The British-born actress Rebecca Hall has earned raves for her performance in the new film ‘Christine’, a harrowing reimagining about the final days of Florida news anchor Christine Chubbuck, who shot herself during a live news broadcast in 1974. As a movie, it couldn’t be more different from Eleanor Coppola’s ‘Paris Can Wait’, a light-hearted tale of self-discovery in middle age starring Diane Lane as a woman who finds unexpected wisdom during a road trip through France. But as it turns out, actress Hall and director Coppola have plenty in common.
Coppola, who is making her feature directorial debut at age 80 with ‘Paris Can Wait’, is the matriarch of a major Hollywood family—she’s the wife of director Francis Ford Coppola and mother of Roman and Sofia. “I started looking for a woman director, but I couldn’t find a person with the aesthetic I thought I wanted the film to have,” Coppola says. “One morning at the breakfast table, my husband said, ‘Well, you direct it.’” Hall too grew up in an industry family—her father is a stage director and her mother is an opera singer—so she knows well how infrequently parts like the title role in Christine come along. “There aren’t many roles out there for ladies that have this quality of being an antihero,” Hall says.