20 Years Later, Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette Gets the Flowers It Deserves

When Sofia Coppola took over Versailles in the spring of 2005 to film Marie Antoinette, she filled the palace with pyramids of Ladurée macarons, fresh flowers, a collection of custom-made Manolo Blahnik heels, and a New Romantic-inspired soundtrack of New Order, The Cure, and Bow Wow Wow. The resulting film is a cult-classic portrait of the doomed queen as a teenage girl, splashed across mood boards and fashion Tumblr pages for years to come. But when it premiered at Cannes in May of 2006, Marie Antoinette famously drew a mix of boos and applause, and critics were similarly polarized when it opened in theaters later that year.

Two decades later, Marie Antoinette is vindicated, at last. To celebrate its 20th anniversary, the film is receiving a 4K restoration in theaters, a documentary by Coppola’s late mother, Eleanor (in theaters October 23), its own retrospective exhibition at Versailles’s Petit Trianon this fall and winter, and a new photo book, Making Marie Antoinette, featuring behind-the-scenes photographs from set, including a few that even Coppola herself had never seen.

The book collects photographs taken by Andrew Durham, Coppola’s close friend since the early ’90s, who documented the production from the first days at Versailles to the Cannes premiere. Durham quit his job as a TV studio executive the same day Coppola invited him to Paris to be the film’s photographer. He showed up with a small Contax 35mm, capturing Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman lounging in their towering wigs, extras talking on their cell phones and smoking cigarettes in full period costumes, and the enduring visual decadence of Versailles itself.

“As a photographer, Sofia’s set was filled with eye candy,” Durham tells W, noting there was “a great shot everywhere you looked. There is a lot of downtime on set, waiting for the camera to set up or the actors to rehearse, so I had plenty of time to explore and take pictures.” He loved the flowers brought in from Belgium by Thierry Boutemy just for the production, and “the actors hanging out in those outrageous wigs and Milena Canonero’s beautiful costumes.”

Coppola had received rare, unprecedented access to film at Versailles, including the queen’s private bedchamber. But for Durham, the palace’s Baroque Hall of Mirrors made the biggest impression. He had visited years earlier as a tourist, and returning “without the other tourists or museum guards, having it all to ourselves, still seems surreal.”

Some of Durham’s favorite memories happened after wrap. The cast and crew celebrated Dunst’s 23rd birthday at Davé, the storied Parisian Chinese restaurant, then moved on to Le Baron, the tiny, then-very-hot nightclub that became the production’s unofficial living room. “It was tiny but had a great dance floor and the best music,” Durham says, recalling “dancing and drinking champagne until early in the morning. I made sure to include photos from our nights at Le Baron in the book. It was so much of the entire experience.”

He also had a close view of the partnership at the center of the film. Coppola first cast Dunst in The Virgin Suicides (Coppola’s first feature) when the actor was just a teenager. “Sofia and Kirsten have a lot in common,” Durham says. “They share the same sense of humor, and they both are the least stressed-out people I know.” That created a shorthand on set. Rather than “walking her through a long description of character motivation,” he says, Coppola “would say something subtle, maybe an inside joke between them, and Kirsten would immediately get it.” Twenty-seven years after they met, he adds, “Now they are both moms with kids!”

Durham had planned to keep the photos for a personal archive, but when Carine Roitfeld visited the set and asked to see them, Vogue Paris ended up running them as a story ahead of the release, and they’ve circulated ever since. As Coppola tells it in the book, someone recently broke into her building and stole only one thing: one of Durham’s photos from Marie Antoinette. “Was the robber a teenage girl?” Durham jokes.

Making Marie Antoinette pairs those images with a conversation between Durham and Coppola, and an oral history by Keaton Bell that quotes cast members Dunst, Schwartzman, Rose Byrne, Molly Shannon, Jamie Dornan, and Marianne Faithfull. Additionally, fashion figures including Manolo Blahnik, Grace Coddington, Marc Jacobs, Sandy Liang, Alex Consani, and more weigh in on the film’s lasting legacy. Now that a new generation is discovering Marie Antoinette, Durham thinks its influence is clearer than ever.

“Twenty years ago, audiences were used to a certain type of period film and had a difficult time wrapping their heads around it,” he says. “There seems to be a lot more latitude now on how we tell these stories and more acceptance of experimentation.” With the restoration returning the film to theaters, he’s excited for young fans to see it on the big screen for the first time. “It was made to be shown that way, so I think they will love it.”

Making Marie Antoinette ($80) is out now from Important Flowers. Below, a look inside: