Marie Antoinette may be a film about an isolated, lonely young woman, but Eleanor Coppola's behind-the-scenes documentary, Making Marie Antoinette, is anything but. Coppola captured 80 hours of documentary footage during the shoot of her daughter Sofia's third film and, 20 years later, that footage has finally been compiled into a film in its own right. Eleanor and Sofia began working on the project during the COVID lockdown in 2020, and Sofia finished the job after her mother died in 2024.
Released in 2006, Marie Antoinette stars Kirsten Dunst as the last Queen of France, in a sympathetic, highly stylised retelling of her life. With a $40 million budget, it was Sofia's most expensive project to date (ten times more expensive than her previous release, Lost in Translation), and the production had been granted unprecedented access to the Palace of Versailles on the outskirts of Paris.
Unlike Eleanor's 1991 behind-the-scenes doc Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, which documents the rollercoaster shoot of Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now, there's no disaster or conflict at the centre of Making Marie Antoinette. Instead, there's a quiet, touching view of a mother and daughter's bond.
Eleanor's role on the film sets of her children and husband, she explains, is not to be the centre of attention. In journal entries, read by Diane Lane, she voices anxieties about feeling like an inconvenience. It's not about her, she says. It's the fate of the mother writ large; fading into the background at the expense of her family and knowing that's not just her duty but that she has no other choice.
There may be no grand dramas in Making Marie Antoinette, but Eleanor's camera has the warmth of a home movie – no small feat, when the home in question is the imposing Versailles. As well as capturing the sheer scale of the production, with hair and makeup stations lining the palace's cavernous halls and disappearing over the horizon, she catches smaller, more intimate moments on set: Louis XVI actor Jason Schwartzman in a costume fitting, while his tiny dog steals the show; his co-star Asia Argento teaching her castmates how to read palms in between takes.
It's instantly evident that Eleanor knows what a privilege it is to be allowed into the creative process of someone you love, to see them up close and in their element out in the world. How many of us get to see our loved ones this way, in a job they're so passionate about? It's moving to consider those roles being somewhat reversed in the making of this documentary while Sofia worked as a producer on her mother's footage. It takes a village to make a film, but it takes one to create a filmmaker, too.
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