Sofia Coppola: AppleTV dudes ‘pulled the funding’ for my miniseries

I watched Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla over the holidays and I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. Coppola really did a great job with the material (Priscilla Presley’s memoir) and she made a really good movie on a small budget and she got fantastic performances out of the two leads, Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi. Sofia has been quite open about the constraints she faces when working with small budgets, and her struggles to get any kind of financing. The fact that Priscilla looked like it had a great costuming and set design budget is a credit to Coppola and her team. I bring this up because Coppola recently spoke to the New Yorker about how AppleTV canceled her dream project, a miniseries based on Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country, because of the budget and because the male executives found the female lead “unlikeable.”

Sofia Coppola continues to shed light on her unrealized adaptation of Edith Wharton’s “The Custom of the Country,” which she was developing as a five-episode series for Apple TV . In a new interview with the New Yorker, it’s revealed for the first time that Coppola had cast Oscar nominee Florence Pugh to star in the lead role of Undine Spragg, a Midwestern girl who attempts to ascend in New York City society.

News broke in May 2020 that Sofia Coppola was partnering with Apple TV on “The Custom of the Country.” By the end of 2021, the project was killed.

“They pulled our funding,” Coppola said. “It’s a real drag. I thought they had endless resources.”

Coppola’s series was not going to come cheap. Her most expensive film was 2006’s “Marie Antoinette,” which had a production budget of $45 million. The director said she was planning “Custom” to be “five ‘Marie Antoinettes.’”

“They didn’t get the character of Undine,” Coppola said of Apple executives, who she described as “mostly dudes.” “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.”

Coppola previously told The New York Times that Apple execs did not want to spend the money on her five-hour adaptation due to issues they had with the main character. “The idea of an unlikable woman wasn’t their thing,” Coppola said at the time. “But that’s what I’m saying about who’s in charge.”

“The people in charge of giving money are usually straight men, still,” she said in her Times interview. “There’s always people in lower levels who are like myself, but then the bosses have a certain sensibility … If it’s so hard for me to get financing as an established person, I worry about younger women starting out. It’s surprising that it’s still a struggle.”

[From Variety]

While I’ve never read The Custom of the Country, it sounds like William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, with a focus on the “social climbing” Becky Sharp. Still, Wharton’s books have been adapted to the screen several times already (to mixed results) and it does feel like this would have been the kind of ideal project for a streamer with unlimited funds. AppleTV throws all kinds of money on all kinds of weird sh-t. I’ve still never met one single person who watched one episode of Foundation. No one talks about For All Mankind (which is apparently a good show, but again, barely anyone watches it). The “unlikeable female lead” complaint is so gross as well.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.