The Virgin Suicides, before Oscar-winning writer-director Sofia Coppola made it, anyway, was exactly as terrifying to Hollywood film executives as th
The Virgin Suicides, before Oscar-winning writer-director Sofia Coppola made it, anyway, was exactly as terrifying to Hollywood film executives as the title suggests. “They thought it would start an epidemic and that it was going to start some wave of tragedies,” Coppola tells VF of her 1999 debut film based on the 1993 novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. “But every responsible person in that world that I talked to said it’s actually more helpful to have a conversation around this topic.”
Coppola’s film follows the ethereal but troubled Lisbon sisters, and their untimely deaths as they’re suffocated by suburbia one by one, as told in a dream-like haze by the neighborhood boys who worshipped them from afar. Coppola recalls it being well-received when it premiered at Cannes, but the US release of the petite independent film, shot over the course of four sweltering summer weeks in Toronto, was almost nonexistent. Coppola, only 29, says she was melancholy to see her first film fade into oblivion.
“Nobody saw it,” Coppola tells Vanity Fair. “That’s why it means so much to me that people even know it and appreciate it now. It was just very much guys, ’90s macho. It was a different environment back then. I think the studio didn’t know what to do with it, and people didn’t seem to get it.”
Corinne Day, from The Virgin Suicides (MACK, 2025), published on the occasion of the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary. © Corinne Day Estate.
Like the Lisbon sisters, her film was a misunderstood misfit, struggling to find its footing. But 25 years later, The Virgin Suicides, its status cemented in the Criterion Collection, has become the defining work of Coppola’s career, setting the foundation for a filmography steeped in universal girlhood, whether in suburbia, Graceland, or Versailles.
Coppola, not knowing what The Virgin Suicides would come to mean to audiences, and adolescent female audiences in particular, asked the delayed British photographer Corinne Day to document the making of the film. The images Day captured have become iconic unto themselves, from the mundane snapshots of the adolescent girls—Kirsten Dunst, A.J. Cook, Hanna Hall, Leslie Hayman, Chelse Swain—piled onto a bed or asleep between takes to portraits of a adolescent heartthrob in the making, Josh Hartnett.
To commemorate the 25th anniversary of the film, Coppola has compiled Day’s photographs into a book, The Virgin Suicides, the first work published by Important Flowers, from her imprint with publishing house MACK.
Corinne Day, from The Virgin Suicides (MACK, 2025), published on the occasion of the film’s twenty-fifth anniversary. © Corinne Day Estate.
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