LOST IN TRANSLATION
Q&A with director Sofia Coppola, actress
Scarlett Johansson and producer Ross Katz		 Search all of phase9.tv






Movie Interview by S Felce

Sofia Coppola wanted to make a movie about Japan and wanted Bill Murray to play the lead role. That’s all she knew when she start writing the script for LOST IN TRANSLATION. Together with the female star of the movie, Scarlett Johansson and producer Ross Katz, Sofia Coppola meets the English Press at London’s Dorchester Hotel. Softly spoken and a bit shy, Coppola answers briefly to all the questions and leaves the more outgoing Johansson to talk about her memories while shooting the film.


(To Sofia Coppola) Bill Murray gives this film one of his best performances of the year. Did you think of him playing the lead role as soon as you wrote the script?

SOFIA: I actually wrote the script with him in mind. I wanted to work with him and see him playing a romantic role and actually this combination of being really funny, sweet and sad.

(To Ross Katz) How did you come on board LOST IN TRANSLATION?

ROSS: I think I am one of the biggest fans of THE VIRGIN SUICIDES and fortunately I was working on a film whose director had the same agent as Sofia’s, so he put us together and then I was just anxious to work with her. She is amazing and I think that being a fan of THE VIRGIN SUICIDES just helped to put it all together.

(To Scarlett Johansson) What was it about this movie that struck a cord with you and made you want to play Charlotte? It seems that you and Bill Murray play these characters so well because you understand the limbo in which they find themselves - the clashing of culture, the jet lag, everything that goes with travelling…

SCARLETT: Sofia and I met in a restaurant in New York and she told me she had this idea that was shaping into a script with Bill Murray in it and if it wasn’t Bill Murray she wasn’t going to do it and it was based in Tokyo. It had two appealing things for me - Tokyo and Bill Murray - so I asked her to send me the script when she had finished with it. Not much time later the script arrived. I knew straight after I finished reading it that it was a project I wanted to be part of. It was such a beautiful script. Everything was there. It was only 75 pages, a lot of it was very visual, and the dialogues between Bill Murray and me were like a... ping-pong! I had one line. He had one line. It just read so well, like a great novel and when I finished it I was sad and I was happy. I just knew I could play it!

Sofia, is there much of yourself in the character of Charlotte, as for your experience of travelling to Tokyo as a young woman?

SOFIA: The story is personal to me in all the characters, from Scarlett’s character to Bill’s character. I was definitely thinking of myself in my twenties when I didn’t know what I wanted to do, I had just finished school.

Sofia, LOST IN TRANSLATION is being produced independently. Do you think that if the movie had been produced by a major studio it would have been different?

SOFIA: It was important to me that the film was made according to the idea I had in [my] mind and the only way to do that was to make it low budget.

Scarlett, what did you like best and least about Tokyo?

SCARLETT: I was really tired when I was there. We were shooting one week during the day and one week during the night and it was very surreal. Also, because we were staying at the same hotel it was really strange for me to go downstairs in my pyjamas for a scene. The days I had off, which was one per week unfortunately, I tried to do what everybody else was doing: going for a walk, eating out, going shopping but I didn’t do any tourism. I was too much involved in what I was doing.

Continued on page 2


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