COPPOLA, PART II; DIRECTOR'S DAUGHTER TOOK THE BULLET FOR 'GODFATHER III,' BUT NOW CALLS SHOTS FOR HER 'VIRGIN SUICIDES'.

Byline: Glenn Whipp Film Writer

Sofia Coppola mumbles. She slouches. She twists and twirls her hair a lot. She can be painfully shy. She isn't much of a storyteller and will take the visual over the verbal any day of the week.

These things become immediately apparent when you spend time with the 28-year-old daughter of high-powered director Francis Ford Coppola, a young woman who up until now has been most famous for being a bad actress.

But Sofia Coppola never wanted to be an actress in the first place. When her father cast her as Michael Corleone's daughter in ``The Godfather, Part III,'' she gamely went along with the idea, mostly because she was bored with school at the time. She never had any illusions, though, about her talent in front of a camera.

``I wasn't even supposed to be in the movie,'' Coppola says softly. ``I was in Rome on Christmas vacation, and they called and asked me to come to the set. Winona Ryder had dropped out of the production, and I had already read the part during a round table reading. My father asked, and I said yes. I just kind of jumped into it. I never thought about the hugeness of the movie or all the hoopla surrounding it. When I was there, I was just trying to stay afloat.''

She hated almost every minute of it. ``The Godfather III'' was a preordained disappointment (how do you follow the first two chapters?), and Sofia received much of the blame.

``The criticism was really intended for me,'' Francis Ford Coppola says. ``Just like the end of the story, when the little girl gets the bullet that was meant for her father.''

The little girl is now a grown woman, and after successful career stints as a photographer and fashion designer, she believes she has found the job she knew she wanted all along. Coppola has directed her first film, ``The Virgin Suicides,'' a movie she adapted herself from Jeffrey Eugenides' novel about five lustrous sisters who commit suicide and the young boys who can't shake their memory.

Coppola believes directing was something she always knew she could do. But, ``When something's really close to you, you don't see it,'' she says.

That doesn't mean she wasn't aware of the career possibilities. There are those famous genes, of course, not that her father encouraged her one way or the other. (``He wants you to follow your own path,'' she says.) Coppola made quite a few home videos when she was young, and took great pleasure in ``getting the other kids to do what I wanted them to do.'' In fact, what soured her on acting (besides all the bad reviews) was the inability to boss people around.

``I'm not interested in having someone dictate my choices to me,'' she says. ``I like to be the one doing the dictating.''

She might be the most placid dictator in history. Contrasting with her famously animated father, Coppola prefers to be seen, not heard. When directing a scene, she stands right by the camera, in order, she says, to make the actors feel more relaxed. But it's probably out of necessity, too; otherwise no one would ever hear what the soft-spoken Coppola had to say.

``I've never worked with a director that quiet,'' says actress Kirsten Dunst, who plays Lux Lisbon, the oldest ``Suicides'' sister. ``Sofia never raised her voice once. She was always so calm, so collected and so open to other people's ideas. But underneath that calmness, she was in total control. She always had an answer and a reason for whatever was happening in the scene.''

Such assurance came from Coppola's total familiarity with the material. Coppola read ``The Virgin Suicides'' four years ago and immediately connected with the story, for reasons she's not able (or willing) to articulate. After learning that someone had already purchased the film rights to the book, Coppola decided to write a screenplay anyway, figuring it would be a good exercise if nothing else.

``I felt really protective about the book, and I had all these ideas about how it should be done,'' Coppola says. ``So I'd write on the weekends, and before I knew it, I was halfway through, and I thought, 'Well, I should finish it.' When it was done, I had pictured every shot.''

She had pictured it so well that when producer Julie Costanzo passed her screenplay along to the company that owned the book, they ditched their plans and offered Coppola the directing job. Costanzo says it was the writing, not the family name, that got Coppola hired, although Francis Ford Coppola did come on board as one of the film's producers.

In addition to Dunst, ``The Virgin Suicides'' stars James Woods and Kathleen Turner, who played Coppola's mother in Francis Ford Coppola's 1986 film ``Peggy Sue Got Married.'' Woods, playing against type as a milquetoast father, ultimately became Coppola's most outspoken and protective supporter, proclaiming, ``I hope this movie is a success so that all the naysayers who slammed her when she was a teen-ager because her father cast her in a movie will finally get to shut up.''

Coppola smiles when told of Woods' comments, but if she's bitter about anything in her past, she does a good job of hiding it. She married director Spike Jonze (``Being John Malkovich'') last summer at her parents' estate in the Napa Valley. (Was it close to that big wedding scene in ``The Godfather''? Coppola: ``Kind of, yeah.'')

She talks now of being a ``supportive wife'' for Jonze and wanting to learn to be a ``homemaker.'' The couple lives in Los Feliz.

``What I'd really like to learn to do is cook,'' Coppola says.

Might her father have some input in that area?

``He says he's going to teach me how,'' she says. ``And that's a pretty good thing because he's almost as good a cook as he is a director.''

CAPTION(S):

3 photos

Photo:

(1 -- cover -- color) Sofia's choice

Director Francis Ford Coppola's daughter follows in her dad's footsteps with 'The Virgin Suicides'

(2 -- cover -- color) Leslie Hayman, left, Kirsten Dunst, A.J. Cook and Chelse Swain in 'The Virgin Suicides'

(3) Sofia Coppola, left, directs star Kirsten Dunst on the set of ``The Virgin Suicides,'' which Coppola also adapted.