While director Sofia Coppola was laboring on “Marie Antoinette,” documentarian Eleanor Coppola, the director’s mother, shot 80 hours of behind-the-scenes footage. Eleanor had done this before, most notably for her groundbreaking 1991 documentary “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” which served as an all-access pass to her husband, Francis Ford Coppola, laying it all on the line to produce “Apocalypse Now.” But unlike that project, Eleanor’s “Marie Antoinette” footage has gone untouched.
That is until 2020, when Sofia and her family moved back to Francis and Eleanor’s Northern California Vineyard Estate during the COVID lockdown.
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“We were all at home in Napa, and my mom said, ‘Let’s get the footage out and look at it,’” said Sofia Coppola, while a guest on this week’s Filmmaker Toolkit Podcast to discuss both the 20th Anniversary re-release of “Marie Antoinette” and Eleanor’s documentary “Making Marie Antoinette.” “It was the first time I had ever seen it, and I didn’t realize how much footage she had.”
According to Sofia, Eleanor was frustrated that the material had only appeared in some promotional marketing materials without being utilized to its full potential. Toward the end of her mother’s life (Eleanor died in 2024 at age 87), she made it known that she wanted her memoir to be published as a book, and for “Making Marie Antoinette” to be finished — a process that started during lockdown. Sofia said she “never thought to make” the documentary, but wanted to carry out her mother’s wishes and pay tribute to her with the film, which ended up opening her own eyes in a number of different ways.
“It’s really cringey to see myself as a baby director because it was 20 years ago and I’m not as confident about being assertive,” said Coppola. “My dad would always say, ‘You have to yell ‘action’ louder,’ he was worried that people wouldn’t take me seriously.”
Sofia, contrasting herself to her father, Francis, acknowledged she has a very low-key demeanor, something that hasn’t changed over the years, but in rewatching the footage she gained perspective of how much, in just 20 years, people’s attitude around her changed. In a moment from “Making Marie Antoinette,” Sofia is seen having to push back against the need for a scene to be covered from the perspective of Jamie Dornan’s character, as if solely shooting it from the female characters’ perspectives was somehow incomplete.
“I think you see me really trying to fight for a female point of view that was unusual at the time,” said Coppola. “Where now it’s like everyone gets it, but you can see me struggling to try to make that clear.”
In retrospect, Coppola also believes the same applied to male critics, having recently revisited the scathing critical response her film initially received.
“I found a box a pile of bad reviews, and they’re just like one terrible review after the other, and they had really funny headlines like, ‘A Royal Mess,’ and they were all written by men,” said Coppola. “And it was [as if] because [the film] was frilly and feminine, then it had to be fluff and dismissed, and I think that just was sort [of the] attitude — [it] was different then about a woman’s point of view [in movies].”
Despite the bad reviews, Coppola insists the reports of the “Marie Antoinette” getting booed at its Cannes Film Festival premiere were completely overblown.
“The thing at Cannes got exaggerated; it wasn’t that dramatic,” said Coppola. “There was a little group of English journalists that started booing, and then they, at the press conference, said, ‘You got booed.’ So then it came out, all these headlines, ‘Booed in Cannes,’ or whatever. We thought we had a great screening.”
Back in 2006, Coppola had anticipated receiving some pushback at Cannes — a young American director taking French history, “and turning it on its head, and doing it from the point of view of this villain, and making her human” was something she expected would rub some the wrong way. She took some glee in the film being rebellious, imbued with punk spirit. But she was caught off guard by the response to her anachronistic use of a 1980s post-punk, new wave soundtrack, which included songs from Siouxsie & the Banshees, Bow Wow Wow, The Strokes, New Order, and Aphex Twin.
“I’d rather do stuff that people hate and love than just [get] a mediocre response; it would be boring to do safe, but I was surprised that the contemporary music — that hadn’t been done a lot before. It just seems weird that that was shocking at the time, or offensive. Now, it’s like you don’t even think twice [about using a non-period-accurate needle drop],” said Coppola, who, along with her composer (and husband) Thomas Mars (frontman for the band Phoenix) and longtime music supervisor Randall Poster, was praised for use of anachronistic music in Coppola’s 2023 film “Priscilla.”
While on the podcast, Coppola talked about how “Marie Antoinette” was, by far, her most difficult shoot; The stress of the film’s logistics — shooting at the Versailles historical museum with extensive costume changes — nearly broke her, admitting there were times she was convinced she no longer wanted to be a filmmaker. Coppola, who loves “Hearts of Darkness” — and often quotes her father’s “I’m gonna get an ‘F’” meltdown in the middle of making “Apocalypse Now” — also understands the value of Eleanor gaining access that most documentarians never could to both her husband’s and daughter’s sets.
“I would never open up and I would never talk so honestly, and be vulnerable like that except for my mom,” said Coppola about Eleanor coming into the director’s trailer with her camera at her lowest points while making “Marie Antoinette.” “It’s embarrassing for me to show that, but I hope it shows a real aspect of filmmaking and what you’re really feeling at the time and the self-doubt. So I hope to younger filmmakers it’s helpful to see that everybody goes through that.”
Yet the most personal revelation from working on “Making Marie Antoinette” for Sofia was understanding what it was like for her proud mother to watch her then-34-year-old daughter orchestrate this massive production. After Eleanor passed away, editor Aaron Matthews found the parts in her journal that corresponded to being on the “Marie Antoinette” set — those entries would later become the documentary’s voice-over (read by Eleanor’s close friend, actress Diane Lane). In her journal, Eleanor reflected that when she was Sofia’s age, she already had three kids and felt like she had to sacrifice her own creative career for her family.
“She always felt like she wasn’t able to do her full creative work because of being a mother and wife. She just said how different her generation was, and she was really encouraging and happy to see me being able to do both,” said Coppola. “ I didn’t expect that [in Eleanor’s journals], even though I knew that was something that was a big theme for her. And then also seeing myself as a young director through my mom’s eyes, 20 years later, and now I’m a mother to grown daughters, I see it also as a mother’s perspective, so it was really touching for me.”
The postscript to “Making Marie Antoinette” notes that Eleanor would go on to make “Paris Can Wait” (2016) and “Love Is Love Is Love” (2020).
“She made her first narrative feature film at 80, so she’s the oldest person on record to have made their debut film at 80, which is so cool,” said Coppola. “And she says that seeing me do my work was the inspiration.”
MUBI is releasing both “Making Marie Antoinette” and the remastered “Marie Antoinette” in theaters this weekend, timed to the film’s 20th Anniversary. The remastered “Marie Antoinette” will also be released by Criterion in November.
To hear Sofia Coppola’s full interview, subscribe to the Filmmaker Toolkit podcast on Apple, Spotify, or your favorite podcast platform. You can also watch the full interview on YouTube.