Sofia Coppola and Andrew Durham have been close friends since 1990, when he was a producer on her first short film, The Star. “He’s been on all my sets,” Coppola says of Durham, the pair speaking to W over Zoom. “I always trust his feedback, and I knew he was looking to do a film.” She’s referring to Fairyland, the San Francisco-set coming-of-age story that the two adapted for the screen from writer Alysia Abbott’s celebrated 2013 memoir of the same name.
While Durham has typically played the role of photographer on Coppola’s films, this time, she produced while he made his feature directorial debut. Fairyland’s journey to the screen hasn’t been quick; out now in select theaters nationwide, it premiered at Sundance in 2023 and was in production for several years before that. It’s not easy to get a low-budget indie made these days—but Coppola and Durham believed in the story.
Set in 1970s and ’80s San Francisco, from the end of the rollicking free-love era to the height of punk rock and the AIDS epidemic, Fairyland begins when Steve (Scoot McNairy) decides to move his young daughter Alysia (Nessa Dougherty) from the conservative heartland to California after his wife is killed in a car accident. The two settle into an old Victorian with a rotating cast of delightfully bohemian roommates. As aspiring poet Steve raises Alysia as a single father—rare now, but especially then—he also experiences a joyful second adolescence as a newly out gay man in a bustling queer city known for its alternative lifestyles.
For Durham, the story was personal. He, too, grew up in the Bay Area, and when he was ten years old, his father came out and moved to the city following his parents’ divorce. “I grew up thinking that my brother and I were the only kids in the world that had a gay dad,” he says. Reading Abbott’s memoir was a revelation.
Just as Alysia eventually must take care of her dad when he contracts HIV that turns into AIDS, as a young man, Durham also returned to San Francisco to care for his father, who died from the same disease. “It was quite enlightening that Alysia and I were the same age, at the same time, at the same place,” he says. “We even talked about whether or not our fathers ever ran into each other. Both of them died the same year, in 1992, so I guess we’ll never know.”
Coppola’s support included inspiring Durham’s casting process—“Sofia always casts her actors from the gut, and she goes for people who she feels can really deliver,” he says. “They don’t necessarily have to be the biggest at the box office. It’s people that are also partly that person, that character.” There are three leads in the film: the hopeful, at times naive Steve (McNairy), young Alysia (Doughtery, a San Francisco native in her first film role), and the protective older Alysia (Coda’s Emilia Jones). The process took several years, but “I always went back to my gut,” Durham says, mentioning additional characters played by Geena Davis, Adam Lambert, and Cody Fern.
For costuming, Durham worked partially from his memories; when high school-age Alysia starts going to nightclubs in the city with her two close friends (Isabella Peregrina and Bella Murphy), Durham drew from his own life as a teenager in the ’80s. “The way they look and are styled was based on girls that I grew up with: the hardcore punk rock girl with tartan bondage pants and a leather jacket, and the girl who was really into ska bands like The Specials, with a beret and a checkered shirt.” He modeled older Alysia’s looks after another friend of his, who was “a little bit more New Wave or New Romantic, with a little Greek fisherman’s cap and a scarf around her neck with a blazer.”
Fairyland is an authentic portrayal of a transformative but deeply challenging time. As Alysia grows up and out of the whimsical, carefree world created by her father, she steps into the harsh realities of being raised with few boundaries and guidelines. She decides to strike out on her own, attending school at NYU and later in Paris, where she begins the writing practice that led to her memoir.
When she’s called back home to care for an ailing Steve, Alysia faces the conflicting emotions that come with being a caretaker at a young age. In Fairyland, the city of San Francisco plays its own role, offering both a judgment-free space to explore one’s identity and a community-minded environment in the dark days of the AIDS crisis. For Durham, Alysia’s story rang so true that it unleashed a world of memories he’d previously suppressed. Like Alysia, Durham had to step out of his burgeoning adult life—working in the movie industry after film school—to care for his father. “I just shut down,” he says. “It was a horrible, horrible dark chapter, and I just wanted to get back to my life and never think or talk about it again.”
Fairyland changed all of that. “I’m so thankful for the book, because it made me go back and revisit that time,” he says. “I’m hoping people see my movie and realize we can still make films about marginalized folks. I wish there were people who could see the movie that obviously can’t now. But it’s my tribute to so many of them.”
Source: W Magazine
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