Making Marie Antoinette: Eleanor Coppola's Footage of Her Daughter

A first trailer has arrived for Making Marie Antoinette, the documentary assembled from roughly 80 hours of never-before-seen footage that documentarian Eleanor Coppola shot while her daughter Sofia Coppola directed Marie Antoinette at the Palace of Versailles in 2005. The film will open in theaters on October 23, alongside a 4K release of the 2006 feature, followed by a MUBI release on November 6. It premiered at the New York Film Festival.

Sofia Coppola completed the documentary after her mother's death. Diane Lane, an Academy Award nominee, provides the voiceover, reading passages from Eleanor Coppola's journals in which she describes her experiences on set and reflects on her relationship with her daughter. Aaron Matthews edited the footage with input from Eleanor's friends Davia Nelson and Liz Bird.

What does the footage show?

According to the film's synopsis, Eleanor Coppola accompanied her daughter to Versailles in 2005, when Sofia Coppola made her third feature, Marie Antoinette, starring Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman. The production was the first ever granted permission to shoot at the Palace of Versailles.

The documentary marks the 20th anniversary of Marie Antoinette's release and fulfills her mother's wishes, Sofia Coppola said. The film shows:

• The craftsmanship behind the 2006 production;
• Legendary costume designer Milena Canonero at work;
• What it was like to be a young female director at the time;
• What the synopsis calls "an unexpectedly intimate family portrait."

What has Sofia Coppola said about it?

"My mother and I started going through her footage during lockdown," Sofia Coppola said. "It was always her wish to make what she shot into a feature length documentary. She was on set as a filmmaker and also my mother, so I found it so moving to go back through the material and to see our shoot through her eyes."

How did critics receive it at NYFF?

Jake Kring-Schreifels, reviewing the film for The Film Stage at the New York Film Festival, placed the footage within the world of the 2006 feature. "Wrapped inside the visual splendor, luxurious elegance, and ornate decoration of Sofia Coppola's resplendent and anachronistic Marie Antoinette is the story of a young woman leaving her family behind to help lead another country—an unknown journey and simultaneous document of wealth, excess, and its depressive isolation," he wrote.

Yet, he noted, Sofia Coppola never faced the isolation of her heroine on set. "That's largely because her mother, Eleanor Coppola, was always by her side—lurking and observing and recording 80 hours of behind-the-scenes footage with her digital camera inside the halls of Versailles," he wrote.

The October 23 theatrical date, paired with the 4K rerelease of Marie Antoinette, will give audiences the chance to see both films — and two decades of a mother-daughter collaboration on screen together — within weeks of each other.