Eleanor Coppola Spent the ‘Marie Antoinette’ Shoot Filming Her Daughter Sofia Direct It. Sofia Just Finished the Documentary Eleanor Didn’t Live to Make, with Diane Lane Reading Her Mother’s Journals
The footage runs about 80 hours, shot on 16mm and digital at Versailles in 2005. The finished documentary is called “Making Marie Antoinette.” MUBI is releasing it worldwide.
“She was on set as a filmmaker and also my mother, so I found it so moving to go back through the material and to see our shoot through her eyes,” said Sofia Coppola.
Eleanor Coppola spent much of her life pointing a camera at other people’s movies, usually her own family’s. In 1991 she won an Emmy for “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” which she assembled from footage she shot on the set of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s “Apocalypse Now.”
In 2005 she brought her camera to the Palace of Versailles, where her daughter Sofia was directing “Marie Antoinette.” Over the shoot she recorded roughly 80 hours of 16mm and digital footage, watching her daughter work.
She and Sofia started going through all of it together during the pandemic. It was always Eleanor’s wish to shape the material into a feature documentary. She died on April 12, 2024, at 87, from complications of thymoma, before she could.
Sofia finished it for her. She cut the footage with editor Aaron Matthews, with input from Eleanor’s friends Davia Nelson and Liz Bird, and Diane Lane voices Eleanor by reading from her journals. The result is “Making Marie Antoinette by Eleanor Coppola,” arriving this fall worldwide via MUBI.
“Although it was very hard to watch myself as a baby director, it was interesting to see me through my mom’s eyes,” Sofia told Vogue. “She loved moments that were difficult and she got me to open up in a way I wouldn’t with anyone else.”
The documentary is one piece of a larger 20th-anniversary rollout. Sony is releasing a fully restored version of “Marie Antoinette” in US theaters on October 2. Coppola’s Important Flowers imprint is publishing a companion book of on-set photographs by Andrew Durham this September. And from September 22, 2026 through January 24, 2027, the Petit Trianon at the Château de Versailles will host an exhibition on the film’s process, costumes, and cultural afterlife.
“Marie Antoinette was bold, beautiful, irreverent and hugely influential, and to revisit it now through Eleanor Coppola’s eyes, as both a filmmaker and a mother, is incredibly moving,” said MUBI founder and CEO Efe Cakarel.
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