Making Marie Antoinette review – sweet Coppola home movie reveals the family business

It is 20 years since the release of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette starring Kirsten Dunst; it is a supportively unjudging, unironised study of the queen’s early years before the 1789 revolution, lavishly and accurately costumed, shot on location at Versailles and based on the Antonia Fraser biography – but also subversively and amusingly using pop tracks from the 70s and 80s on the soundtrack. It got a storm of booing from French critics, reportedly annoyed at the way their history had been reduced to a music video and fashion shoot with no French actors involved. Or hardly any.

In fact, for all the lack of political grit, the film was interesting and accomplished, and deservedly has a fanbase – and it is to that constituency that this making-of documentary from the director’s mother Eleanor Coppola is really addressed. It is basically a sweet family home movie on digital video which shows something of the strain and the longueurs of shooting a demanding period picture, but tactfully not seeing anything really explosive or bad-tempered. It is very far from Eleanor Coppola’s sensational behind-the-scenes film Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse about the tumultuous creation of Apocalypse Now, directed by her husband Francis Ford Coppola.

Eleanor and Sofia edited the footage together during the Covid lockdown and diary entries by Eleanor Coppola, who died in 2024, are sensitively read by Diane Lane. There are innumerable shots of Sofia smiling at her mother’s camera, yet sometimes looking a little tired and ill. Jason Schwartzman, playing Louis XVI, grins cheerfully, while Marianne Faithfull, as Empress Maria Theresa, cheerfully banters with Sofia in a very naughty English way. Francis Ford Coppola arrives at one stage and says that his advice to Sofia had been to “throw a Marie Antoinette party and invite everyone to come to it…” A good description of the film, actually.

Elsewhere, in Lane’s diary voiceover, Eleanor talks about the pain involved for her personally when Sofia all but broke off contact with her in her teen years, but Eleanor recognised that this was a process she had to go through before they became close again. Yet there is of course no hint of anything problematic here; this in effect is a very indulgent bonus feature, which in a DVD would come in at about 15 minutes, tops. But it does give what looks like a pretty faithful account of the patient slog needed to shoot a feature film.