Sofia Coppola's marriage has been lost in the translation.
The writer-director, whose latest movie, Lost in Translation, figures to see strong reviews turn into strong Oscar chances, confirmed her split Thursday with fellow filmmaker Spike Jonze.
"It is with sadness that Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze have jointly announced that they are divorcing," Coppola's rep Bumble Ward said in a statement.
Coppola, 32, and Jonze, 34, were something of the first couple of indie film. They wed in 1999, the same year he released his first feature, the Oscar-nominated cult flick Being John Malkovich. She earned her own ticket to the art-house circuit with her 2000 debut, the dreamy drama The Virgin Suicides.
Rumors of the their demise as a twosome have persisted for months, aided in part by Coppola's own storytelling. Her screenplay for Lost in Translation concerns a middle-aged actor (Bill Murray) and a recent college grad (Scarlett Johansson) both married to other people, and both not-quite-so-happy about the fact. The LA Weekly recently observed that the "rumpled schleppiness" of Gionvanni Ribisi, who plays the "workaholic, emotionally absent photographer" spouse of Johansson, "reminds one of Coppola's husband."
Coppola didn't speak to how her own marriage may or may not have inspired the troubled unions in her script, but she did tell the Weekly that she and Jonze weren't made out to be collaborators.
"But we usually read each other's screenplays and talk about them, and both of us understand when one of us is wiped out, or what it's like to wait for an actor to respond to a script," Coppola said in the October interview.
Both Coppola and Jonze are offspring of high-powered families: she, the daughter of Oscar-winning Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola; he, real name Adam Spiegel, a page turn away from the Spiegel catalog fortune.
The two met in 1992 on the shoot of the Sonic Youth music video, "100%," which Jonze codirected with Tamra Davis.
"They were friends for years before they got together," the band's Kim Gordon told New York magazine in 1999. "They were spending every day together, but for some reason, she just didn't get it."
In the early 1990s, he was a novice helmer, who edited a magazine, the now-defunct Dirt, so that young men could have their own version of Sassy, sadly, also now defunct. She was on the rebound from mostly unkind reviews for serving as Winona Ryder's last-minute sub in the role of Mary Corleone in her father's The Godfather, Part III.
Jonze went on to find fame and a way to make Christopher Walken dance in music videos such as "Weapon of Choice." Coppola cocreated the 1994 Comedy Central magazine show Hi-Octane and found her niche with The Virgin Suicides.
This past March, it was a Jonze film, Adaptation, that figured prominently at the Oscars, with four major nominations (although not one for its director).
Lost in Translation is looking like a gamer for the 2003 Oscar race. On Wednesday, it was named one of the year's 10 best films by the National Board of Review. Additionally, Coppola was presented with a "special filmmaking achievement" for writing, directing and producing.
Coppola and Jonze's marriage was the first for both.
For expert advice on busted relationships, Coppola can call on her cousin, the twice-divorced Nicolas Cage.