‘Making Marie Antoinette’ MUBI Review: Eleanor Coppola’s Posthumous Production Diary Doubles as a Tender Portrait of Her Daughter at Work

I learned not to make big movies, not to make period movies, to have a small crew and a small cast,” Sofia Coppola says near the end of Making Marie Antoinette. “I enjoyed it, but I wouldn’t do it again.” The director’s confession has a particular significance. She is saying it to her mother, in her trailer, as she is about to finish shooting Marie Antoinette, her ambitious $40 million movie, much of which was filmed at the Palace of Versailles and which was released in 2006. Her mother, Eleanor, was making a documentary about the shoot, just as she had done when her husband —and Sofia’s father— Francis Ford Coppola directed Apocalypse Now. An obviously partial observer, Eleanor had the kind of relationship and trust that gave her not only unrestricted access to the set but also to her daughter’s more intimate thoughts, something Sofia probably would not have confessed to just any filmmaker.

Eleanor shot more than 80 hours of footage during the making of Marie Antoinette, but she did not dare go back through it and try to turn it into a film until the pandemic and its inevitable lockdowns arrived, which she spent with Sofia herself. Eleanor died in 2024, at the age of 87, and it was her editor and her daughter who ultimately completed the film, working from her comments and notes. Part of that production diary serves as the narration for this making-of. Read by actress Diane Lane, it reveals Eleanor’s personal thoughts, her observations, her reflections on what was happening and her feelings as she watched her beloved daughter take on such an enormous production, seemingly balanced on her small and rather fragile shoulders.

One of the central threads of Making Marie Antoinette is precisely that: watching Sofia figure out how to steer such an enormous ship despite being a fairly shy person with a calm temperament, qualities that are not usually considered requirements for a job like this. That becomes especially clear when her brother Roman Coppola —the film’s second-unit director— appears and we see him behaving in a much more conventionally male-filmmaker way. Francis, the “father of the creature,” also shows up several times during the shoot, but apart from a brief interview segment, he is deliberately kept in the background, so as not to overshadow the female duo at the center of the two films being made at the same time.

Marie Antoinette was an expensive production that took 57 days to shoot, with hundreds of extras and a cast that included Kirsten Dunst in the title role alongside Jason Schwartzman (Sofia’s cousin and Eleanor’s nephew), Judy Davis, Asia Argento, Molly Shannon, Steve Coogan, Rip Torn and Marianne Faithfull, to mention only those who appear here. Sofia was given access to Versailles in a way no filmmaker had been before, and she filled the place with her busy costume, makeup and production-design departments, along with huge numbers of extras and a technical crew from several different countries. And all of it came at a cost in terms of her health —she developed a cough and fever from bronchitis and took antibiotics for several days— as well as in terms of the constant worries that come with a production of this scale. But she managed to bring the ship safely into port, finishing on schedule and without going over budget.

Eleanor’s camera observes the shooting of specific scenes, reflects on what she is seeing, follows Sofia during conversations with members of the crew (costume designer Milena Canonero is particularly important, as is the cinematographer Lance Acord), and spends plenty of time with Dunst and with the always attention-grabbing Schwartzman, who cannot help but make himself noticed. But more than the familiar behind-the-scenes footage that Eleanor captures so well, what makes Making Marie Antoinette most interesting are her reflections and the way they are woven into what is happening on set. Through Lane’s narration, the filmmaker talks about her “role” within a family of filmmakers, about how her daughter was instrumental in convincing her to show the footage she had shot, about her relationship with Sofia and about her own position as an “uncomfortable” documentary filmmaker in the middle of someone else’s production.

Despite its cost and ambition, Marie Antoinette was a very personal film from a director who, at that point in her career, had just scored two consecutive successes with The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. Although her third film received divided reviews, she retained that eye for detail and for the experiences of her alienated female protagonists, while largely setting aside the political and historical dimensions of the character and her era. Add to that its contemporary touches —from the visual style and editing rhythm to, above all, the modern songs on its soundtrack— and Marie Antoinette ended up feeling a more fragile than its predecessors. The exhausting experience soon sent her back to smaller sets and more intimate stories, as seen in her subsequent Somewhere and The Bling Ring. Time, however, has been kind to the film, and now, a month after MUBI releases the documentary about its making, the original movie is getting a 4K Criterion edition.

Ultimately, while Eleanor is the person credited with making the film, the fact that it was completed by Sofia herself also turns Making Marie Antoinette into a portrait of her mother, a tribute to the talented and discreetly supportive woman behind that family of filmmakers, moguls and larger-than-life personalities. Eleanor, Sofia says, was the one who encouraged her to follow her artistic muse and take the risks involved in pursuing the same profession as her father. From the beginning of her career, Sofia was seen as a prototypical “nepo baby,” and it was her films that gradually managed to dismantle that perception. Thanks to her mother’s warm, understanding and at times almost concerned perspective, Sofia Coppola demonstrates here that you do not have to raise your voice or adopt a “dictatorial” personality to lead a film production. The same is true of Eleanor. Both women demonstrate that with talent, sensitivity and respect for other people’s work, much of the journey is already accomplished.