Ahead of the release of her new movie, Priscilla, Sofia Coppola has made a grievous admission. Speaking to Rolling Stone in a career-spanning interview, Coppola admitted that she forgot she was in Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace. We’re not kidding. Coppola did not remember playing Saché Adova, one of Queen Amidala’s handmaidens on Naboo, not to be confused with Sabé, who is played by Kiera Knightly. What is she, chopped liver? Saché was once considered a favored successor to Sio Bibble!
When asked by Rolling Stone about her small part in the film, she responds by laughing—laughing—and says, “I forgot about that.” Saché, a war hero who engaged in covert ops against the Galactic Empire and refused to name names when facing interrogation before being elected to the planetary legislative assembly (per Wookiepedia, obviously—why the hell would anyone know that sort of thing off the dome), has no lines in the film. Nevertheless, Coppola used the opportunity on set to learn about filmmaking to write her debut The Virgin Suicides.
“When I heard he was doing a Star Wars movie, since I was so little the first time, I said, ‘I want to come hang out.’ So they said I could be in it, and that was the best way to be on set,” she said. “That was such a funny experience — I was actually writing the script for Virgin Suicides while I was doing it!”
Though she insists, “I love George like an uncle,” and claims to “share a birthday with him,” she clearly didn’t use his knowledge for the role, which probably consisted of him pointing at her and saying, “Uh, yeah, you’re Saché, um, Adova.” Still, she proudly uses Lucas to influence her own film Somewhere.
“There was a birthday book where you look up everyone’s birthday, and it said ‘the day of the forward thinker,’ and I like to align myself with him that way. He made a short film about race cars going around a track [1966’s 1:42.08] and that actually inspired the opening scene in Somewhere. George is very sincere about what he does, and I love it.”
Alright, we admit that it’s okay not to know who Saché is. Even Sir Alec Guinness thought Star Wars was “fairy-tale rubbish.”
The Rolling Stone interview also goes in some non-Star-Wars-related directions for some reason, including the fact that she almost quit directing after Marie Antoinette. No, it wasn’t because Star Wars fans kept begging for a six-episode Saché series on Disney+, but rather because making movies is really difficult. She also finally explains why she didn’t make the final Twilight movie:
We had one meeting, and it never went anywhere. I thought the whole imprinting-werewolf thing was weird. The baby. Too weird! But part of the earlier Twilight could be done in an interesting way. I thought it’d be fun to do a teen-vampire romance, but the last one gets really far out.
Priscilla opens in theaters on November 3. Saché premieres on Disney+ never.