‘Making Marie Antoinette’ Review: Eleanor Coppola’s Chronicle of Daughter Sofia Shooting Her 2006 Biopic Makes for a Sublime Collaboration of Talents

A film some people hated when it premiered at Cannes but which many others (those of us with excellent taste) adored from the moment they saw it in 2006, Marie Antoinette is aging exceptionally well. It’s like one of those gawky kids who, by the time they get to university, turns out to be both a beauty and a brainiac. And given one of its sub-themes is parenthood, and mother-daughter relationships in particular, it’s moving to see Sofia Coppola‘s third feature finally whelping a making-of documentary long after the fact, made by Sofia’s own mother Eleanor Coppola, who shot 80 hours of behind-the-scenes footage back in ’06.

Admittedly, the final product may not have the heft of Eleanor’s best-known doc, Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1993), her deeply insightful account of her husband (and Sofia’s father) Francis Ford Coppola filming Apocalypse Now. But Hearts of Darkness didn’t have anywhere as many macarons, pugs or frothy silk-satin gowns as Making Marie Antoinette does, so who knows which one future generations will watch more?

As explained by opening intertitles, the raw footage for this current film lay dormant for years after shooting, only parts of it used for Marie Antoinette‘s marketing campaign at the time. Spending lockdown together in 2020, Eleanor and Sofia started organizing the material with a view to finally finishing it. After Eleanor died in 2024, Sofia pressed on to finish it as a tribute to her mother, and only Eleanor is given the director credit here (Sofia is listed as one of its producers).

Viewers may wonder at how much each filmmaker shaped the end product. But care has clearly been taken to ensure that Eleanor’s is the dominant voice, even if the voice we literally hear reading Eleanor’s diary entries from the time is actor Diane Lane’s. An early montage of shots where Eleanor can be seen reflected in the many mirrors of Versailles, holding her camera to her face, also helps to resuscitate her as a presence here.

Meanwhile, her visual signature as an artist is also palpable throughout, felt in the attention given to details that amused or fascinated her, such as a oner capturing scores of extras getting their hair and make-up done in one of Versailles long hallways, or close-ups of actors’ tennis shoes lurking under period-perfect frocks. As the mother of Marie Antoinette‘s director, an aunt to one of the film’s major stars (Jason Schwartzman) and a long-time acquaintance of the movie’s star (Kirsten Dunst), Eleanor was an insider in a way other making-of documentarians could only envy. She could see how exhausted and overwhelmed Sofia was by the $40m project, an anxiety she strove to hide but which a mother could spot in the slump of her shoulders or the flicker of annoyance in her face.

At one point, Lane’s voiceover mentions almost as a throwaway line that Sofia and Eleanor had a rough patch when the former was a teenager, but whatever that was about, it seems to have passed and there’s an intimacy here, a bond both familial and artistic that’s quite beautiful. Unlike anyone else who has tried to interview the notoriously tight-lipped Sofia, whose deceptively simple California-girl verbal style belies her intelligence, Eleanor doesn’t seem cowed or hesitant to say things to her daughter’s face that others wouldn’t dare to utter. For example, she notes that all Sofia’s films so far have been about lonely, privileged girls, a point Sofia blinks away with just the tiniest trace of irritation.

That said, at one point Eleanor captures Sofia giving Dunst a note about the scene where Marie Antoinette is upbraided by her ambassador (played by Steve Coogan) for paying more attention to sleeve lengths than a looming diplomatic crisis. Sofia likens the moment to times she herself has had to let producers know that she’s “not an idiot,” a rare insight into how the director sometimes felt belittled by peers and had to fight to be taken seriously. Of course, such patronage has completely died out in the film industry worldwide, and not something any woman director has to contend with these days, right?  

Later on, Sofia has the most ladylike of grouses to her mother about how she has to keep arguing with those closest to her, like her own father or her cinematographer Lance Acord, against giving more subjectivity to the men in the story. In the case of her disagreement with Acord, it comes down to her literally arguing against having a point-of-view shot for Marie Antoinette’s prospective lover (a then-barely-known Jamie Dornan) during the masked ball scene.

Francis Ford Coppola, on the other hand, had the temerity to suggest during the development stage that maybe more attention could be paid in the script to what was going on with husband Louis. Sofia was quite right to kick against that, as the film’s ruthless focus on Marie Antoinette’s blinkered, innocent, insanely frivolous sensibility is one of the qualities that makes it so fascinating. How fitting that it’s shown here that the last scene shot was Dunst in the bathtub, sultrily suggesting that the starving peasantry should eat cake.

The above might give the impression that Making Marie Antoinette is preoccupied with gender equity and on-set discord, when in fact for the most part it’s breezy, blousy and pink as a May peony. There’s plenty of time to watch Schwartzman, for example, goof off between takes playing pop tunes on the harpsichord, Asia Argento show off her palmistry skills, and savor some of the 72 different searingly gorgeous gowns costume designer Milena Canonero had made just for Dunst’s Marie Antoinette. Mind you, a few of the filmmakers interviewed here by Eleanor complain about Canonero and her department’s perfectionism, which end up costing days’ worth of time out of a tightly scheduled shoot.

By the end of the production, poor Sofia looks, in the most soigné sort of way, totally cooked, and confides to her mother’s camera that it’s been fun making this big-scale confection but she’s over it now and going forward wants to make smaller, simpler works and never another period piece. Fans of The Beguiled and Priscilla will be pleased she didn’t keep her word because, as Making Marie Antoinette illustrates, Sofia Coppola’s distinctive, thoughtful, irreverent use of period settings is one of her superpowers as a director. It’s a sieve through which she filters female-driven stories in a truly unique way, just as Eleanor Coppola processed her own fascinations through documentary observation of artists at work. How fitting that Making Marie Antoinette captures both mother and daughter at their best.