Did Mainstream Director Gia Coppola Make the First Masterpiece of the TikTok Era?
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Ever since Icarus took his fateful trip, the idea of being cursed by getting just what we want has intrigued storytellers. Gia Coppola simply brought the idea into the age of social media.
In her new film, Mainstream, out May 7 in theaters and on digital platforms, Coppola chronicles the rise and fall of Link, a social-media superstar (played by Andrew Garfield) whose collaboration with friends Frankie (Maya Hawke) and Jake (Nat Wolff) earns him an army of followers and unbelievable influence but doesn’t turn out to be everything he expected.
“Right when I finished my first film, Palo Alto, I was watching Turner Classic Movies and I caught the tail end of A Face in The Crowd, and it just really stuck with me—it felt really relevant to what we were dealing with today,” says Coppola, the 34-year-old photographer and filmmaker who is, of course, the granddaughter of directors Eleanor and Frances Ford Coppola and the niece of directors Sofia and Roman Coppola. “Even though it took place in the 1950s and is told from the point of view of a young woman who helps Andy Griffith’s character to transition from a radio star to television. He adjusts to the dangers of fame, but money make him an egomaniac and creates a monster. That always stayed with me, and I tried to figure out how to do a modern representation.”
Mainstream does just that. The moral of the story might be a classic, but the film embraces the look and language of modern-day social media; emojis fly across the screen, vital moments appear as if they were filmed on an iPhone, and Link’s ascent and eventual flameout can be tracked in the comments and reactions of his millions of followers. “I wanted this to be fun, but also kind of enlightening,” Coppola says. “It’s about the coming of age of a young woman, and it’s every girl's bad boy story; it's grappling with a lot of things.”
Like the films that inspired it—including Network and Broadcast News—Mainstream asks questions about what being put on a pedestal can do to a person, but Coppola (whose own Instagram account offers a stylish but reserved look into her personal and professional life) isn’t sure she’d call it a warning.
“I'm not a hater of social media, I think there are pros and cons to it—it's more a question of how you navigate it,” she says from her Los Angeles home. “I was diving into that world and trying to reflect back the things I was feeling, the things that I was witnessing other people were feeling. I didn't really want it to be so much about harpooning the Internet but wondering how you find your way through it.”
If Mainstream’s subject matter required contemplating trial and error, helming the film was a bit more straightforward. “It was easy for me to trust Gia,” says Maya Hawke. “She has a kind of gentle confidence and the ability to always be in control while making everyone feel like they’re in control. Everyone on set felt empowered to tell the story they wanted to tell, and Gia—in her magic way—let us explore and experiment but also had the whole thing in her head. She wanted us to experiment and play and come up with something better than her idea, but we rarely did.”
Coppola calls the filming process, which took place over 19 days, a “mad dash,” but Hawke points out that the creative process was more complicated than the short shooting schedule might suggest. “In her mind, the heft of the work might have happened in that short time when we made the film, but I watched Gia and Tom Stuart, who wrote the script, and Andrew and Nat work for years,” Hawke says. “They had done so much work fleshing it out. Even when we were shooting, we’d get together in the mornings or on weekends to read through scenes and work. It wasn’t just the time we filmed, but the years of building that world that happened beforehand.”
With Mainstream headed out into the world, Coppola’s free to start creating new stories—the big question now is what those might look like. “I feel so excited to just try so many different things,” she says. “I'd love to do a ghost story or play in period costumes or with science-fiction and genre.”
Right now, as she explores different options, she is writing every day using Stephen King’s On Writing as inspiration for what might be a film or a podcast or a project across mediums. “I guess it's very much based on the situation,” she says. “I think for something like Mainstream, I felt that I had a distinct vision for it, and I really needed to take the reins. But now I feel very open to exploring all different ways to be creative.”
One hopes, however, that she doesn’t stay away from the big screen for too long. “I remember someone once told me that making movies is like making pancakes, the first one might be a little gooey and you're always gauging how to work with what comes next,” she says. “It's always new, which makes it exciting. I like how a movie shapes itself; you go in with a strong idea, and then certain forces just tell you what it has to be.”
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