Making Marie Antoinette Relishes in the Fun of Sofia Coppola’s Cult Classic

This fall marks the 20th anniversary of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, the cult classic, semi-anachronistic retelling of the young queen’s life of luxury and lovelessness in 18th-century France. In great Coppola family tradition, the late Eleanor Coppola was behind the scenes, recording her own video diaries that would become Making Marie Antoinette. Eleanor’s presence was not only a longtime essential factor in her daughter’s movies, but her landmark documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse — about all that went awry on Apocalypse Now — contributed to the storied lore of that film’s troubled production. Lucky for everyone, the mood behind the scenes on Marie Antoinette was much brighter and happier, bordering on silly in the first exclusive clip from the new documentary. Though the first bedroom scene between Kirsten Dunst’s titular queen and Jason Schwartzman’s King Louis XVI is painfully awkward in the text of Coppola’s film, the actors and Coppola herself are all smiles as they joke around in preparation for the shot.

After her mother’s death in 2024, Coppola worked through the footage to finish the documentary Eleanor started during the pandemic. With Diane Lane narrating from Eleanor’s journals during that time, Making Marie Antoinette transcends a behind-the-scenes special and becomes a much more intimate look into the artistry of a mother and daughter in conversation with each other. “It was such a gift to be able to look back on this time and see it though my mom’s eyes now that she is gone and seeing her watch her daughter at work now that I have almost grown daughters. And we were scrambling to get our shots done each day. I feel so lucky to be able to see what was going on,” Coppola said in an email. “It was nice for all of us to have a calm mom presence there, but she was mostly stealthily slipping around filming without trying to be noticed.”

Mubi will release Making Marie Antoinette in theaters on October 23.