On the Rocks: How do father-daughter ties evolve?
Rashida Jones and Bill Murray star in Sofia Coppola’s new film, a coming of age tale which explores a generational divide.
For Rashida Jones, starring in Sofia Coppola’s new film was an experience that began a whole year before she stepped in front of the camera, with long conversations about “the movie and the character and the script” unfolding between lead and director. Coppola, says Jones, “is so collaborative, she’s really good about taking feedback and then processing it into her world and her tone”.
The pair are good friends — the daughters of famous fathers; Coppola’s is director Francis Ford and Jones’s is legendary producer and composer Quincy. There’s a strong father-daughter theme in On the Rocks; Jones plays Laura, a writer with a husband and two young daughters, living in a New York apartment and struggling with the book she has long promised herself she will find time for, in between daily routines. She’s stuck.
Her husband, Dean (Marlon Wayans), is travelling a lot for business and Laura starts to wonder if he’s having an affair — one of the first people she shares her suspicions with is her father, Felix, played with effortless confidence by Bill Murray. Felix is not only ready to believe the affair is taking place: he’s prepared to play detective and collect evidence for her.
There’s a lightness of touch to On the Rocks, but a serious intent when it comes to exploring aspects of the relationships between the central characters.
“That’s what it felt like when we were filming. And that’s what I hope it feels like when people watch it, which is that, while you’re enjoying this dynamic between father and daughter, all this other stuff is bubbling under the surface, like the generational divide, this need for my character to free herself from the relationship with her father and really come of age and become her own person,” Rashida Jones says.
Felix is determined to make an adventure out of the investigation. He brings caviar and champagne to a stakeout; she has a go at him for having too much fun in a situation that’s potentially distressing for her. He engages in airy disquisitions about the difference between men and women that can sound old-fashioned, inappropriate even. Could he be provoking her, or does he really think these things?
Whatever Felix might say about the differences between the sexes, Jones says: “I think he really does love a strong woman. And he wants somebody to spar with. So, when she doesn’t give it back to him, I think he worries. I don’t think he wants her to stay the little girl who just nods along and laughs at all his jokes. Probably at some point he wants her to fight that.”
Jones and Coppola spoke about what happens as people grow older, “and wake up one day and wonder what will be left when you leave”. “We talked a ton about that, and then how that’s particularly tied to your relationship with your parents, because you think about them at your age and the decisions they made and how they ended up where they were: the things you want to do that are like them, the things you want to do that are absolutely not what they did.”
In one scene Felix reminisces about fatherhood, about what it felt like to see his daughter “as a person” for the first time, at the age of nine months. “We looked at each other and we both started laughing,” he tells Laura. “I saw who you were.”
It’s a line that resonated with Jones, “as somebody who loves my dad so much. We have this really special bond. I think some of that bond is about seeing ourselves in each other and seeing each other as people. And the fact that he saw me as a person from such a young age, in a way that made me feel validated and fortified and confident in my life — so much of that was given to me by my dad”.
Jones grew up in Los Angeles; her mother is the late Peggy Lipton, best known for her roles in Mod Squad and Twin Peaks. She studied religion and philosophy at Harvard before beginning to work as an actor, writer and director. Her career started slowly; her first significant role was in the The Office (US version), in which she played Karen, who came between fan-favourite couple Jim and Pam (she has admitted she feared viewers would hate her for the role).
It was a very different matter in Parks And Recreation, in which she played Ann Perkins, loyal best friend to Amy Poehler’s Leslie Knope, calling it “the most magical seven years of my professional life”. She played a minor role in The Social Network; wrote and starred in Celeste And Jesse Forever, with Andy Samberg, and played Paul Rudd’s fiancee in I Love You, Man, a character gracefully dealing with the unexpected consequences of a friendship she encouraged her partner to pursue. In 2018, she made Quincy, a documentary portrait of her father, which won a Grammy for best music film.
In On the Rocks, she joins Coppola and Murray in a creative partnership that already encompasses two films. In Lost in Translation (2003) Murray starred alongside Scarlett Johansson; they were a mismatched pair, alone in Tokyo, who found temporary refuge in each other’s company.
“Bill through Sofia’s eyes is definitely different than any other version of Bill,” Jones says. “He’s always great, and always truthful and all that stuff, but she finetunes him to where he gets to be charming and funny and maybe just a little bit melancholy.” Jones describes On the Rocks as “personal” to the filmmaker.
Like Lost in Translation, On the Rocks explores the circumstances of a central female character at a pivotal — and lonely — moment in her life. “Lost in Translation was about identity and being young, and in a young relationship, and feeling alone in a relationship. And I think in some ways, On the Rocks is about being in a relationship with your family … kids, your husband and your dad, and feeling alone, and wondering how to carve out your own sense of self without all that noise and relativity.”
To varying degrees, they draw on experiences of those in their personal orbits: Laura calling her father about a suspected infidelity is something that happened to a friend, and Jones herself is the basis for a plot point about Laura being unable to whistle since she had children.
Coppola is the youngest child of Francis Ford Coppola and Eleanor Coppola, also a filmmaker. She was cast as Michael Corleone’s daughter in Coppola’s The Godfather III when Winona Ryder dropped out. She gravitated towards filmmaking; her first feature, The Virgin Suicides in 1999 was a lush, yearning adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel. After Lost in Translation, she made Marie Antoinette, an idiosyncratic, often gorgeously anachronistic vision of a young queen isolated in luxury and confined by expectations while The Bling Ring (2013) explored a world of California teenagers obsessed with the trappings of celebrity.
“She has this graceful authority over her set and over her tone, and you’re very aware of when you enter her space,” Jones says
Coppola spotted the rapport between Jones and Murray when they worked together in A Very Murray Christmas, a holiday musical special Coppola directed in 2015. “I think what Sofia really liked about Bill and me,” Jones says, “is that we are so different, but we have this way of jabbing each other, lovingly jabbing each other a little bit.” When preparing for On the Rocks, Jones and Coppola discussed movies such as the Thin Man series from the 1930s and 40s, featuring a husband-and-wife detective team, and screwball comedies such as It Happened One Night, His Girl Friday, “where the banter was tight and witty”.
Jones became a parent herself two years ago when she had a son with her partner, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig. “It definitely cracks your heart open. I feel like you start to see everybody as their child self, in a way. And you think about the world differently because you wonder what it’s going to look like for your child.”
She has talked about what it means to be bi-racial. “I am a product of slaves. I am also a product of Jewish immigrants and Holocaust survivors. I have a responsibility to represent those things,” she said in 2018. Asked about her next project, she says: “It’s a tricky time. I just feel overwhelmed with feeling and responsibility, sometimes hopeless, sometimes hopeful — and it does feel like when you put something out into the world, people have an expectation that it has to meet the moment we’re in. This country has a very painful history. This country was built on kidnapping and subjugation and genocide, and this is the moment to deal with it. How we choose to move forward from this moment, who knows?
“There’s still a beauty in making something that’s timeless or … prescient or … nostalgic. But it feels like everybody’s so invested … right now, which makes perfect sense. So I think I’m taking a step back and I’m listening, learning.”
On the Rocks is in select cinemas nationally (except Victoria) from Friday. On AppleTV+ from October 23.
