But it's not just the noise. She mumbles a lot. She swallows her words and barely smiles, as if trying not to take up much space, which she doesn't. She's here to talk about The Virgin Suicides, the movie she wrote and directed. It tells the strange tale of five daughters growing up in the 1970s in the American suburbs.
Boys are off-limits.
So are parties and dances. Kirsten Dunst plays the beautiful Lux, and we watch her and her sisters through the eyes of the neighbourhood boys who long for them from afar. It was that dreamy quality in the book of the same name, by Jeffrey Eugenides, that drew Coppola. I thought it was really sad and funny in a subject that you wouldn't think would be funny. As when a sprinkler suddenly goes off after one of the daughters dies by jumping off a balcony.