Gia Coppola

“Visually, I love the setting of suburbia.”

“The teenage years are such a great subject because everything is heightened and on the surface, and it deals with universal emotions that we face even as we get older.”

“As a teenager, I wanted to be sophisticated and avant-garde, and I was really judgmental. But when you're a teenager, you're fearless because you don't know the repercussions to anything.”

“I'm so drawn to photography because you can convey a complex story in a single frame.”

“I love working with other people and bouncing ideas off them.”

“I studied photography at Bard, but I just felt tired of it. Someone asked me to be in a video but didn't want to be in it, so they told me to make my own, and that seemed more fun to me.”

“It's great because all of my friends from elementary school are still my closest friends.”

“It's hard for me to articulate myself.”

“My grandpa told me, 'Learn to love anxiety, because it never goes away in moviemaking.'”

“Costumes say a lot about a character. When it came to 'Palo Alto,' it was important for me that the kids didn't look perfect. In most teen movies today, all of the clothes are expensive. I remember wearing a lot of dirty vintage clothes.”

“I didn't go to film school. My Grampa always says just watch a lot of movies. He didn't go to film school; he went to theatre school. It's interesting to learn about the technical side of it, but I think it's more important to learn about writing and working with actors.”

“In California, where you're allowed to drive at 16, you get so much freedom with that. It's a freedom to get outside of your parents' house and to do bad things.”

“When I was younger, I had pink underneath my hair, and I got detention. I went to an all-girls school where you wore a uniform, and pink hair was not OK.”

“I'm so proud to be American.”

“I normally wear jeans and sneakers, but given an occasion, I enjoy dressing up.”

“My name does help me get in the door, but it doesn't do the work for me.”

“When I graduated, I felt a little burned out on taking pictures after so many years of churning out so many for classes.”

“I like the pharmacy makeup. I always get stuck in that aisle... I've always liked looking at it.”

“My family and I are so close, it's important to have a close knit relationship and to make time to spend with each other, especially at the holidays.”

“I love my family's films.”