Making Marie Antoinette

7:30pm | SIFF Film Center

Presented by Grand Illusion Cinema. Eleanor Coppola turns her camera on her daughter, Sofia, as she shoots Marie Antoinette. Catching every detail of the behind-the-scenes and on-set action, Eleanor captures the feat of Sofia’s directing a landmark film aged 34, and muses on what it means for a mother to watch her daughter at work. 

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Polarizing upon its release, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette is now, 20 years later, widely embraced as a 21st-century cinematic cornerstone and a distilled expression of its director’s recurring themes of celebrity, wealth, and isolation. For the first time, Coppola’s dynamic craftsmanship in creating her personal vision for the brief life of the 18th-century queen in the years leading up to the French Revolution is on full display in this diary shot by her mother, filmmaker Eleanor Coppola, on the film’s set in Versailles in 2005.

From almost 80 hours of video, Eleanor began to assemble the footage during the pandemic lockdown, and Sofia helped finish editing it after Eleanor’s death in 2024. Narrated by Diane Lane, reciting Eleanor’s journals from the time, this is a rare behind-the-scenes glimpse that is both process-oriented and touchingly personal.

“Lush, intimate and compulsively watchable, this Coppola family affair bottles the fleeting nature of time and invites us to the ultimate Versailles party.” —Tomris Laffly, Variety

“Making Marie Antoinette is considerably more than meets the eye… [It is] a circular and tenderly meta-textual film unto itself — one about two generations of women paying tribute to each other across space and time, seeding each other with the strength required to be seen in a world that would sooner flatten them into the wallpaper.” —David Ehrlich, IndieWire