Sofia Coppola Finishes Her Mother's Final Film: 'It's Cringy For Me to See Myself'

Sofia Coppola has finished her late mother's last film. Making Marie Antoinette, Eleanor Coppola's posthumous documentary built from more than 80 hours of footage shot on the set of Sofia's 2006 Marie Antoinette, is now in theaters and arrives on MUBI on November 6, alongside a new 4K restoration of the feature itself.

Eleanor Coppola died in April 2024. Mother and daughter had begun reviewing the footage together in 2020, during the pandemic, but had not started editing. "She was explaining what parts she was drawn to," Sofia Coppola told The Film Stage. After Eleanor's death, Sofia found the editor, Aaron Matthews, through a friend of her mother's, and spent the past year completing the film as a mission of sorts.

What's in the finished film?

The documentary departs from Eleanor's earlier behind-the-scenes work in one key way: it pairs her daily diary entries, read as voiceover, with the footage she shot that same day. The journal was also being prepared as the third book in Eleanor's published series, and the editor helped locate passages that matched the set material. The result is less a record of the production machine and more an adoring portrait of Eleanor herself, refracted through her daughter's judgment about what stayed in.

That judgment had limits. "I really relied on the editor to be like, 'Okay, what do we keep in here?'" Coppola said, describing her discomfort as a subject rather than a director.

Why does watching it make her cringe?

"It's cringy for me to see myself," she said bluntly. She cites footage of herself as a young director, "not quite as comfortable being assertive about things," and moments of irritability — vulnerability she'd never have allowed a standard behind-the-scenes crew. She hopes young filmmakers take away that a career is "a process and an evolution," not a fully formed arrival. Experience, she notes, teaches economy: nobody in the audience noticed the opera-scene extras wearing different wigs thirty minutes apart.

There are lighter discoveries too. Because she was on the main set, Coppola had never seen the "miles of wigs" for the extras, or much of what her mother's camera found — Milena Canonero's costumes above all, which Eleanor loved. Francis Ford Coppola wasn't directly involved in the edit, though Sofia showed him rough cuts for his editorial eye, and screened versions for a friend of her mother's to stay true to her perspective.

What's next for Coppola?

Marie Antoinette remains the biggest shoot of her career. At the end of it she vowed never again; she no longer feels that way, but she has learned she prefers "a more hands-on, intimate way" of working. The anniversary of Marie Antoinette served as the film's deadline — without it, she admits, she doesn't know when the documentary would have been done.

She calls the year-long undertaking emotional but a gift: time spent inside her mother's point of view on a chapter of her own life. Now, after two documentaries in a row, she misses narrative filmmaking and "getting to imagine a world and create it." No next project is in production. She'll get back to thinking about what's next — presumably without a camera-toting parent in the frame, which, on past evidence, she'd tolerate graciously anyway.