Strangers in the night - but without the clichés

On a Sunday in a mid- Manhattan hotel, reporters squeeze elbow to elbow around a large table that fills a windowless room.

Almost imperceptibly, director Sofia Coppola slips into the only empty chair. As she fields questions, her voice trails off at the ends of sentences as if preoccupied - yet she's highly attentive. When one of the recording devices clicks off, she thoughtfully pauses so that its owner can flip the tape.

She may seem like the most low-key of directors, but Coppola has been able to do what director Terry Zwigoff couldn't: get comedian Bill Murray to act in her new film. "Lost in Translation," which has been entered at the Venice, Toronto, and Telluride film festivals and debuts next Friday, is a delicate, moody romantic comedy set in Tokyo.

"I wrote the movie with Bill Murray in mind," says Coppola, who is the daughter of director Francis Ford Coppola. "He's a great improviser and added a lot to the role. He approaches everything with 'how can we make this more fun?' "

The impetus for "Lost in Translation," came primarily from Coppola's strong visual impressions of Tokyo and her experiences working there in the '90s as a fashion designer and photographer.

In 1994, she launched her teen fashion line, Milk Fed, which was marketed in Daikanyama, Tokyo's hip neighborhood, as California Cool with a pink-and-cream logo. She later did photo shoots there for a Japanese fashion magazine and met Fumihiro Hayashi, a man nicknamed "Charlie Brown" who introduced her to the city. She cast him as Charlotte's friend Charlie in "Translation."

The simple story, about a chance meeting of two lost souls who strike up a friendship, is set in Tokyo's fortress-like Park Hyatt Hotel. There are echoes of Jacques Tati's classic "Playtime" in the contrast between the hotel's ultramodern architecture, which isolates human beings, and the exaggerated, almost anthropomorphic quality of devices like loud faxes piercing the silence.

Murray plays a cranky, washed-up TV actor, Bob Harris, who's there ostensibly to shoot a very well-paid Suntory whiskey commercial. His height and casual deadpan manner make him stand out even in Tokyo's most frenzied situations, as does the contrast between his insouciance and Japanese formality - generating much humor.

His potential soulmate is Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), married for two years to a workaholic photographer. Charlotte combines the dreaminess of a philosophy major with the social assurance (and superciliousness) of a recent Yale graduate.

"What I love about Tokyo is this weird mix of Western influences," says Coppola. "Like suddenly finding a New York bar with a jazz singer singing 'Scarborough Fair' on the 10th floor of a Japanese office building."

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