Making Marie Antoinette

Follows filmmaker Eleanor Coppola’s behind-the-scenes documentation of her daughter Sofia Coppola directing the 2006 film Marie Antoinette, capturing the craftsmanship and challenges of being a young female director.

Polarizing upon its release, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is now, 20 years later, widely embraced as a 21st-century cinematic cornerstone and a distilled expression of its director’s recurring themes of celebrity, wealth, and isolation. For the first time, Coppola’s dynamic craftsmanship in creating her personal vision for the brief life of the 18th-century queen (Kirsten Dunst) in the years leading up to the French Revolution is on full display in this diary shot by her mother, filmmaker Eleanor Coppola, on the film’s set in Versailles in 2005.

From almost 80 hours of video, Eleanor began to assemble the footage during the pandemic lockdown, and Sofia helped finish editing it after Eleanor’s death in 2024. Narrated by Diane Lane, reciting Eleanor’s journals from the time, this is a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse that is both process-oriented and touchingly personal

“Making Marie Antoinette is considerably more than meets the eye… [It is] a circular and tenderly meta-textual film unto itself — one about two generations of women paying tribute to each other across space and time, seeding each other with the strength required to be seen in a world that would sooner flatten them into the wallpaper.” – David Ehrlich, IndieWire

Sophia Coppola’s newly remastered Marie Antoinette screens at the Roxie on Friday, October 23.