Joining them was a team of talented, like-minded artists who worked closely with Coppola, who is famous for the sparseness of her scripts. “We started as we always start,” explains Brian Reitzell, music supervisor on this film (as he was on Coppola’s Lost in Translation). “She asked me for some music to help her write the script. I struggled with it at first and then put together for her a compilation that included music by the Cure, Aphex Twin and Bow Wow Wow.” The Cure and Marie Antoinette? “It seemed kind of natural to us,” continues Reitzell. “The whole stage between Punk and the New Romantics seemed to fit what we were doing. Our choices reflected the energy and created an atmosphere. The movie,” he explains, “has an arc: innocence, decadence and maturity. I also had to study opera and 18th-century music. I needed three opera arias and I couldn’t believe it when I found a very sad aria by Jean-Philippe Rameau. It sounded as though you would really dig this if you were a Björk fan.” And while the completed soundtrack still includes contemporary pop and rock, Reitzell explains that the classical music was all recorded in a castle, rather than a studio, because “it was important that the sound be right”.
The music aside, the fact that Marie Antoinette (played by Kirsten Dunst) and her friends sound like American teenagers has proved controversial. “I was trying to make it sound normal,” Coppola explains, rather than a “stiff period movie”, but actually the Fifth Avenue Princess tones also convey the kind of affluent bubble in which the courtiers at Versailles lived, oblivious to the stresses and strains of the wider world. But some French viewers have been less than keen, even responding with boos at the premiere at Cannes.
Perhaps to have an American director reinterpret French history must already have seemed challenging; for that director to do so with a contemporary sensibility and unorthodox choices seemed a bold step too far. But Coppola has ingeniously made Marie Antoinette accessible to the viewer by employing a modern perspective and avoiding the trappings of period movie-making.
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“Sofia Coppola is very astute visually,” explains K.K. Barrett, a former painter from Nebraska turned punk musician, who fell into film-making after he designed the set of Being John Malkovich, directed by Coppola’s former husband, Spike Jonze. “She gave me tear sheets,” he recalls of the early days of the process by which the film-makers sought to envisage Marie-Antoinette’s world. “Not period details, but contemporary images or pictures of anything she liked or that she assumed a 14-year-old girl would appreciate. It was a kind of impressionist swatch book. Colours, a pose, a photograph in soft focus... these were to be interpreted and decoded in feeling – and not as direct reference.”
The film was shot on location in France, a process complicated by the fact that the palace of Versailles – the grand theatre where friends and enemies were made and love and intrigue played out – was only available for shooting on Mondays, when it was closed to tourists. “The curators were very trusting, even though they knew it was Sofia’s personal vision,” says Barrett. But the schedule was tight and the pressure intense to get everything done in time, with the rest of the week spent on set, mainly in smaller French châteaux, which Barrett would transform into the Queen’s private apartments.
“Our biggest challenge was to live up to the level of Versailles, without letting it seem like a museum. We replicated everything, we copied her furniture, we built some rooms in a bigger size, in different colours. It had to seem as though it had just been created, rather than preserved for 200 years. Marie Antoinette always redecorated. You had to believe it was all one and the same.” In fact, the curators of Versailles were so impressed with the reconstruction of a theatre the queen once used to perform in front of her friends at the Petit Trianon that they asked to keep it.
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“Shooting in Versailles was incredibly beautiful,” recalls cinematographer Lance Acord, even if at times, as Coppola admits, the experience could be “spooky”, such as when Dunst stands on the very balcony from which Marie Antoinette faced a braying mob. “You can’t compete with it in terms of scale,” Acord explains, “and it was difficult to present everything in its original grandeur. We had to rejuvenate it all. But to be there, to walk around the rooms where all those people had walked around and to touch the walls was inspirational.” Acord’s biggest challenge was recreating the lighting of the period. “Even though we wanted to approach it in an unconventional sort of way, I wanted to make sure the lighting was right. They burned tens of thousands of candles daily at Versailles. The chandeliers are massive and dominate the ceilings of most of the rooms. The quality of that sort of candlelight is so warm and festive. We worked hard to simulate that effect with electric lighting.”
Coppola actually began work on Marie Antoinette while shooting Lost in Translation, having read Fraser’s biography even before it was published, as the author is an old friend of her mother, Eleanor. She was also fascinated by conversations with the production designer Dean Tavoularis, who has researched the period. Fraser’s sympathetic but unflinching psychological portrait of the queen was a major inspiration, but in this, as in all sources, the film-makers weren’t slaves to authenticity. As Acord explains, “One of the important decisions we made early on was to, whenever possible, avoid the tableau approach to framing and be very selective in how we would use period painting as a reference in general. So much of the portraiture of the time is so heavily stylised that it proved counter to the more personal and honest side of the character we wanted to portray.”
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Milena Canonero, whose costume designs for Chariots of Fire and Barry Lyndon have earned her two Oscars, was familiar with Marie Antoinette’s world, having read many books on the subject. “Sofia’s portrait of Marie Antoinette in the film is accurate, but human,” explains Canonero. “To me, Marie Antoinette was very unlucky. She lacked the right upbringing for such a role. She was the sweet playful girl of the family. Sofia has grasped the lightness and superficiality of the young Marie Antoinette, but also the dignity of the woman. She has done it by using light brush strokes and not too much dialogue.”
At the start of pre-production, Coppola handed Canonero a box of pastel-coloured macaroons from the Ladurée pastry house. “She told me, ‘These are the colours I love’,” recalls Canonero. “I used them as a palette. Sofia was clear about the colouration, but left the rest to me. We squeezed the essence of the period, without reproducing it. Even if you think you know a lot about it,” she argues, “you always have to look for a new angle. I simplified the very heavy look of the 18th century. I wanted it to be believable, but more stylised.”
The biggest challenge facing Canonero was the sheer volume of costumes involved in staging three operas – Marie Antoinette was a keen and accomplished amateur performer – her wedding to the Dauphin, his coronation as Louis XVI, plus gambling and party scenes. “To dress and undress so many people is incredibly challenging. It’s rare to make a movie these days that spans 20 years of a very grand life.” The bulk of the clothes were made in ateliers in Rome’s Cinecittà studios. “I started by throwing pieces of material over Kirsten to see what colours suited her best. I hardly used wigs, because they weren’t right for her. We thought that maybe we could have gone more crazy, but there just was no time.” For Madame du Barry (played by Asia Argento), “the rather vulgar mistress of the decadent King” (Louis XV, Marie Antoinette’s grandfather-in-law), Canonero wanted a totally different look from that of Marie Antoinette. “I dressed her like an exotic bird, in contrast to the rather naive, innocent queen-in-waiting.”
Coppola has never claimed to be “a fetishist about historical accuracy”, but if the contemporary allusions or accents are anachronistic, the film essentially remains faithful to its subject. “Rather than a historical piece, it’s more a history of her emotions,” explains K.K. Barrett. Besides, there was actually something of a cultural divide between the courtly world of Louis XV and the more casual, less etiquette-bound and hierarchical instincts of the younger generation. As Barrett explains, “Marie and Louis XVI were the younger set and weren’t interested in the formal court. The distance between the yearning of the young and the lost wisdom of the old is reminiscent of The Virgin Suicides.”
Film is a collaborative art and it seems to be never more so than on Sofia Coppola’s sets – one senses that she thrives on her colleagues’ individual artistic freedom. Lance Acord explains, “On other films you only deal with your job, but it’s different with Sofia. Sofia has an amazing way of imparting something personal and honest about herself into the films she makes. In that way they transcend straight storytelling and become more artful.” Or, in the words of K.K. Barrett, “It’s about doing what you love, without thinking of it as a job or a career.”
Marie Antoinette opens on October 20
