Twenty years on, Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette still divides people, and this making-of doesn't try to adjudicate that fight. What it does instead is something narrower and more personal: show you what it looked like to be Eleanor Coppola, trailing her daughter through the halls of Versailles with a digital video camera, watching a movie get made. The comparison looming over this film is Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, Eleanor's 1991 behind-the-scenes documentary about Apocalypse Now. That film had everything — chaos, breakdown, heat, Francis Ford Coppola unraveling in real time in the Philippine jungle. Making Marie Antoinette has Sofia smiling tiredly at her mother's camera and Jason Schwartzman grinning. The bar was never going to be cleared, and to the film's credit, it doesn't try. What you actually get is a patient, affectionate record of the slog of period filmmaking — the waiting, the costume checks, the long days at Versailles. Marianne Faithfull banters with Sofia in what the review calls 'a very naughty English way.' Francis Ford Coppola materializes to deliver one genuinely good line: his advice to Sofia had been to 'throw a Marie Antoinette party and invite everyone to come to it.' It's the best critical description of the film anyone offers, and it takes about thirty seconds. Eleanor's diary entries — read by Diane Lane, sensitively — give the film its only real emotional weight. She talks about Sofia pulling away from her in adolescence, the pain of that distance, the eventual closeness that followed. It's brief and honest and earns its place. The rest is warm footage that would have made a generous DVD extra. Eleanor Coppola died in 2024. The film was edited during Covid lockdown by mother and daughter together. That context doesn't transform the footage into something it isn't, but it does give the whole thing a different gravity on the way out of the cinema. You're watching two women who worked through estrangement find something they both valued. That the something is a slightly indulgent filmmaking diary is almost beside the point.
