Luckily, Sofia found the basis for her story right there in her own past. “When I was growing up, we spent a lot of time in hotels, off-and-on, going on location with my dad [Francis Ford Coppola] when he was filming in different places,” she reveals. “As a kid, I always thought it was interesting to see the people staying in hotels, and fun to be in hotels. They become their own world inside.”

So hotels were in again, a place Sofia had previously exploreed with Lost In Translation. But how to go about crafting this hotel-based story? Sofia discovered her lead character in a surprising place – one of her own unused scripts. “A couple of years ago, I was working on a different script, a vampire story,” she says. “There was this Hollywood movie star character who popped into that story. He kept coming into my thoughts and demanding my attention, and I figured that he really needed his own movie.” And then Johnny Marco was born…