Auto is Auto I'm afraid. You are only in charge of where you point the camera. To do what you want, turn off auto but set the ISO to auto (menu option), aperture to auto (on the lens), set shutter speed to auto (Top of camera). Then either select manual focus or A+M (menu option). If you have A+M active, it focuses automatically, but if you keep the shutter half pressed you can manually tweak the focus on the lens focusing ring.
One last tip, if you are in Manual focus mode, but find your subject is massively out of focus and you don't want to spend all day spinning the focus ring, you can press the AFL button and it will auto focus. Do this to get focus "in the ballpark" then continue to tweak as you require manually.
Hope this helps... have fun playing with you camera!