Sofia Coppola may never fully escape the shadow of her father, but she’s thrived in it, building an acclaimed career on tales of women in gilded cages. Among those women is Marie Antoinette, the subject of her 2006 film: a royal who lived while the guillotine blade hovered above the French aristocracy yet enjoyed a world of dreamy beauty before the blade fell. That production is now the subject of Making Marie Antoinette, which began life as an extra on the film’s original DVD release. While it never quite ceases to feel like a bonus feature, it also never feels less than a generously expanded and expertly made one.

Making Marie Antoinette is primarily the work of Sofia’s mother, Eleanor, who documented the behind-the-scenes happenings of her daughter’s 2006 film. Long before, she had chronicled the making of her husband’s 1979 classic Apocalypse Now in the documentary Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse. During Marie Antoinette’s production, she recorded over 80 hours of footage, which she finally began assembling into a feature-length film during the Covid pandemic. (Sofia herself completed the work following her mother’s death in 2024.)

The story behind the story here is nowhere near as dramatic as that of Apocalypse Now. There’s no drunken bloodshed, no heat-induced madness, no megastars making up their lines on the fly. But Marie Antoinette was almost as ostentatious an undertaking as Francis Ford Coppola’s Vietnam epic, with Sofia granted unprecedented access to the Palace of Versailles. Between the length of the shoot, the scale of the production, and the exacting precision of Sofia’s vision, it made for a daunting project. More than anything else, Making Marie Antoinette gives us a keen sense of how exhausting the process was and how near-miraculous it is that she pulled it off.

That’s especially true because, while she doesn’t have jungle maladies or military logistics to deal with, Sofia does wage an uphill battle of her own as a young female filmmaker. The narration, which is taken from Eleanor’s journals and read by Diane Lane, often explicitly mentions the difficulties the director faced while navigating the male-dominated world of moviemaking. She’s continually second-guessed and spoken over by the people who are supposed to be working to fulfill her vision. In one scene, we see her posing alongside her crew for a team photo—a slight figure lost in a sea of larger male bodies. While Making Marie Antoinette has a habit of using Eleanor’s commentary to explain (and sometimes over-explain) the points it wants to make, it allows that particular image to speak for itself.

Though Sofia’s experiences take center stage for much of the documentary, large parts of the voiceover are dedicated to Eleanor’s musings about her role as the wife and mother of more famous artists. At other times, Making Marie Antoinette operates simply as a free-floating look at the day-by-day production of Marie Antoinette, letting us drink in the ornate costumes and sets and catch the cast in unguarded moments. (It will come as a surprise to few that another Coppola family member, Jason Schwartzman, is a restlessly entertaining presence.)

The documentary never quite transcends the specific story of this particular production to offer a bigger or deeper rumination on femininity, family, or filmmaking. As such, it’s bound to mostly appeal to fans of Marie Antoinette. But for those already enchanted by that film’s delicate, beautiful world, this documentary offers a beguiling look behind the curtain, one that doubles as a poignant last collaboration between mother and daughter.