Sofia Coppola’s Path to Filming Gilded Adolescence

When we first met, in the fall of 2021, for breakfast near her home in the West Village, 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.’ ”