Eleanor Coppola died before she could finish ‘Making Marie Antoinette’

In 2005, Eleanor Coppola shot 80 hours of behind-the-scenes footage during the production of Marie Antoinette. It was her daughter Sofia Coppola’s third feature and a quite ambitious one at that, with unprecedented access to Versailles, a budget of US$40 million and 57 shooting days on the schedule.

Though Eleanor had made one of the great documentaries about the filmmaking process in Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, capturing the chaos of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s film Apocalypse Now, she hadn’t come to Marie Antoinette to make her own film. She was there to help capture moments for marketing.

“She loved to show how things are made,” Sofia told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “The truth of what’s really going on behind that was always interesting to her.”