Patron saint of teen girls Sofia Coppola feels like the "villain character" now that she has her own teens

Sofia Coppola’s upcoming Priscilla is slated to be another intimate portrait of teenage girlhood, this time filtered through the eyes of Priscilla Presley, who was just 14 years old when she met her future husband Elvis Presley, 10 years her senior. Their complicated love story may have been something out of a teen dream, but it left her parents “confused and bewildered” and, understandably, reluctant to leave their young daughter in the care of an adult man (and an ultra-famous one at that).

Coppola may be a master at accessing the messy, sometimes problematic feelings of her teen subjects, but these days she might relate more to the “confused and bewildered” parent in the situation. “Now I can see the mother’s point of view also,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter of making the film now that she has teen daughters of her own. “And I see all these teen-girl objects in my house that look like set dressing from one of my movies. In my life, I’m like, ‘Oh my God, now I’m the villain character.’ That’s new. I can’t believe that.”

Nothing about Priscilla’s story is black and white, though audience members might have their own opinions on who the real villain is. (It may just be the grown man grooming a young girl to be his wife.) From the perspective of a teen, though, the villain is usually the parent setting reasonable and healthy boundaries for their child. Priscilla, for one, thinks she probably would have run away if her parents had stopped her from seeing Elvis. “My parents were really beside themselves,” she says to THR. “I basically threatened them and told them, ‘If you don’t let me go, I’ll find my way.’”

Coppola’s kids have found their own ways to rebel, too—her daughter Romy Mars infamously went rogue on TikTok earlier this year, explaining how she was grounded “because I tried to charter a helicopter from New York to Maryland on my dad’s credit card because I wanted to have dinner with my camp friend,” she explained in the video.

“We were raised to be so private, and social media is so the opposite of how I grew up,” Coppola explains of her household social media ban in the THR interview. “I got lots of compliments on [Romy’s] filmmaking. And comedy. She’s funny. But people discussing my parenting publicly is not what I would’ve hoped for.” You either die a hero, or live long enough to become the parent setting those dreaded boundaries for your kids, apparently!