Director: Eleanor Coppola
Watching Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette on it’s initial theatrical run was the last time I saw one of the most important people in my life. Someone who meant the world to me. We went to see it together and, afterward, she came back to mine, just briefly. There was a strange magic in the air, something unspoken and unusually intimate – more-so than the lovely, casual intimacy that had defined our relationship before that. One of those fleeting moments that stay with you.
Marie Antoinette stayed with me, too. In spite of a relatively hostile critical reception at the time of release (a predictable, taciturn backlash against Coppola after the praise for The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation both), the film has weathered the past 20 years (shit!) to become a beloved cornerstone of the filmmaker’s canon, with a deserved anniversary re-release just around the corner. Her mother, Eleanor Coppola, shot upwards of 80 hours of behind the scenes footage during the shoot but it wasn’t until lockdown circa 2020 that the pair regrouped in their family bubble to sift and organise the footage. When Eleanor passed in 2024, Sofia stepped up to finish assembling the documentary now released on MUBI in the UK.
Making Marie Antoinette justifies itself as a feature documentary, beyond what one might expect from a run-of-the-mill special feature on a deluxe blu-ray. Diane Lane provides the after-the-fact narration for Eleanor. This and the footage reveal the motherly bias of Eleanor’s documentation. Through her eye Sofia looks small and fragile, particularly in a shot of a crowded set where she is sat between figures all standing. It’s a document of her own concerned parenting. When Sofia gets sick with bronchitis on set, it is Eleanor who calls a doctor to check on her and prescribe antibiotics. With $40mil on the line, there’s no altering the 57-day schedule, even as the elaborate nature of the Versailles location keeps eating up time. So much make-up, so many costumes, so many extras waiting for the call of “action”. At times it looks like a restless variation on Alexsandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark. Masses of people displaced from time haunting a palatial historic landmark in preparation for some intended haunting. Lane’s narration even muses on filmmaking as an act of transcending linear time.
The familial closeness and tight-knit nature of the Coppolas evidences a level of reassurance on set, highlighted when Roman Coppola arrives to shoot second unit. Making Marie Antoinette makes an argument for the legitimacy of nepotism; that it can be a comfort, a balm, a blessing to smooth the rough and daunting edges of a film shoot with so much on the line. As much as Eleanor wishes to be “as invisible as possible on set”, her very presence has a material – and maternal – effect on the outcome.
Being a secondary roaming camera around the action also highlights the enduring relationship between Marie Antoinette and young, aspiring (and by extension often isolated) women. Both Sofia and her star Kirsten Dunst acknowledge the personal closeness they feel to Antoinette and her legend. Sofia through growing up in a family of (mostly male) filmmakers, Kirsten thanks to literally growing up on movie sets, learning how to navigate the attention and judgments of others. Their commitment to the project evidences the inspirational debt they owe to the tragic figurehead, both hoping against hope that the endeavour doesn’t end with their own execution in the court of public opinion. They aren’t the only people to finds their roles on set blurred by historical influence. Jason Schwartzman shows just as much nervousness and self-doubt as his character Louis XVI. Elsewhere, Steve Coogan looks as irritated and uncomfortable between takes as in the finished product, while Marianne Faithful comes off, candidly, like an empress herself.
Various key players from the production provide interview segments between shots or are captured in the act of doing their jobs; cinematographer Lance Acord, production designer K.K. Barrett, producer Ross Katz and costumer Milena Canonero, many more besides. Francis visits set, peacocking about without a role, seemingly quite relieved to be nothing more than a spectator. The film opens with Sofia rousing the crew with the Coppola family tradition of three cries of “poo-waba”. Given how Eleanor’s documentary on Apocalypse Now captured this same tradition at the beginning of that fraught, maniacal, frequently cursed production, it casts a tremelo of anxiety over the picture. Will this shoot prove a folly of similarly sprawling dimensions? Though there are hiccups for sure, what unfurls feels very different, creating a portrait of Sofia’s softer, adaptable but confident onset process and her methods of collaboration. If Making Marie Antoinette is less of a dramatic journey than Hearts of Darkness, that’s a testament to how Sofia corrals a cast and crew of hundreds to bring her imagination to life. Instead of documenting an embittered fight to the finish line, Making Marie Antoinette celebrates the creative artistry, play and closeness of movie-making, in the hands of a grounded professional always ready to undersell her own abilities.
It also reminded me that I miss my friend, and that movies connect us on both sides of the lens.
