On Wednesday evening, Chanel and MoMA celebrated Sofia Coppola during the annual Film Benefit, now in its 17th year. Coppola was joined by her family, husband Thomas Mars and daughters Romy and Cosima Mars, as well as past collaborators like Elle Fanning, Josh Hartnett, Bill Murray, and her cousin Jason Schwartzman. Other guests included Lupita Nyong’o, Olivia Wilde, Rose Byrne, David Letterman, Marc Jacobs and Char Defrancesco, Anna Sui, Peter Marino, Tyler Mitchell, Larry Gagosian, Ava Dash, and Anna Weyant.
Coppola said she was “so shocked” when she received word that she’d be this year’s Film Benefit honoree.
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“I was here last year for Sam Jackson, which I really enjoyed, and I never thought in a million years that I would be here this year,” she said on the red carpet. “But I’m really thrilled. I mean, I love MoMA Film, I love seeing movies here and I’m really proud to have my films in the collection, so it’s really surreal.”
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Inside the cocktail hour, Coppola’s daughters hung out with Jacobs and Defrancesco while Fanning and Byrne caught up. Murray and Schwartzman stuck together, hamming it up on the step and repeat before working the room in tandem.
Upstairs, guests took their seats at long candlelit tables for a dinner of mushroom salad and steak, as Coppola’s career was toasted.
Fanning, dressed in an ivory Chanel two-piece ensemble, first worked with Coppola on the film “Somewhere” and later again on “The Beguiled.”
“I vividly remember what I wore to meet Sofia for the first time: I was 11 years old and I picked out blue jeans with ballet flats, very Sofia, a lavender top with ruffled sleeves that was a bit see-through, so I had to put a white tank underneath, not yet requiring a training bra, and light pink glasses,” Fanning recalled. “Yes, I was a kid with glasses and a sparkly retainer that I often clicked in and out when I was nervous.”
She’d been dying to work with the director ever since she successfully convinced her grandmother to take her to see “Marie Antoinette” in theaters, despite her grandma’s concerns that she was too young for it.
“Living in that cinema in Sofia’s world for a few hours, it would change my girlhood forever. It was a place that I felt safe and seen and I wanted to live in,” Fanning said. “I wanted to live in it a hundred times over. I never knew that something could look so beautiful.”
“Sofia hired me when I was 19 years old,” Harnett, who starred in “The Virgin Suicides,” told the room. “I didn’t know much about anything yet, but I was excited to learn. Sofia was 26 or 27, I can’t remember, and she was wise and worldly, sophisticated and oh, so cool. And she wasn’t 30 yet, so I felt like I could trust her.”
“The movies that she makes and the person that she has become are a result of paying attention and self-awareness that allows her, that demands that she sees moments like these moments that you’ve seen up here on the screen,” said Murray, who starred in Coppola’s second film, “Lost in Translation.” “She has seen them, she’s witnessed them. We’ve all seen them, but we didn’t always capture them. And this is what we’re looking for. This is what great artists do, they capture a moment.”
Coppola herself took to the stage to thank the museum for the recognition and all her collaborators, before her childhood favorite Elvis Costello treated the room to a performance.
“When I started, it was such a different time. I remember an executive telling me that you couldn’t have a story with a female main character, that girls would go to stories about boys, but boys wouldn’t go see a story about a girl,” Coppola said. “So it’s so gratifying to see stories about girls and women and to see so many young women filmmakers today.”