project 350

Author Eugenides was apparently not pleased with the first draft of Coppola’s screenplay. But later he visited the set, saw the house, and met the actors. “I asked him if it looked like anything he’d imagined. I expected him to say, ‘not really.’ But he said, ‘yes. It looks just like it.’ That was really encouraging. I’m such a fan of his. I wanted to keep what I loved about the book intact and transfer that to film.” Later Eugenides admitted that he was glad his novel was filmed by a woman, “because he got accused of being misogynistic having this violent act happen to these girls, but he always loved the girls. And I get that when I read the book. He was writing from the boys’ point of view and he also had empathy for the girls, and sort of knew about their inner world from afar.”

Although she added a bit she thinks “it’s the boys’ story. The girls sort of represent the end of their innocence. The writer talked about some girl he liked that was the prototype for Lux [Lisbon, the most prominent of the five sisters]. I know stories about guys and the girl they loved in second grade and they’ve never found anyone that compares. But if there’s something I don’t understand, I go over it a million times. And that way I can relate to it.” Coppola sums the story up with, “Boys who don’t understand girls grow up to be men who don’t understand women.”