To a generation of millennial girls, Sofia Coppola‘s works represent all that is exciting, intense, frustrating, and suffocating about being a woman. Her 1999 debut feature The Virgin Suicides was critically praised, and the acclaim intensified with the release of her sophomore film, 2003’s Lost in Translation.
By the time her sweeping portrait of doomed French queen Marie Antoinette (played by Coppola’s regular collaborator, Kirsten Dunst) hit screens on Oct. 20, 2006, it seemed Coppola could do no wrong. And yet the reviews were extremely polarizing upon the film’s release, with the negative takes characterizing it as a case of all style and no substance.
“It was disappointing when it first came out,” Coppola tells Gold Derby now. “We got a ton of bad reviews, and it got really dismissed as girly fluff or whatever.” One of the most extreme examples was Leah Rozen’s review for People magazine, which called the film: “a pop video, with Kirsten Dunst as the doomed 18th century French queen acting like a teenage flibbertigibbet intent on being the leader of the cool kids’ club.”
And while the film was nominated for — and won — an Oscar for Best Costume Design, it fell short of the four nominations that Lost in Translation received. Coppola won Best Original Screenplay for that earlier film, which also scored a Best Actor nod for star Bill Murray to accompany its Best Director and Best Picture nominations.
Coppola moved on from the bad reviews, having a child and putting out two movies after that, 2010’s Somewhere and 2013’s The Bling Ring. But as with any good cultural touchstone, Marie Antoinette saw a second life that Coppola first noticed around the film’s 10th anniversary in 2016.
“People were talking about it, and I was like ‘Oh, wow, it wasn’t totally forgotten,'” Coppola recalls, adding that, for her anyway, the film itself hasn’t changed. What has shifted is who is watching it and how their perspective has shifted over time. “Mothers and daughters were saying that they were bonding [while] watching it,” she says.
The perspective of teenage girls has historically been undermined, but the fresh approval bestowed on Marie Antoinette, and Coppola’s entire career by extension, demonstrates a larger cultural shift. Her work as a director is now indicative of an entire aesthetic emulated by the likes of Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter, not to mention the copious amount of social media content that you can find under the hashtags #sadgirl and #coquettecore.
And as Marie Antoinette celebrates its 20th anniversary, there are further avenues to re-evaluate it. For example, the new Mubi-distributed documentary Making Marie Antoinette — featuring extensive footage that Coppola’s late mother, Eleanor, filmed during the movie’s production — is opening in theaters this weekend with a streaming release scheduled for Nov. 6. It’s an opportunity for audiences to see the technical craft Coppola put into the film at the time, and also a reopening of a time capsule for the director to revisit her younger self.
“There are so many young women that have a voice in the culture now because when I started I was told that’s not an audience,” she observes. Making Marie Antoinette is also a final farewell to Coppola’s mother, who was also a filmmaker in her own right, having co-directed the seminal documentary Hearts of Darkness about the tumultuous production of Apocalypse Now, helmed by Eleanor’s spouse and Sofia’s father, Francis Ford Coppola.
Returning to her mother’s footage, Coppola experienced a joy at seeing Dunst and Jason Schwartzman having fun on set, as well as witnessing what was going on with other departments, like the production team having to find a way to quickly costume and wig a large amount of extras.
But Coppola was more surprised to see just how busy she was making the film, right down to working while nursing a case of bronchitis. Rewatching the footage also let the director just enjoy the majesty of filming in Versailles, which the production received unprecedented access to. “We were so stressed about just getting stuff done that it was fun to be able to really appreciate that we got to do that,” Coppola says.
As seen in Making Marie Antoinette, Coppola is a fierce advocate for the movie, always prioritizing the title character’s voice and autonomy as the reason for the film’s existence. In one sequence from the documentary, she talks to her mother behind the camera about having to refute suggestions that she should focus more on Schwartzman as King Louis XVI.
“It’s embarrassing because I see myself much younger and I’m not as comfortable asserting myself,” she observes, something she says has improved as she’s gained more directorial experience. “I’m really stubborn, and when I have an idea in my head I’ll do anything to make it happen. I try to do it in a polite way but if someone says no then I’m going to ask again in a different way. That’s part of, I think, being creative.”
Coppola’s renewed advocacy for herself extends to getting her projects greenlit. Back in 2006, Marie Antoinette was a studio-produced project that had a $40 million budget, and the director brought it in on time and under cost, as she’s done with all her features. Yet in a 2024 article Coppola talked about Apple pulling funding on her adaptation of Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country due to claims that the novel’s central heroine was unlikable.
“With that project I hit some walls on what a main female character could be,” she admits. Coppola remains optimistic, however. “I think that’s just shifting all the time. More and more, the financiers are seeing that there is this audience that is interested in that.” Coppola points to Zoe Kazan’s hit Netflix adaptation of East of Eden as one recent example, noting how star Florence Pugh — who the director hopes to work with — plays a character that is claimed to be a monster.
Outside of the documentary, Marie Antoinette is also getting a 4K restoration and re-release via Criterion in November, which Coppola oversaw. “When I saw the restoration on a big screen, I was blown away by the color and the beauty of it because there was so much work that went into every frame,” she says. Since this is only her second Criterion release — the other being “The Virgin Suicides” — Coppola doesn’t take it for granted that her body of work is necessarily worthy of preservation.
“It feels like it’s part of a body of classic films, which I’m so thrilled will live on That all the people that worked on it with me, that their work is preserved. It’s just being a responsible filmmaker to preserve your films.”
With all this talk on “Marie Antoinette,” it’s clear that the reputation it had upon release has disappeared. “It was a good learning lesson that sometimes it takes time for things to find their audience,” she said. What was once derided as girly fluff is now hailed as Sofia Coppola’s masterpiece that brings forward the power of female voices. It’s a great end for what started as the story of a doomed queen.
