Sofia Coppola’s Lunch Club Is the Coolest Invitation of the Season
4 min read“Too many salads?” Sofia Coppola asks the table. The Oscar-winning filmmaker is in a cozy private room in the back of Via Carota, the popular Greenwich Village canteen, and has taken charge of ordering lunch family-style. She and her companions—sculptor Rachel Feinstein and fellow writer-director Tamara Jenkins—await the arrival of the fourth member of their group, artist Sarah Sze.
“I’m all for salads,” Feinstein replies, as plates and pots clank in the adjoining kitchen. “Do you guys want to get anything, like, fried and nasty?” “Yeah, yeah, yeah!” comes the resounding response.
Arancini and grilled artichokes are added to the order. Feinstein’s phone rings. It’s Sze; she’s gone to the wrong restaurant, their usual rendezvous point, by mistake. It’s not far, so she’ll be right over. “She’s always got so much going on, it’s incredible,” says Feinstein, an artist focused on sculpture and immersive installations, who had a solo show at the Bass Museum of Art in Miami Beach in 2024. “Like, I don’t know how she does her life.”
Sze’s life certainly is impressive. A solo show of her large-scale paintings and video installations recently opened at Gagosian in Beverly Hills. She also won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2003 and was the United States representative to the Venice Biennale in 2013. “And she’s always cheerful and relaxed,” Coppola adds.
The quartet has been gathering for lunch for 10 or so years—no one can quite remember when they started. Feinstein and Coppola first crossed paths several years earlier, both having been in Marc Jacobs’s orbit. Feinstein and Sze became friends via artist Lisa Yuskavage. Jenkins also met both artists through Yuskavage, and Coppola through Jenkins’s husband, producer and screenwriter Jim Taylor. Then Jenkins’s, Coppola’s, and Sze’s daughters were all schoolmates. It’s a bit blurry now.
But before the dawn of the lunch era, Coppola and Jenkins formed a coffee group for female filmmakers. They were the only members. “We would meet after drop-off and talk about art,” says Jenkins, whose credits include Slums of Beverly Hills, Private Life, and The Savages, which earned her an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay. “Our joke was, ‘Oh, it’s Women in Film.’
When Sze arrives, the others greet her warmly, and the four soon emerge as charmingly appealing archetypes of a high school clique—or a really fun movie about one. Sze is the studious sort the others try to emulate; Jenkins is the quick, dry wit; Feinstein regales the crew with hilarious tales from her daily life; and Coppola’s slightly shy, soft-spoken demeanor belies her powers of observation.
Each not only has a thriving career but also is a mom. Their combined eight kids were young when the lunches started (all are now in high school or college), and the women were determined to keep making art at a high level.
Feel Free by Sarah Sze.
“My mom always had her girlfriends, and they each always really struggled with being a mother and a wife and an artist,” says Coppola, whose mother, Eleanor Coppola, was a writer and documentary filmmaker but lived largely in the shadow of her husband, legendary director Francis Ford Coppola. “Our mothers’ generation didn’t have that figured out. We’re trying to figure it out.”
Over the years, the friends have served as sounding boards and cheerleaders for each other’s ideas. The group encouraged Coppola to make The Beguiled when she was on the fence. She won Best Director for the film at Cannes in 2017. “It’s a supportive environment,” she says.
Today the conversation pinballs from Jenkins’s gallery recommendations to lively takes on this year’s Oscar contenders. Sze describes her daughter’s recent 16th birthday dinner at her studio, and Feinstein gives a harrowing but comical account of discovering her son’s escaped pet python curled up behind a painting hanging on a basement wall. “It’s enormous, right?” she says, as the others gape at photos on her iPhone. “I got giant gloves. I grabbed it, and it wouldn’t come off, so I took the whole painting down and put it into his tank. He unraveled himself, and then I took the painting out.”
The discussion circles back to methods for maximizing creativity. Sze rises at 6:30 A.M., drives her daughter to school for bonding time, then heads straight to her studio. “I paint alone in the morning. I don’t do any emails, nothing, until 1:00 P.M.,” she says.
Feinstein says that she’s going on a seven-day retreat to learn the Hoffman Process. It’s a hardcore therapy technique, but the draw seems to be the strict no-tech rule. She wants to learn to stress less, focus more.
“My mother was always like, ‘I did not get to have the career that I wanted,’ and she was really angry about it,” says Feinstein, whose pieces often challenge society’s feminine ideals. “Then I thought, well, I’m gonna do it, and I’m also gonna have the kids. And the truth is, in retrospect, you can’t do it all.” Or at least, not simultaneously and well, she adds. “I tried the best I could. Does that make sense?”
“I would be less hard on yourself,” Sze says. “You actually have done it. I’ve actually done it. Our kids are seeing they have working mothers.” They nod, then huddle and smile for a selfie.
This story appears in the April 2026 issue of ELLE.