‘Marie Antoinette’ at 20: A peak behind the velvet curtain

By Leah Dolan, CNN

Sofia Coppola was once robbed. The burglar broke into the first floor of the director’s New York townhouse, scanned an array of expensive framed artworks on her wall and made their choice. It was a little surprising.

The thief decided to steal a set photo of Coppola’s 2006 movie, “Marie Antoinette.” In it, two extras stand in a large white tent, dressed in designer Milena Canonero’s pastel Oscar-winning costumes, snapping a photo on a digital camera.

“It’s so funny because you can watch the surveillance camera and the guy looks around and around and that’s the thing he takes,” said the creator of the image, Andrew Durham, a photographer, producer and close friend of Coppola’s, in a video call. “Like why? I don’t know. It’s such a random thing.”

Maybe the robber was a film student. Or at least had an active Tumblr account in the 2010s — where Durham’s intimate behind-the-scenes photographs of Coppola’s third feature film had fostered a cult audience.

Fascination around Coppola’s stylish, sympathetic biopic of the Dauphine of France has hardly waned in the 20 years since its release. So much so, it’s hard to envision the film’s once rocky start. At the Cannes Film Festival in 2006 the movie was booed by viewers and panned by critics. The Guardian called it “baffling and historically obtuse,” while Slate said Coppola was “as nostalgic about the ancien régime as ‘Gone with the Wind’ is about the antebellum South.” Much of the outrage pivoted on the film’s disinterest in accuracy, from the new wave romantic soundtrack to the American accents. It didn’t help that Coppola had been granted unique access to actually film inside the Palace of Versailles, a privilege some believed was totally wasted. The movie covered its production costs at box office, but not much more.

It didn’t go entirely without industry recognition, however. Canonero won the Oscar for best costume design for her froo-froo pastel creations in 2007, and the movie even took home the Cinema Prize of the French National Education System at Cannes — a surprising bolt of irony, considering many initial complaints were leveled at the film’s departure from historical events. Some critics did get on board with Coppola’s vision, and praised her accordingly. But over time, the tide has turned completely.

Now, “Marie Antoinette” is lauded as the film that launched a new chapter of vibes-based period dramas, legitimizing directors more interested in conjuring a mood than chronicled truth.

Powdered wigs and iPod classics

The film has taken on a more mythologized afterlife beyond its initial release, becoming a cultural shorthand for gilded loneliness and the young queen a melancholic symbol of girlhood. Last year, London’s V&A museum staged a multi-roomed menagerie of the young queen’s clothes, shoes and bedroom furniture, as well as Canonero’s costumes and a collection of contemporary runway pieces that took inspiration from the Dauphine herself. Curator Sarah Grant said the showcase “wouldn’t have been possible” without Coppola’s movie. This week, Versailles opened its own exhibition, more tightly focused on the film; while next month, “Marie Antoinette” is set to receive a full theatrical re-release to celebrate 20 years.

If that wasn’t enough, fans can now re-live life on Coppola’s set through not one, but two pieces of media that immortalized every pannier and pastry. The first is Durham’s enormous collection of point-and-shoot film photos, and the second is the late Eleanor Coppola’s behind-the-scenes documentary, “Making Marie Antoinette,” released next month.

Durham took 1,872 photos, to be exact, across 52 rolls. The final book, published this month by Important Flowers, is a curated selection of around 400 images. “I was really there just to document the production for Sofia,” Durham said. “Just for our archives, so Sofia and I could have all these snapshots.” He flew out from Los Angeles to Paris, crashed on Coppola’s sofa and traveled with her each morning to set. “Luckily for me, no one was doing what I was doing, and nobody cared,” he said. “I just walked around with my camera and sort of did my thing,” he added.

His ‘thing’ was often zoning in on the pleasingly incongruous, particularly moments where 18th century dress clashed with early 2000’s tech — Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman in full costume using an Apple PowerBook, or sharing headphones plugged into an iPod Classic, or extras in powdered wigs smoking and talking on a brick phone.

Durham’s pictures were first published by Vogue France, and then other magazines around the world became interested — they were licensed at first legally, with the help of a syndicate agent he had proactively sought-out. Then, after the invention of social media, the photos popped up anywhere and everywhere. “We had no control over them,” he said.

The images have been printed onto bootleg T-shirts and circulate endlessly on the internet. “I’d see this photo of Jason and Kirsten on this Vespa, it was everywhere,” he said. “And I was like, I don’t know how people got it.”

A different era

Part of the reason Durham believes these photos have had such a long tail is the fact they act as a kind of “time capsule.” “This movie was shot the year before the iPhone came out,” he said. “I think that says a lot about what these images represent.” There’s also an undercurrent of indie sleaze zeitgeist. “Maybe for young people they represent this cool older movie,” Durham added. “It’s kind of fun seeing these actors when they were younger and everyone’s smoking and it evokes a different era.”

There is something debauched and luxurious about Durham’s photos, and not just because everyone in them is dressed as French aristocrats guzzling champagne and popping bon-bons. Today, the US film industry has battled a downward spiral with around 30% unemployment since 2022 according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Studios are making significantly fewer movies than even just a few years ago, and declining film budgets mean it’s hard to get a film financed at all — let alone money for extra niceties. “When I arrived in Paris, I felt like the film set just mirrored the court of Versailles,” said Durham. “We would have these fabulous long lunches… Then it spilled out into our weekends and days off.” Photos of the cast and crew dancing at Le Baron, their “go-to hangout,” are peppered throughout the book — including a bleary-eyed photo of Coppola in the wee hours of the morning locked outside the apartment because Durham lost the keys on the dance floor. “We were all just a bunch of kids having fun in Paris,” he said.

A mother’s perspective

Durham’s approach to documenting was different to that of Eleanor Coppola, the late documentary filmmaker who died in 2024 and Sofia Coppola’s mother, who filmed her own version of events on set. Sofia and Eleanor Coppola began working on the commemorative documentary together while quarantining together during 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic, with Sofia ultimately finishing the film following her mother’s death.

“She was one of the most stealth people,” said Durham. “My process was more just going out and befriending people.” His pocket-sized Contax TVS3 meant he could snap photos quickly in a way that wasn’t intrusive, he said. “Eleanor, she was tucked away and so quiet, you don’t even know she’s there. Her process was so different, it was like a fly on the wall.”

Eleanor Coppola captured over 80 hours of footage from the movie’s time in production — recording intimate moments on set including her daughter’s brief flares of frustration with man-splaining colleagues, or Dunst’s polite ambivalence at being filmed for an additional project in-between takes. But more than just letting fans re-experience “Marie Antoinette” through a candid lens, the documentary allows viewers to see the whole thing from a mother’s singular point-of-view. Actor Diane Lane narrates passages of Coppola’s own diary throughout the film where she recalls the immensity of witnessing her daughter’s professional and creative ambition first-hand.

The final shot of the documentary shows Dunst luxuriating in a bathtub reciting one of history’s most fictionalized quips — “let them eat cake.” It was, fittingly, the last scene filmed on set in Versailles. Eleanor Coppola’s narration tells us that Sofia was astonished that they not only managed to finish the film, but also do so on time and on budget. Small-scale wins that pale in comparison to the film’s place in cinematic history.

“I don’t know if people can afford to make movies like that,” said Durham of Sofia Coppola’s masterpiece. “This really feels like the kind of movie that has gone out of style.”

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With contributions from CNN’s Bianca Betancourt.