When Sofia Coppola logs on to our video call, her friend and fellow film-maker Andrew Durham – whose directorial debut, Fairyland, she has produced – is telling me about being nine or 10 years old, and accidentally outing his father as gay.
“Have you heard this story, Sofia?” he asks breezily from Los Angeles. “About Pietro? The Italian guy that my dad was maybe having an affair with when we lived in England?” At home in New York, Coppola furrows her brow. “Uh, yeah. A long time ago, I think. I forgot …”
The subject is germane: after all, their movie is adapted from Alysia Abbott’s 2013 book Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father, in which the author details her childhood and adolescence with her gay dad, the writer and poet Steve Abbott (played by Scoot McNairy), who came out after her mother’s death. Alysia (Nessa Dougherty in the film’s first half, then Emilia Jones in later scenes) grows up amid her father’s friends and lovers in a blizzard of glitter and feather boas. At one of her birthday parties, she blows out the candles while the adults blow their minds on acid.
It overlaps closely with Durham’s own life. Like Abbott, he grew up in the Bay Area of San Francisco in the 1970s. After his parents separated, he spent weekends with his dad, Jerry, a museum curator. Also like Abbott, in later life Durham nursed his father after he contracted HIV. Both Steve and Jerry died in the same year, 1992.
No wonder Coppola, who optioned the book, thought Durham would be a perfect director for the film. They have known each other since the 1990s, when Durham produced Coppola’s achingly cool TV show, Hi-Octane, as well as her first short, Lick the Star, about a middle-school clique. Since then he has been the on-set photographer for most of her movies. “Her taste and sensibility haven’t fluctuated with the times,” he says. “That’s the sign of a true auteur.”
Despite rumours to the contrary, Coppola never considered directing Fairyland herself. Durham mischievously suggests that Alysia was disappointed to discover this: “Well, who wouldn’t be?”
Coppola, who recently turned 55, takes up the story. “We went to meet Alysia and I was, like, ‘Just so you know, Andrew’s going to direct it and he’s never made a movie before but it’s going to be great.’ At first, she was a little like ‘Errr …’ But they really hit it off.” Durham agrees: “We’d dealt with the same stuff in our lives. I always thought it was just me. I never ran into that many people who had gay dads who died of Aids.”
Though this is Coppola’s first time producing another film-maker’s work, she relished the prospect of following her father, Francis Ford Coppola, director of Apocalypse Now and the Godfather trilogy. “It’s in the tradition of what my dad did at [his production company] Zoetrope, championing things you love and believe in.” Fairyland, too, is a Zoetrope production and even begins with the company’s original 1970s logo, much to Durham’s delight. “One thing Sofia and I have in common is we hate a bad logo.”
The movie continues a pattern of bittersweet father-daughter stories in Coppola’s filmography: Somewhere, which won the Golden Lion at Venice, stars Elle Fanning as the wise 11-year-old child of a feckless movie idol (Stephen Dorff); On the Rocks is a lightweight caper about a reformed roué (Bill Murray) helping his daughter (Rashida Jones) snoop on her possibly unfaithful husband; and the Oscar-winning Lost in Translation, starring Murray and Scarlett Johansson as lonely souls connecting in Tokyo, rehearses the father-daughter dynamic even as the film teeters on the brink of romance.
This preoccupation is hardly surprising when Coppola’s own father is such a larger-than-life figure, not only in movies but in the same landscape that was home to Durham and Abbott. “I always remember my dad in these corduroy suits,” she says. “We were living in San Francisco in a big old Victorian house. Stylish European film-makers were coming and going. Family friends wearing 1940s vintage clothes in the late 1970s. I have this hazy little-kid memory of all these eccentric people.”
Coppola’s parents (her mother Eleanor, a film-maker and artist, died in 2024) insisted that she and her two brothers be involved in every part of their lives, from west coast shindigs to Philippines film sets. “They wanted us around. We weren’t shuffled off to bed or handed over to nannies.”
Durham, a few years Coppola’s senior, had a similarly unorthodox childhood. When he was seven, his father moved the family from Palo Alto to Guildford in Surrey while he worked at the V&A museum in London. Durham thinks now that this spell in the UK played a decisive part in the development of Jerry’s sexuality. “My dad grew up on a cattle ranch in Wyoming. He’d travelled, but I think it was on that trip to the UK where he met a lot of other gay people.”
Enter Pietro. “We all loved him. He had a great house with these big gardens where we played croquet. Once we were back in California, we’d get these airmail letters – those blue and red ones where the letter is also the envelope. They were so glamorous to me as a kid. I saw one crumpled up in the trash at home, so I took it out and showed my mum. Apparently, it was a love letter from Pietro to my father.”
Durham is fuzzy about what exactly he and his older brother were told at the time. Once their parents divorced, though, the boys spent weekends with their father in San Francisco. “Not only was it mostly men [around] but there were these fabulous parties and we were going to the theatre and the hottest new restaurants. It was so sophisticated and flamboyant.”
Steeped in this lavishly bohemian life, I wonder what either of them found to rebel against. “Oh, I never rebelled,” says Durham. Really? “No! Of course I did!” He dyed his hair blue and pogoed into the punk scene. “And I know Sofia was a sneaky teen, too,” he teases. What did that entail? “I don’t know if I’d really want it in print,” she says.
In Fairyland, the teenage Alysia keeps stumm while her peers tell homophobic jokes. How did Durham handle the same issue? “I was fortunate enough to have a good group of friends, so that was never a problem. Though I found out much later in life that some people weren’t comfortable with my friends hanging out at my dad’s house. The kids didn’t care – it was their parents who were nervous.”
It was especially bracing for Durham to revisit the circumstances of his father’s death while working on the film’s final scenes. “It’s still a weird trigger for me,” he admits. “When I was writing, I’d get to the third act and it would feel intense because I was drawing on my own experience of caring for my dad.” He added some stinging details that aren’t in Abbott’s book. “One is the memory loss that affects Steve at the end. I remembered that you get this kind of dementia when the virus attacks your brain. It was as if these guys were getting Alzheimer’s over a weekend. It was crazy.”
Another scene, touching on the early HIV medication AZT and its punishing side-effects, was drawn directly from a conversation between Durham and his father.
“I was so concerned about AZT because it seemed to be killing everybody,” he says. “It was the precursor to what is now PrEP. I told my dad, ‘You’ve got a compromised immune system. I don’t think you should be on this.’ And he said, ‘I’m not taking it for me. I’m taking it because we’re the guinea pigs. We have to take it for your generation, and the ones after that.’ As a young man in my 20s, that was so profound to hear. Now everyone’s on PrEP. But they need to understand where that came from – and the sacrifices that were made to get there.”
The pair agree that the film’s themes can’t help but resonate in the climate of fear surrounding queerness today. Are they surprised that these issues are still being debated in 2026?
“The older you get, the more you realise that this pendulum swings back and forth,” says Durham.
“It’s pretty shocking,” adds Coppola. “That’s why I thought it was so important in the film to show all kinds of families, because there’s so much prejudice now. I never imagined there could be this kind of attitude all these years later.”