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Priscilla director Sofia Coppola says that, despite her plaudits and hit rate at the box office, she continues to fight for “a tiny fraction” of the money her male counterparts have to work with.
Coppola, who has an Oscar to her name for Best Screenplay for her 2002 movie Lost in Translation, told BBC News that budget restraints meant her forthcoming biopic was shot digitally, not on film, and put together in just 30 days:
“I just see all these men getting hundreds of millions of dollars and then I’m fighting for a tiny fraction of that.
“I think it’s just left over from the way the culture of that business is. It’s frustrating but I’m always fighting to get it and I’m just happy to get to make my movies independently and find people that believe in them.”
But she adds that this limitation gives her the chance to be creative:
“There’s a challenge and a freedom in making things small because if you have a big budget, you have a lot of input from studio executives, and I would never be able to make a movie like that.
“So I have that freedom. And then you have to be really crafty and it was really hard but I had the best team… we were able to re-use sets and I don’t know how we made so many costumes! It was all hands on deck and just having really creative department heads.”
“I would have liked to shoot on film, but we shot digitally because we had to move so fast.”
Priscilla is based on Priscilla Presley’s 1985 memoir Elvis and Me, with Presley named as an executive producer on the movie.
When it’s released on January 1, fans of Elvis may notice a lack of his songs on the soundtrack. This came down to rights issues, another challenge Coppola faced head-on, telling BBC News:
“I originally wanted to have three Elvis songs, but I always knew that we might not be able to get them. I wanted it to really be focused on her [Priscilla’s] story… and to me it is really important to have Dolly Parton at the end, to have a woman’s voice at the end.”
The movie finishes with Parton’s song, I Will Always Love You, the track the country star famously refused to give to Elvis after his manager Colonel Tom Parker tried to wrestle the publishing rights from her.
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