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‘I’m in an Eleanor Coppola film!’ Marianne Faithfull coos down the lens, the gilded walls of Versailles behind her cluttered with lighting rigs and crew prepping the next shot. It's the first time a filmmaker has been granted access to the palace on this scale.
Marie Antoinette was Sofia Coppola’s third feature, following The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation, and marked a serious step up in scale, with a 250-strong credited cast and crew.
Twenty years on, this documentary celebrates both the film and Eleanor, who spent her life among filmmakers before releasing her first feature, Paris Can Wait, at 80 in 2016. Sofia has explained that her mother’s 80-odd hours of footage were first trimmed into a DVD extra. Lockdown prompted the pair to revisit it, and Sofia completed the project following Eleanor's death in 2024.
The film itself initially divided critics with its anachronistic style, but it’s since become a cult classic, thanks to its thumping indie soundtrack, punk-pastel palette and dry wit. It’s also a clear expression of Sofia’s empathy for troubled young women (Marie was just 14 when she married Louis XVI, and 18 when she became queen), a pattern in her films that her mother clocks, at one point asking why she always has an ‘isolated main girl’ in her pictures.
On screen, Sofia has just 57 days, 20 of them at Versailles, to rebuild interiors including the Queen’s Grand Chamber, dress the cast in Milena Canonero’s elaborate, Oscar-winning costumes, and battle escalating bronchitis. Being her mum, Eleanor gets access few others would. You witness Sofia’s frustration at mansplaining colleagues (‘Go ahead and make a movie about Louis,’ she quips when a cinematographer suggests shooting from his POV) and the pressure of budgets and shooting deadlines. Yet flashes of comedy emerge, most notably from Jason Schwartzman, her on-screen Louis, clowning around on a harpsichord, and Faithfull, who plays Marie’s mother, joking about getting a ‘tit lift’ from the costumiers.
Even Hollywood filmmakers squabble with their mums
It’s a family affair, too, with brother Roman helping on second unit, father Francis Ford Coppola professing his admiration for his young daughter's clear vision, and Eleanor’s first meeting with Sofia's now-husband, Phoenix’s Thomas Mars, while he’s dressed as a court performer.
Underpinning it all is Eleanor’s own point of view, voiced by Diane Lane, the star of Paris Can Wait, in diary entries recalling the awe of watching her daughter’s ambition up close while trying not to be ‘an annoyance’ to cast and crew. There’s a revealing humanness to it, particularly as Sofia grumbles about an ‘hour and a half press junket in my trailer with my mother’, an image of a mum and teenager bickering lightly. It’s the prickliness you only have with a parent.
And though the footage is clearly amateur, with montages of random shoes and crew caught in modern tech and period garb, it’s disarming to feel so close to a cult classic in the making. This charming love letter to a universal relationship is proof that even Hollywood filmmakers can squabble with their mums, and love them regardless.
In cinemas worldwide Fri Oct 23. On Mubi from Nov 6.