In 2005, Eleanor Coppola shot 80 hours of behind-the-scenes footage during the production of “Marie Antoinette.” It was her daughter Sofia Coppola’s third feature and a quite ambitious one at that, with unprecedented access to Versailles, a budget of $40 million and 57 shooting days on the schedule.
Though Eleanor had made one of the great documentaries about the filmmaking process in “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” capturing the chaos of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s film “Apocalypse Now,” she hadn’t come to “Marie Antoinette” to make her own film. She was there to help capture moments for marketing.
“She loved to show how things are made,” Sofia told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “The truth of what’s really going on behind that was always interesting to her.”
Eleanor Coppola had a vision for a documentary
The film’s release came and went, and life moved on, but it frustrated Eleanor that her work was never put together the way she wanted, that Milena Canonero’s beautiful costumes that she so lovingly captured were never highlighted. Then one day during the COVID-19 pandemic, Eleanor decided to revisit the footage and started dreaming a little bigger: Maybe there was something there after all.
Though Eleanor wouldn’t live to see it finished, she was right: There was something there. And Sofia would see it to completion: “Making Marie Antoinette,” a luminous and intimate look at the creative process, is now playing in select theaters. On Nov. 6, it’ll be available to stream on Mubi.
“I always loved Frederick Wiseman’s films that don’t have any plot. They’re just like fly on the wall,” Sofia said. “And I thought, oh, maybe it’s cool for the movie just to feel like what it was like on the set. So that was kind of the starting point.”
Eleanor and Sofia worried early on about the lack of drama. There were no “Hearts of Darkness” crises. Sofia even finished “Marie Antoinette” on time and on budget.
“It’s like the opposite of ‘Hearts of Darkness,’” Sofia said. “In a way it’s sort of a nice counterpoint because that movie’s so macho and masculine and this is so feminine.”
And it’s also true to what really happened. Going through the footage they discovered a trove of gems that Eleanor captured, including the first time she met Sofia’s then-boyfriend Thomas Mars, and the late Marianne Faithfull, in her beautiful costume, praising Eleanor’s films.
Sofia Coppola helped to finish what her mother started
Before Eleanor died in April 2024, she told her daughter that she wanted this film to be finished and her book, “Two of Me: Notes on Living and Leaving,” published. And, while grieving, Sofia, along with family friends and longtime collaborators, got to work to realize her vision.
“It was always kind of just finishing what she started out,” Sofia said. “Like any documentary, I’ve learned, you find the shape of it as you go. The hardest part was me being in it. Like, I would never in a million years think to show footage of me being vulnerable.”
In one moment, she’s sitting in a trailer with her mom and is visibly annoyed that she’s being filmed.
“Maybe I should rest so I can come onto set fresh and not having done a press junket in my trailer with my mom,” Sofia says.
Any mother and daughter, no matter their age, knows this kind of interaction well. But it didn’t make including it any easier.
“I’m like, oh, do we have to have that?” Sofia said. “It’s embarrassing that I’m being irritable and snotty with my mom. But it is real. So she would love that. I didn’t want it to be a puff piece. I wanted to show all the sides of that experience because that’s what she was looking for.”
The film also shows Sofia learning in real time to assert herself on a massive production.
“I hope that it’s helpful for people to see that there is evolution of people as, you don’t just walk on set and be this experienced person, like you have to find it,” Sofia said. “And you have to do things your own way, and it’s not always the way that everyone else does it.”
While it was coming together, they realized they had Eleanor’s words from that time to draw on as well from journal entries that they could overlay with the footage. In the film, they’re read by Diane Lane, an actor who has known the Coppolas since she was young, having appeared in many of Francis’ films going back to “The Outsiders” and “Rumble Fish.” She also starred in Eleanor’s directorial debut, “Paris Can Wait.”
“She really loved my mom,” Sofia said. “She knew her so well. So, she could kind of embody her, the feeling of my mom.”
20 years later, ‘Marie Antoinette’ has become beloved
“Marie Antoinette” had a rough entry into the world. It was infamously booed at the Cannes Film Festival and went on to receive mixed reviews from a pool of critics who were mostly male, but there were some outliers.
Roger Ebert, in a four-star review, wrote that, “every criticism I have read of this film would alter its fragile magic and reduce its romantic and tragic poignancy to the level of an instructional film.” At the box office, it wasn’t a disaster, but it wasn’t a hit either, with some $60 million in worldwide ticket sales.
But in the past 20 years, it’s undergone a significant cultural reappraisal. And thus its 20th anniversary year has become a big celebration, with “Making Marie Antoinette,” a 4K theatrical re-release of the film itself, a behind-the-scenes book with photographs from her friend Andrew Durham and an exhibition at Petit Trianon in the Palace of Versailles that runs through January.
But perhaps most importantly for Sofia, it’s a chance to remind (or show) the world who her mother was as an artist and a documentarian.
“It’s such a gift that she gave us this footage and that I got to kind of spend this year of grieving her in this way,” Sofia said. “She had such a specific way of doing things and seeing the world.”