Making Marie Antoinette Offers an Intimate Look at the Film’s Production 20 Years Later
A new title from Sofia Coppola and Andrew Durham is as much a time capsule as it is an homage to a bygone era of filmmaking
Andrew Durham once considered himself an amateur photographer. The producer and director, whose friendship and creative partnership with Sofia Coppola date back decades, began experimenting with the medium by making photo albums for his friends. This personalized approach led him to document the production of perhaps her most controversial film to date, Marie Antoinette.
“I had been working as a television executive at the time that this all came about,” says Durham. “I was sitting behind a desk and I was getting really bored of making bad TV. Sofia called me up and said, ‘Do you want to come take some photos on my set?’ She wanted me to kind of recreate the snapshots I’ve been taking of our group of friends for the last several years.”
Durham, who has since shot for the likes of Chanel, Louis Vuitton, and Marc Jacobs, couldn’t have predicted that his behind-the-scenes photography would have a life of its own. After a select few images were published by French Vogue upon Marie Antoinette’s release in 2006, they populated the Tumblr feeds, screensavers, and counterfeit T-shirts of many a millennial-Gen Z cinephile, and for some, marked their earliest exposure to Coppola’s work.
Among Durham’s most recognizable snapshots are the film’s stars, Kirsten Dunst and Jason Schwartzman, huddled around a MacBook, clad head-to-toe in Rococo regalia, or a trio of extras (also donning full period dress) chatting on flip phones and smoking cigarettes on their lunch break. These, along with many never-before-seen photos, have now been compiled into Making Marie Antoinette, a new book from Coppola’s Mack publishing imprint, Important Flowers.
Out in time for the cult biopic’s 20th anniversary, the project is part documentary, part oral history. The book includes an in-conversation feature with Durham and Coppola, as well as a retelling of Marie Antoinette’s production authored by Keaton Bell.
Durham sifted through around 2,000 photos—all shot on 35mm film—to craft a cohesive narrative for the book, ranging from principal photography to the movie’s Cannes Film Festival premiere.
“I wasn’t really focused on composition or getting the perfect photo,” he says. “I was just running around taking pictures of what inspired me, and things I gravitated towards.”
Needless to say, inspiration was everywhere: Coppola and her crew were granted unprecedented access to the grounds of Versailles, and the director invested practically every penny from her first big-budget film back into production, sparing no expense on costuming, floral arrangements, and food styling.
“There was a great atmosphere with the cast and crew,” Durham recalls. “I don’t know whether Sofia intentionally tried to create it, but it almost mimicked the court of Versailles. She kept the party going.”
Nights off were frequently spent at Le Baron, a now-defunct Parisian nightclub that was particularly trendy in the 2000s. “It was the place to be, but it was tiny and had a very low ceiling and great music,” he says. “We would all go there to let off steam and dance until the early hours of the morning.”
The fact that Durham could fit his camera in his back pocket meant that he could capture moments like these on an intimate scale. “It helped because it’s not very intimidating,” he adds. “A lot of people probably thought, ‘Well, it’s just Andrew and his little point-and-shoot; how much harm could he do?’”
The magic of Durham’s photography is that it reflects the film’s anachronistic aesthetic, which simultaneously dazzled fans and drew the ire of critics. Actors spoke in American accents, while the soundtrack incorporated the New Wave stylings of Adam Ant, Bow Wow Wow, and The Cure.
Marie Antoinette might have been poorly received at Cannes, but 20 years later, it’s clear that it was ahead of its time: modern period pieces such as The Favourite and The Great replicated this “anti-historical” formula to critical success.
Coppola and Durham’s book is as much a time capsule as it is an homage to a bygone era of filmmaking, one without computer- or AI-generated imagery. “If these photos can get people excited to see a movie like Marie Antoinette, that’s great,” Durham says. “Anything to get people back to the movie theater, right?”