Beyond Marie Antoinette’s glamour, Sofia Coppola gets celebrated by her late mother

In 2005, documentarian Eleanor Coppola showed up on the Versailles set of her daughter’s movie and quietly started filming. She captured Sofia Coppola at work on Marie Antoinette (2006) as she directed Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman and company, ultimately amassing about 80 hours of behind-the-scenes footage. Alongside the video, Eleanor kept a running diary of what she saw and felt—notes that would later become as important as the images themselves.

Years later, during the pandemic in June 2020, mother and daughter sat down together and began shaping that archive into a feature-length documentary, Making Marie Antoinette. What started as set B-roll evolved into a deeply personal portrait of a filmmaker watching another filmmaker—her child—find her voice.

“She credits her daughter as her inspiration. ” — title card in Making Marie Antoinette

Eleanor Coppola died in April 2024 at 84, leaving the film unfinished. Sofia took over producing duties to bring the project to the screen while keeping her mother’s name on the movie as director. The finished film blends Eleanor’s on-set footage with passages from her journals, preserving her point of view front and center.

The mother–daughter loop

Eleanor’s influence on Sofia runs through the new documentary and through Sofia’s work at large. Rooted in the 1970s conceptual art scene, Eleanor encouraged a kind of creative freedom that treated art as something you could make from almost anything. Her patient, observant approach offered a distinctly feminine counterbalance to the grand, high-voltage energy associated with Francis Ford Coppola’s filmmaking world.

You can feel that inheritance in Sofia’s films—from The Virgin Suicides to Priscilla—which linger on private spaces and the unspoken lives of women. Eleanor, for her part, always pointed the camera at the unvarnished process itself, and Making Marie Antoinette carries that same curiosity about how a movie is actually built.

It helps that the film in question became a modern cult object. Sofia’s Marie Antoinette turned Versailles into a pastel-pop fantasia—macarons, New Wave tracks, towering gowns—while tracing the isolating bubble of a teenage queen. Dunst’s take on Antoinette became iconic; Eleanor’s footage captures how that confection was mixed together, layer by layer.

• 2005 — Eleanor films Sofia directing in France, gathering ~80 hours of material and keeping detailed diaries.
• 2006 — Sofia’s Marie Antoinette opens, cementing its candy-colored, punk-tinged legacy.
• June 2020 — Mother and daughter begin crafting the archive into Making Marie Antoinette.
• April 2024 — Eleanor dies at 84; Sofia finishes the film as producer, retaining Eleanor’s directing credit.

The completed Making Marie Antoinette weaves Eleanor’s footage with her diary entries, keeping her voice at the heart of the movie.