To mark the 20th anniversary of her 2006 film, director Sofia Coppola has partnered with the Château de Versailles on an unusual exhibition of props, costumes and behind-the-scenes materials, staged in the palace the real queen called home. Friends and family including Francis Ford Coppola, Rashida Jones, Thomas Mars, Virginie Efira and Niels Schneider joined the party, with New Order providing the tunes. Of course, Versailles has clearly been on Coppola’s mind for the past year.
While working with the museum’s curators to put together the exhibition, she was also editing “Making Marie Antoinette,” a documentary drawn from 80 hours of on-set footage shot by her late mother, Eleanor Coppola. Now playing the fall festivals, the film will be released by Mubi on Nov. 9. She really wanted this film finished at the end of her life, so finishing it is a tribute to her.” Coppola had already dipped into nonfiction with 2025’s “Marc by Sofia,” but this project asked something different, if only because the filmmaker doesn’t really consider the film her own.
They helped me see what other people might want to watch.” “I thought that if you love that movie, it would be fun to visit the film set, so the idea was to show what it was like there,” she continues. But I hope it’s helpful for young people to see that you have to evolve and find your way as a director, too.” While developing her next feature, Coppola has spent this retrospective year taking stock, reflecting on the echoes and overlaps as she watches her own children pursue creative paths with a familiar pride. After all, she dove into this meta-textual documentary shortly after directing a music video for her daughter, Romy Mars.
Milena Canonero’s Oscar-winning costumes dress mannequins modeled on Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman, positioned beneath historical portraits and busts in the very rooms where the real figures once danced and broke bread. Fact and fantasy mingle throughout: Visitors move through the Petit Trianon’s opulent halls to the faint pulse of New Order, past display cases holding priceless historical artifacts alongside an arguably just as valuable pair of Manolo Blahniks. That playfulness channels the same artistic impulse that first drew Coppola to the project.
They filmed at Versailles for just 20 days in the spring of 2005, a typical crunch for a site this popular. Then as now, productions are allowed to film only on Mondays, when the palace is closed to visitors. That constraint bred some on-set ingenuity.
When you’re in a real place and see the real view out the window, it transports you, and the whole crew and cast feel it. On a soundstage, there’s no view of the gardens.” Countless productions have since shot at the royal palace, always, as ever, on Mondays. But for Versailles museum director Laurent Salomé, “Marie Antoinette” stands above the rest.
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