While she’s coming off the praise of her critically acclaimed drama, “Priscilla,” which is turning its lead, Cailee Spaeny, into something of a star (she’s got the leading role in the next “Aliens” movie from director Fede Alvarez), filmmaker Sofia Coppola had less luck with a project that was supposed to arrive before it.
Coppola revealed late last fall that Apple TV+ had decided not to proceed with her first series attempt, an adaptation of Edith Wharton’s “The Custom of the Country.” At the time, she revealed that Apple passed on what would have been a five-hour limited series because “the idea of an unlikable woman wasn’t their thing.”
Sofia Coppola’s Apple TV+ Series Was Passed On Because An Unlikable Female Lead “Wasn’t Their Thing”
Now, in a new interview with the New Yorker, Coppola has revealed more details about the ambitious-sounding mini-series, including that Florence Pugh, one of the hottest rising stars in Hollywood and coming off a small but acclaimed part in Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” and about to feature in “Dune: Part Two,” would have starred.
Here’s how the New Yorker explains it.
Coppola had spent the previous two years at work on her most ambitious venture to date, a miniseries, for Apple TV+, based on the Edith Wharton novel “The Custom of the Country,” from 1913. Coppola had adapted the book into five episodes and cast Florence Pugh in the lead role of Undine Spragg, a Midwestern arriviste on a desperate quest to infiltrate Gilded Age Manhattan society. Coppola, like Wharton, is known for her gimlet-eyed portrayals of a rarefied milieu, and for her insight into female characters who enjoy enormous privilege but little autonomy. “Marie Antoinette,” her most expensive movie, had a budget of forty million dollars, still modest by Hollywood standards; for “Custom,” she was planning for, as she put it, “five ‘Marie Antoinettes.’ ”
During the project’s development, she’d gone back and forth with executives (“mostly dudes”) on everything from the budget to the script.
Ouch, so if the sting of Coppola’s planned series being canceled wasn’t enough, now there’s a further insult to injury for fans knowing they were robbed of what sounds like one of the filmmaker’s biggest projects ever starring Florence Pugh.
“Apple just pulled out. They pulled our funding,” she told the New Yorker. “It’s a real drag. I thought they had endless resources.”
“They didn’t get the character of Undine,” she added. “She’s so ‘unlikable.’ But so is Tony Soprano! It was like a relationship that you know you probably should’ve gotten out of a while ago.”
Ooof, what a loss. At this point, if Apple, of all streamers, as she suggests, the one with seemingly the most resources and dollars of all the current streaming outlets, has turned it down. It seems unlikely we’ll ever see this one transpire; what a true shame. Netflix, if you’re listening and feeling audacious. Blow in a call to the Coppola household?
