Sofia Coppola Brings 'Marie Antoinette' Back to Versailles at 20

Sofia Coppola has staged an exhibition of props, costumes and behind-the-scenes materials from her 2006 film "Marie Antoinette" inside the Château de Versailles, in the very palace the real queen called home. The show, spread over two floors of the Petit Trianon, runs from September through January and marks the film's 20th anniversary.

"It's like Christmas for me," Coppola said ahead of the opening. "You think of a museum as very serious, and [the curators] have brought some rock and roll to it."

The launch drew an A-list crowd to the Versailles Orangerie, reuniting "Marie Antoinette" stars Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman. Francis Ford Coppola, Rashida Jones, Thomas Mars, Virginie Efira and Niels Schneider joined the party, with New Order — whose music pulses through the film — providing the tunes.

Milena Canonero's Oscar-winning costumes dress mannequins modeled on Dunst and Schwartzman, positioned beneath historical portraits and busts in the rooms where the real figures once danced and broke bread. Fact and fantasy mingle throughout: visitors move through the Petit Trianon's opulent halls to the faint sound of New Order, past display cases holding priceless historical artifacts alongside an arguably just as valuable pair of Manolo Blahniks.

The exhibition is one of two Versailles-adjacent Coppola projects this year. While working with the museum's curators, she was also editing "Making Marie Antoinette," a documentary drawn from 80 hours of on-set footage shot by her late mother, Eleanor Coppola. The film, now playing the fall festivals, will be released by Mubi on Nov. 9.

"It was such a gift to see all the memories of filming at that time, and to see them through my mom's eyes, watching her daughter work, when now I have almost-grown daughters doing their own work," Coppola told Variety. "It was very touching. She really wanted this film finished at the end of her life, so finishing it is a tribute to her."

Coppola had already worked in nonfiction with 2025's "Marc by Sofia," but this project asked something different, if only because she doesn't consider the film her own.

"Creatively it was challenging, because I wasn't making something I had in mind," she said. "I was trying to finish [my mother's] film the way she would have wanted, showing all the detail and beauty she cared about, while keeping in mind how she would have wanted it seen."

Co-editor Aaron Matthews and advisor and family friend Davia Nelson provided ballast, helping Coppola cut a documentary in which she herself was the subject.

"It's hard to tell what would be interesting to someone else when you're so close to it," she said. "Because I'm in it, and it's embarrassing to see myself as a young director, I have no perspective. They helped me see what other people might want to watch."

"I thought that if you love that movie, it would be fun to visit the film set, so the idea was to show what it was like there," she continued. "I was also a young director, not quite sure of asserting myself, so it's cringey for me. But I hope it's helpful for young people to see that you have to evolve and find your way as a director, too."

The documentary is the latest chapter in a retrospective year. Coppola directed a music video for her daughter, Romy Mars, shortly before starting the edit, and she has watched her own children pursue creative paths with a familiar pride.

"It's fun to see my kids being creative, and it's touching for me to see my mom watching her daughter make things," she said. "Now, I can see it from a new perspective, as a mother too."

The exhibition's playfulness channels the impulse that first drew Coppola to the project two decades ago.

"I wanted the characters to feel relatable and alive, as if you were going back in time rather than looking from a distance, and I wanted them to feel like the teenagers they were," she said. "I wanted a modern audience to feel maybe what they felt, keeping it grounded in the period, but also having fun."

The show will stay at Versailles far longer than Coppola's crew ever did. The production filmed at the palace for just 20 days in the spring of 2005 — a typical crunch for a site this popular, since productions are allowed to shoot only on Mondays, when the palace is closed to visitors. That constraint bred on-set ingenuity.

"Because we shot many different periods in a single day, Kirsten had to go from 14 to 28 in a matter of hours, and we tracked her age by the size of her hair," Coppola said. "On the other days of the week, we recreated her bedroom and other rooms elsewhere. When you're in a real place and see the real view out the window, it transports you, and the whole crew and cast feel it. On a soundstage, there's no view of the gardens."

Countless productions have since shot at the royal palace, always on Mondays. But for Versailles museum director Laurent Salomé, "Marie Antoinette" stands above the rest.

"Because Sofia doesn't care so much about historical precision and is more interested in feelings and atmosphere, it helps you understand what the place means," Salomé said. "Making a film here means exploring the mystery of the relationship between people, the house, its decoration, beauty and harmony with nature. Filming here has nothing to do with filming on a studio set. The château is itself a work of art, something strange that Louis XIV invented to transform people, including diplomatically. We saw that again recently with the visit of a certain president!"

With the exhibition open through January and the Mubi release of "Making Marie Antoinette" set for Nov. 9, Versailles will host Coppola's vision of the doomed queen well past the anniversary itself.