This year’s honoree at The Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA’s) 3rd annual film benefit, “A Work in Progress,” was writer/director Sofia Coppola, recent Academy Award winner in the “Original Screenplay” category for the multi-nominated Lost in Translation. The evening honored the 33-year-old Coppola’s work, creative vision, and dedication to the art of filmmaking. It included film clips and a conversation onstage at the Gramercy Theatre with guest moderator Elvis Mitchell (The New York Times’ film critic), who coaxed the very reticent director to admit her surprise at the success of her recent film. “It didn’t have a plot or anything,” she admitted. Coppola then confided to the audience that dialogue had actually been written for the film’s poignant closing scene between Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. That day, though, she told Murray to just “whisper something in the actress’s ear,” and they’d “fill it in later.” The final kiss was the actor’s idea, and the intended words remain a secret.

Also joining the director onstage was director Jim Jarmusch, who called her work “poetic,” and fretted about the pressure she would now be under after Lost in Translation. An emotional Kirsten Dunst introduced a clip from Coppola’s early Virgin Suicides (with Josh Hartnett) with the introduction, “She’s a visionary, she’s a guide ….” And the always amusing Bill Murray regaled the audience with memories of the shoot, suggesting that Coppola’s understated persona had convinced the Japanese crew that she had a “salt imbalance and that her parents would be claiming her at the embassy!”

Coppola introduced her video I Don’t Know What to Do With Myself (for the group White Stripes, starring Kate Moss), and two childhood home videos (Good Kids, Bad Kids and Doughmain).

Since 2002, “A Work in Progress” has honored a filmmaker whose “body of work reveals a distinctive and original voice in cinema.” It benefits MoMA’s Department of Films and Junior Associates (who help fund the acquisition of new works and support museum exhibitions).

Seen partying at the star-studded, sold-out event: Virgin Suicides stars Kathleen Turner and Kirsten Dunst (with Jake Gyllenhaal), Marcia Gay Harden, Bill Murray, Kevin Bacon and Kyra Sedgwick, Claire Danes, SNL’s Jimmy Fallon, Moby, Rosario Dawson, Anna Sui, Thom Filicia (of Bravo’s Queer Eye for the Straight Guy), mom Eleanor Coppola, publicist Bumble Ward, and directors Quentin Tarantino, Alexander Payne, Stephen Daldry, Al Maysles, and Mira Nair.

Certainly, this rising young filmmaker’s talent and creativity were not “lost in translation” to the most appreciative audience on this very special evening.