Sofia Coppola on The Bling Ring

Strange but true: teenagers who want for nothing, but still commit break-ins. They have been reported in the famous Beverly Hills district and more particularly in the villas of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan. Standing for the moment in the shoes of their (idiotic) idols was at least as important to them as their ill-gotten gains. Sofia Coppola has given us a portrait in The Bling Ring.

“It is always a pleasure to come to Cannes, but The Bling Ring is very much at home here,” observed Sofia Coppola knowingly when she spoke to the press. Her latest film opened in the Cannes side competition that goes by the name of “Un Certain Regard”. In The Bling Ring she sketches a portrait of a bunch of filthy-rich kids who, thanks to the social media, find out when the stars are out and then break into their villas and goggle at their wardrobes, their kitsch, and even their toothbrushes.

Obsession with fame
Coppola didn’t make them up. The young band of thieves, obsessed with fame and hip lifestyles, has been dubbed the Bling Ring. Among other things, they stole shoes and jewellery belonging to Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Megan Fox. Vanity Fair published their story under the title “The Suspects Wore Louboutins”. “I knew about the story from the news, alright, but when I read that article in the plane, I immediately knew this was for me,” says Coppola. “We got hold of the rights. The more I talked to the journalist and read the transcripts, the more I thought the whole thing was so fascinating and so contemporary and said so much about our culture today. I thought it seemed like a movie: it was unbelievable, and had young, pretty kids being bad in a glamorous world. I think their quotes really struck me: how they didn’t seem to think they had done anything that wrong, and how they were mostly interested in the fame the robberies had brought them.”

The director, who made her breakthrough with The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, refuses to judge her characters. “I tried to be empathetic, and not judgmental. I didn’t want to say what they were doing was OK, but I want the audience to make up their own mind. I never like to tell the audience how to feel. It does show how the culture can affect kids who don’t have strong values from their families.” Coppola did, however, deliberately change the names of the glamour-thieves in question. Some members of the Bling Ring complained about the way they were depicted. “That didn’t surprise me. It doesn’t bother me. It’s not a documentary; we made a feature film. The reason I changed the names of the characters is that I didn’t want to make the kids more famous than they are. They want to be as famous as the stars whose houses they break into. I didn’t want to add to their celebrity.”

Temptation
Emma Watson is the only well-known actor in the film. “It was important that the characters shouldn’t come across as parodies or cartoons. They had to come across as real, as I didn’t want to tell the story from their point of view. I wanted to understand how those children could allow themselves to be caught up in such an absurd sequence of events. So I wanted actors of the characters’ age group. We spent nearly a year looking for them. Each had to have a distinctive personality, but they had to form a group.” The film’s style was adapted to the story. “I tried to make it in a collage style with ADD, no attention span, lots of information, Facebook images and Internet images of that kind of pop celebrity. I wanted to incorporate all that in the style of the world we were encompassing.”

Like Somewhere, The Bling Ring could only happen in Los Angeles. “LA and Hollywood are the epicentre of the aspect of American culture we are looking at: the world of pop celebrities and reality TV stars. This story couldn’t have happened anywhere else. These children lived in suburbia, right over the hill: next to those stars.” Irresistible temptation.

The Bling Ring ●●
US, 2013, dir.: Sofia Coppola, act.: Emma Watson, Israel Broussard, 90 min.