Sofia Coppola reveals why she gave up on making her film The Little Mermaid

“How are we going to attract 35-year-old men?”

Well before Disney’s live action version, released in theaters this year, The little Mermaid almost had a version Sofia Coppola. A “darker” and “closer to the original book” project, as the director has often described it.

In 2014, in the wake of Somewhere And The Bling Ring, the filmmaker is committed to developing her vision of Ariel according to Hans Christian Andersen, with the Universal studio. But after a meeting that went wrong, the project was abandoned in 2015. She recounts what happened:the breaking point” in a recent interview with Rolling Stone:

“I was in a meeting room with a lot of studio executives and a development manager suddenly said something like: ‘But what will attract the 35-year-old to see the film?‘I just didn’t know what to answer. I just wasn’t in my element. I felt like I was a little naive. I almost felt like the character in Andersen’s story, trying to do something outside of my natural environment. It was a funny parallel.”

Sofia Coppola admits having often been confronted with this from studios: “This happens a lot because usually the people funding things are heterosexual men. So this is not the same point of view as me. But you try to explain to them: ‘People, not all people, not everyone is going to like what you like…‘ But hey, I just wanted to make a film that spoke to me”. Her Little Mermaid therefore fell into the water.