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"  In the first moments of Palo Alto, a couple of teenage boys are cruising their quiet upscale neighborhood en route to the kind of party where no parents are around. They&amp;#039;re friends, or at least they would be if the motormouth driver didn&amp;#039;t use his pal as a verbal punching bag. But just when you want to shut him up, he grazes a car coming the other way, hard enough to make both cars spin out. The accident, which we see from above, doesn&amp;#039;t injure anyone, but it jerks you into red alert for the rest of the movie. This is Gia Coppola&amp;#039;s impressively deft debut as a writer and director, and already you can see that she has the Midas touch with her actors. As she looks over her shoulder at 27, her own teen years are still fresh, but the distance gives her perspective. Which explains why Palo Alto is neither a hottie rom-com nor a total teen devastation. Instead, she has captured something fascinatingly real. Related: Talking Style, Design and Sleeping in Playgrounds with James Franco &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s such an interesting age,&amp;quot; Coppola says, &amp;quot;because you&amp;#039;re too young to take on adult needs and too old to be considered a child. But you deal with mature things anyway, even driving. You&amp;#039;re behind a serious piece of machinery and you&amp;#039;re probably not ready for it.&amp;quot; Palo Alto isn&amp;#039;t beginner&amp;#039;s luck; she&amp;#039;s not the first indie director who trained herself and found her talents by making short movies with her friends. Of course, people assume that anybody named Coppola already has a leg up in the movie business. But she&amp;#039;s heard it all before; when her aunt Sofia made her fine directing debut with The Virgin Suicides, small minds insisted that Francis Ford Coppola, her father, made the movie, even though it bore no resemblance to the Godfather saga or Apocalypse Now or anything else he&amp;#039;s done. Gia&amp;#039;s Palo Alto is so accomplished that no doubt a new generation of those little minds will try to chalk it up to her aunt. Related: Women in Hollywood Except on TV, dynasties can be a real pain. Coppola says, &amp;quot;I remember people\u2014not my family\u2014always asking, &amp;#039;Oh, so are you going to make movies when you&amp;#039;re older?&amp;#039; I felt pressured, and that always kind of deterred me.&amp;quot; As for having it easy, Coppola never had the chance to know her dashingly handsome father, Sofia&amp;#039;s elder brother, Gian-Carlo, who was killed at 22 in a boating accident three months before his daughter was born. Like Sofia before her, Gia gravitated to photography in college before succumbing to the big screen. She also found two mentors not named Coppola. The first was the photographer Stephen Shore at Bard College. &amp;quot;I really wanted to work with a great teacher because I was having a hard time in high school,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;I got my GED my senior year and ended up taking community-college classes before I transferred to Bard. The photography program was small, so you had to decide the first day on the direction you wanted to take.&amp;quot; Shore is famous for shooting the most mundane subjects in a way that yields volumes of insight. The direction Coppola chose channels his deceptively simple clarity. Coppola found her second mentor\u2014and colleague\u2014in James Franco. During college and while working as a bar back, she had started writing screenplays. Her mom introduced the two, and Franco asked if he could see Coppola&amp;#039;s writing and photography and gave her his story collection, Palo Alto, about troubled teens (and at least one appalling predatory adult). Coppola&amp;#039;s work convinced Franco that she could not only write the script but also direct the picture. He suggested that she keep the working atmosphere small and intimate, so we aren&amp;#039;t just watching the picture\u2014we&amp;#039;re in it. As for financing, she says Franco took a role in another film so they could pay the bills. In return she gave him a role in Palo Alto that&amp;#039;s one of his very best. Describing those five years, Coppola says, &amp;quot;It was a step-by-step whirlwind.&amp;quot; And now she can just jump for joy. This article appeared in the May 2014 issue of ELLE magazine. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/movies-tv/reviews/a14155/gia-coppola-palo-alto-profile/>