Bill Murray was the only man for the job when director Sofia Coppola needed a comic for an offbeat movie. Steve Pratt reports.

SOFIA Coppola had only one person in mind to play the leading role when she wrote Lost In Translation - Ghostbusters and Groundhog Day actor Bill Murray. "I genuinely believe that she wouldn't have made the film if he didn't agree to do it," says producer Ross Katz.

Murray stars in this offbeat drama as an actor in Japan to shoot a whisky commercial, and enters into a surprising friendship with a young American woman (Scarlett Johansson).

Sofia, daughter of Godfather director Frances Ford Coppola, is both writer and director. Murray, who's tipped for an Oscar nomination, was keen to work with her.

"Talent must be genetic," he says. "She really has got it and she's a nice person. She's fun to be with. She travels in this crazy circle and knows everybody in the world. So she passes through all these barriers, but she's not affected and she's perfectly natural." Sofia's first screen appearance hardly hinted that one day she'd be on Hollywood's hottest young director list. She was only a baby when she appeared in her father's 1972 gangster drama The Godfather. Not only was she a babe in arms, but she played a boy, Michael Francis Rizzi, in the christening scene.

More embarrassing still was the harsh critical reception that greeted her performance in The Godfather Part III nearly 20 years later. Her father cast her as Mary Corleone after original choice Winona Ryder dropped out through illness at the last minute.

She worked in several areas of film production before turning to directing. She concentrated on design and photography, seemingly deliberately avoiding following her famous father into directing. She admits that, perhaps subconsciously, directing was always at the back of her mind.

"I knew I wanted to do something in the visual arts," she says. "I'd always been around my dad's film sets, so the interest was there. But I didn't have the guts to say, 'I want to be a director', especially coming from that family."

The turning point was reading Pulitzer Prize-winner Jeffrey Eugenides' novel The Virgin Suicides, the year after writing and directing the short film Lick The Star. She felt she knew how to film this tale of teenage angst. Four years later comes Lost In Translation. Her screenplay was inspired by regular visits she's made to Japan. "The whole story is very personal to me," admits the 32-year-old. "There are different aspects of myself in all the characters. I definitely was thinking about that age, when I was in my early 20s, just out of school and not knowing what I wanted to do for work, and in crisis a little bit.

"There are so many aspects of my experience in there, although not totally in one character."

What she gets from her father is a determination to make movies her way, on her own terms. After The Virgin Suicides, she took her time before going back behind the camera and then insisted Lost In Translation was filmed on location in Tokyo with a mainly Japanese crew.

She seems to have thrived on the problems this must have caused for a western film-maker. "It was important for me to have control over it, to make the film exactly how I imagined it. The only way to do that was to make it low budget and not have bosses telling us how to make it more marketable," she says.

"I've been to Tokyo once a year for the last eight or nine years - and love going. I still don't speak Japanese so getting anything, even groceries, is a huge thing. I still think it's overwhelming. It's great and modern. I find it strange and beautiful."

Murray agrees that Tokyo is a real eye-opener. "It's a big, big place. It's got an enormous amount of energy and it's much more creative that I thought it was going to be," he says.

"It's sort of presented to us as bad western culture, but it's not. They're way ahead in so many areas. It's going to be a shock when everyone find outs. They're really up to some stuff over there."

He got round the language barrier by doing what he does best - make people laugh. "They're great laughters. They love to laugh," he says.

"You think they're really serious but there's a tiny bit of armour they have and if you just refuse to acknowledge that it's there and just poke them in the belly three times, it's gone. Then they just fall apart. Then they literally start falling down laughing and lose physical control."

He also found himself bonding with locals during karaoke sessions in the bars. One of the songs, Roxy Music's More Than This, features in the movie. "It's a beautiful song and I'd play that song just to hear it. But it's hard to do after you've had several sakis," he says.

The only dark spot in Coppola's future is the breakdown of her marriage of another of Hollywood's acclaimed young directors, Spike Jonze, who made Being John Malkovich and Adaptation. The pair have announced they've split up.

Perhaps one day she'll work with her father, direct him perhaps, just as he directed her. But she points out: "My dad is a better actor than me".

* Lost In Translation (15) opens in cinemas tomorrow.

Published: 08/01/04