personal experience. After all, before she was Sofia Coppola, Academy Award winning screenwriter and respected director, she was Sofia Coppola, daughter of famed auteur Francis Ford Coppola. She had a firsthand account of how major celebrity can free a person and also trap him, and those contradictions resonate through her entire ouvre. In Somewhere, Coppola gives us a glimpse into the monotony of celebrity that is mostly devoid of easy sentiment. Whether you want that glimpse or not determines how likely you are to enjoy slow-paced movies about wealthy stars having existential crises. To bastardize a line from an old classic: with (films about) the rich and mighty, always a little patience.

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