The Intricate Making of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette

During the making of Marie Antoinette, photographer Andrew Durham wandered the streets of Versailles with a 35mm camera. Twenty years on, more than 350 of his images have been gathered in a new book

In addition to a much-mythologised shoe obsession (she famously acquired four new pairs a week), Marie Antoinette had a not-insignificant enthusiasm for flowers. When dressing the Palace of Versailles then, for her 2006 film about the Austrian teenager who became the Dauphine of France, Sofia Coppola leaned in, installing epic vases of fresh blooms all around the set. “The florist would travel from Brussels every week with these beautiful arrangements,” remembers Andrew Durham, whose new book Making Marie Antoinette features one of these elaborate displays – the work of Thierry Boutemy – on its cover. “They could have just been plastic flowers, but that was the attention to detail on this movie.” And the scent? “I can’t recall, everyone had so much hairspray.”

The photographer, producer and director was introduced to Coppola in the early Nineties, and they would subsequently work together on the series Hi Octane (1994) and short film Lick the Star (1998). When Coppola set out to make her third studio movie, she invited Durham to join; he quit his TV exec job, flew to Paris on his own dime and crashed at her studio-provided apartment in the sixth, capturing behind the scenes on a small Contax 35mm camera he still owns today (at one point during our call he fetches it to show me). “A lot of filmmakers aren’t open to revealing their process, but Sofia and I both enjoy photographs where the director’s talking to crew,” says Durham. “We understand the importance of all those people’s jobs, so it’s nice to see what people actually do.” While a number of images were published in Vogue Paris around the film’s release – eventually turning up on Tumblr and Pinterest before finding new audiences on Instagram – the book, published by Coppola’s MACK imprint Important Flowers, brings together more than 350 photographs, the first time the full breadth of Durham’s archive has been seen in one place.

“I remember pulling up to Versailles in the car with that same wide-eyed feeling as when young Marie Antoinette first shows up in the film,” the photographer continues. “I had been before as a tourist, but this time I could wander as I pleased, taking shots of whatever I wanted. It’s still surreal, that we were allowed to go there and film.” The results are as spectacular as the film’s moments of grand indulgence. There are portraits of Kirsten Dunst, Rose Byrne and Asia Argento, in full 18th-century garb wearing sneakers by New Balance, Puma and Converse, respectively; extras in fantastic wigs having a cigarette break; Coppola posing among a sea of dashed juice cartons; close-ups of the sweet treats from which the film borrowed its distinctive palette. Evenings and weekends would mirror some of the decadence of Versailles, notes Durham, and he documented that too, as well as the film’s premiere and afterparty at Cannes. “It felt important to photograph that and blur the lines, because it really all felt like one, magical time.” 

Perhaps the most famous picture involves Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman and a MacBook. “Jason had made this funny short, like MTV Cribs, and was showing Kirsten,” recalls Durham. “It’s one of those things that just went on to have a life of its own, I saw it on a T-shirt in Silver Lake when I was in line for coffee. The laptop is what makes it so interesting.” Indeed, with the actors in costume as Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI, there’s a sense of disconnect with the technology on display, and yet the machine’s silver colour is somehow in sync with the surrounding tones, adding a further layer of intrigue. Elsewhere, the two leads are pictured sharing a chunky first-generation iPod, while a handful of actors can be seen carrying mobile phones that visibly predate the iPhone’s sleek design, and yet no one’s taking selfies. “This movie was shot a year before the iPhone, so it represents a very specific time,” reflects Durham. “I was lucky, I was the only one taking these photos, a few years later they wouldn’t have been as precious.”  

A glorious, candy-coloured piece that saw Coppola insert her own teenage soundtrack and a nod to the millennium with a pair of baby blue Chuck Taylors, Marie Antoinette was largely dismissed by critics when it screened at Cannes. Twenty years later however, the film has come to represent a certain, defiant brand of filmmaking, and is widely credited with reshaping the way movies – and audiences and pop culture in general – engage with girlhood. “I was thirteen when Marie Antoinette came out and it felt like watching a teenage girl’s fever dream,” the photographer Petra Collins shares in an oral history of the film, helmed by Vogue’s Keaton Bell, that accompanies the pictures in the book. “The way she captures girlhood taught me that there can be a softness in the way you approach your subjects – a sense of humanity and beauty.” 

Collins’ sentiment is echoed by contributions from other young contemporary figures who’ve grown up on Coppola’s films, such as Elle Fanning, PinkPantheress and Olivia Rodrigo, whose ’drop dead’ music video, an indirect homage to Marie Antoinette shot at Versailles, Collins directed. “Sofia told this story from Marie Antoinette’s point of view, she was always clear about that, and Marie Antoinette was a teenager when she became queen,” adds Durham. “Until that point, male filmmakers were making big period movies where the female characters felt secondary. I’m not a teenage girl, but I’m guessing this is why the film resonated with so many young women. They got it, they really got it.”

Making Marie Antoinette is published by MACK and out now. A documentary of the same name is in UK cinemas from 23 October, streaming on MUBI from 6 November.