When Sofia Coppola set out to make her ambitious third feature film, she was given unprecedented access to the Palace of Versailles, where she created a world and vision whose influence continues to reverberate twenty years later. Her interpretation of Marie Antoinette’s life at the palace saw Versailles filled with flower arrangements, macarons, and elephants, costumes by Milena Canonero and shoes by Manolo Blahnik, and an unforgettable cast including Kirsten Dunst, Jason Schwartzman, Marianne Faithfull, Rip Torn, Rose Byrne, and Molly Shannon.
There to document it all was Coppola’s long-time friend and collaborator Andrew Durham, who photographed daily life on and off the set all the way to the film’s premiere at Cannes. He captured actors between takes, in hair and make-up, and revelling somewhere between reality and the entrancing fiction of the film. This unmissable volume brings together an unprecedented collection of Durham’s photographs, alongside an oral history of the film’s making by Keaton Bell and a new in-conversation between Durham and Coppola, forming an unmissable deep-dive into the making and mythology of one of Coppola’s most spectacular productions.
