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Alexis Haines, née Neiers, the outspoken subject of The Bling Ring, blasted director Sofia Coppola for her 2013 film depicting the glamorous criminal pursuits of Los Angeles teens. Haines, who is telling her own story in Netflix‘s true crime series The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist, ripped Coppola for “lazy” storytelling in The Bling Ring, a fictionalized account of the theft Haines and her friends carried out between 2008 and 2009.
In a Wednesday (Sept. 21) interview with Entertainment Weekly, Haines complained Coppola’s film didn’t look deep enough into the “complexities” of her story, which was told partly through Emma Watson‘s Bling Ring character, Nicki.
“That’s the thing that’s so frustrating when you have someone that’s as brilliant as Sofia Coppola and as wonderful an actor as Emma Watson working on a movie together,” Haines said. “You have this opportunity to do something really great and to dig deeper and to look at the complexities, but it’s just lazy.”
Despite her harsh take, Haines actually hasn’t watched Coppola’s film in full. She told EW, “I’m a busy mom of two kids. If I’m gonna sit down for two hours, it’s not gonna be to watch The Bling Ring,” but added that she saw segments while working on Netflix’s Hollywood Heist series.
“When I was filming this documentary, they had me watch bits and pieces of the movie and asked me my opinion on it,” she explained.
The Netflix series — which features interviews with herself and fellow Bling Ring subject Nick Prugo, plus figures like Audrina Patridge and blogger Perez Hilton — provides deeper context, Haines told EW.
“I think the docuseries is so great because in the media reporting up until very recently there wasn’t really a space for the nuance and the complexity of what happened in the crime,” Haines told the outlet. “The story became sensationalized and there wasn’t space to talk about addiction and mental health. We still have a long way to go, but we’re so much farther than we were in 2010.”
The Real Bling Ring: Hollywood Heist is now streaming on Netflix.
