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I'm really nerdy: Sofia Coppola on The Beguiled, being dorky and her famous dad

Her famous surname might have had its advantages, but these days Francis Ford can wait.

Stephanie Bunbury

Six distinctive films into a singular career, Sofia Coppola must still field at least one question in every interview about being her father's daughter. In a way, that isn't surprising. Francis Ford Coppola, as the creator of Apocalypse Now! and the Godfather films, practically owned the New Hollywood of the '70s; he may have lost his touch in recent years but his reputation remains a mighty colossus. Coppola couldn't have been a bad name to have as an aspiring filmmaker. It certainly wasn't a name anyone was going to forget.

It is also true that the Coppola films were – and still are – family projects. Francis and Eleanor's three children famously lived on film sets, most notably the unforgiving jungle locations of Apocalypse Now!, virtually as soon as they could walk. It's Sofia who is in most of the file pictures, however: perched between Francis' legs on his director's chair when she was tiny or sitting beside him at film premieres when she was older. Of all the family, she is the one who looks most like him. Daddy's girl, you think. The one destined to share the vision.

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Trailer: The Beguiled

An injured Union soldier arrives at an all-female Southern boarding school during the Civil War. Soon, sexual tensions lead to dangerous rivalries as the women tend to his wounds.

We are here to discuss The Beguiled, a melodrama about a household of southern belles – the remnants of a school for young ladies, struggling along behind the battle lines during the American Civil War – that is tipped into chaos when they find themselves caring for a wounded enemy soldier. For the peppery headmistress (Nicole Kidman) and her repressed offsider (Kirsten Dunst) as much as the 12-year-old enthusiast for nature studies who finds Corporal McBurney (Colin Farrell) bleeding to death in the woods, the presence of this man is like a fizzing cracker with unknown explosive powers. A tide of feeling has been unleashed. There is no going back to their embroidery now.

The Beguiled is a woman's picture, in every sense. "At the heart of it, it is about power dynamics between male and female," says Coppola. "I think everyone's experienced that. It was interesting to me to look at something that is still relevant today in the context of a melodrama." It is also very definitely a Sofia Coppola film, delivering the stock shocks of a genre film through the gauze of Coppola's characteristically dreamy, drifting style.

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"I always like films from other directors where you feel they come from a specific person, that not anyone could have made that," she says. "I think I have that."

That is unarguable, whether or not you like what she does. As one critic observed, her voice is so particular that it obscures how different her previous films, from The Virgin Suicides (1999) and Lost in Translation (2003) to The Bling Ring (2013), actually are.

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And now, here it comes: the Francis question. "Do you consult professionally with your dad at this stage?" asks an Italian journalist. Yes, comes the ready answer; she shows him her films in their final stages of editing. "But not early on, because I don't want to have too many opinions," she adds. "I just want to stick to the film I want to make."

You can feel the steel under those words, the kind of steel that allows you to forge your own way for 46 years within a loud, large and very close family. Unlike her father, Coppola is not a talker. Her answers often amount to no more than a few words, so vague or generalised or simply polite – "I was glad to work with Nicole" – that there is nothing to quote.

And despite her glamorous image as Hollywood royalty and international fashionista – friend to Marc Jacobs, wife to Thomas Mars of the French electronic group Phoenix – she is genuinely self-effacing. When an Observer journalist asked her in Cannes about her cool image, she was flummoxed. "I was watching some clips of myself on the red carpet from last night and I feel, like, so dorky on them. I'm really nerdy."

The Beguiled played in competition in Cannes; Coppola was awarded best director, becoming only the second woman to win in 70 years, but she didn't come back on the last night to collect her prize. Nervous from the outset, remembering the poor reception she had from the Cannes critics for Marie Antoinette back in 2006, she had already gone home.

The film itself is something of a departure for her, in that it was inspired by another film. Her production designer, Anne Ross, had suggested she watch a 1971 film directed by Don Siegel called The Beguiled – based in turn on a 1960s novel by Thomas Cullinan that Coppola describes as "pulpy" – with a view to making her own version. It became a joke between them. "'Remake' is like a bad word in our family," she has said. "I would never."

Eventually she did watch it, however. She then saw something else she could do. In Siegel's version, Clint Eastwood plays McBurney as a baffled victim; the women are twisted vixens gloating over the man in their power. The idea of flipping the story to see it from the women's point of view fascinated her.

"I thought the premise was so interesting, this group of women who were isolated and different ages," Coppola says. She liked the thought of playing with the image of a helpless man as a lust object. It is not a remake, as she says, but a reinterpretation.

Her personal challenge was to plan a film driven by plot rather than character and mood. Cullinan's novel provided a story arc and some character back stories, but she dropped their more lurid psychosexual motives, filling in the story with her own experience of female groups.

"I just took out the elements that didn't speak to me. A lot of the story is about desire and I wanted to treat that in a human way, in that it didn't have to be perverted. It could just be relatable. Of course they would feel desire."

What didn't interest her was the Civil War itself. She even dropped a slave character in Cullinan's original, which has led to accusations of whitewashing. Diversity is important, she agrees.

"But in the book, that was a very stereotypical character and I don't want to continue that stereotype. I wanted to focus the movie on this particular group of women. The history of the Civil War and slavery is so big. I didn't want to brush over it lightly." She retained the setting, she says, only because the kind of femininity cultivated by white women in the Old South would serve the story.

"All the ways women were traditionally raised there just to be lovely and cater to men – the manners of that whole world, and how they change when the men go away."

The carping about Sofia Coppola's unfair head start into making films – including accusations that her father or former husband, Spike Jonze, must make them for her – tends to be conflated, somewhat ironically, with a fierce disdain for their femininity. Coppola's films are as elusive and unemphatic as she is; characters communicate through glances rather than speeches; the camera's gaze is soft, the costumes lush, the protagonists usually female. For some critics, that means the films must be unimportant.

For others, that makes her a feminist filmmaker. And perhaps she is, but it isn't a label she seeks. She is simply doing what she has always done, following her own star. "I make movies about the characters who interest me and I connect more with female characters," she says. "I'm just trying to convey my point of view."

The Beguiled opens on July 13.

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