The opening shot of Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette features the languorous Queen sprawled across an 18th century divan, all the while being fanned, flattered and pampered by her servants. When her pale powdery makeup is removed, a more fleshy, pale, baby face is revealed, reminding one that this infamous Queen of France ascended the throne at the remarkably young age of 14. Quite a challenge for actress Kirsten Dunst, who at age 24 must reinvent the ill-fated Queen from her extravagant teenage years, through her more somber 30’s.
Ending just before Marie Antoinette’s prison years, Marie Antoinette the film, covers 23 years of her life. The age range may seem vast, but Dunst focused only on the emotional journey. “I think she tried to take charge and tried to take her place and tried to feel rooted and have her little village,” Dunst told Dish. “That is crazy, but she wanted to feel a sense of nature and wanted to feel a sense of a place of her own. I think those things helped her age, but I never felt like I had to act older or act younger.
Still, 24 may still seem like a child to many so-called grown-ups, and Dunst may even agree. Perhaps that is why she connected so seamlessly to Marie Antoinette ’s youth. “All of my friends and my family, everyone in my life, I see the child-like quality in all of them. I think part of her struggle was not being able to feel like a woman. She had no sensuality in her life [Marie Antoinette’s marriage was not consummated for 7 years] other than what she was eating or wearing. She didn’t feel like a woman and I think that her position in the court was just as a pawn. I don’t think she was treated like a human being. I think towards the end of her life, her prison years were probably when she most felt like she had a purpose even though it was doomed.”
When Coppola first read Antonia Fraser’s biography, Marie Antoinette: The Journey, she thought of the star of her 1999 debut film The Virgin Suicides. As a mere teen, Dunst had played another child faced with overwhelming parental expectations. Blow that up on an international scale and you have Marie Antoinette.
“When they described her personality, I thought this was something that Kirsten could portray,” Coppola said. “She has the bubbly, silly, not serious side but then she has the real depth and substance for when she evolves, so I felt like she had both and also that she could carry the whole film. And being German, she looks like how they described her.”
The daughter of Francis Ford Coppola made a big splash with her first film, showing the critics and film snobs that talent runs in the family. Her second film, Lost in Translation, brought her talent to a broader audience. Bill Murray fans came for laughs and left meditating about loneliness.
Both films were Coppola’s original scripts. Marie Antoinette marks her first adaptation, and her first historical costume drama. An independent voice like hers doesn’t do anything by the book though. “I thought it was a challenge and a new way for me to do a portrait of this iconic character in history that we only know as the decadent, evil queen,” she said. “What drew me to it was to start to read about the real human girl behind all the myths and then how to create a portrait. What I was trying to do was make it impressionistic of what it would feel like to live there at that time, so I wanted it to be a style of acting and setting as natural as possible. Then we take artistic license in altering things, to convey more what it would feel like at that time, using music that gives the emotional quality that I wanted the scene to have, as opposed to what actually might be a song [from the era]. A combination to create the impression of what it might have been like.”
The locations and costumes are authentic 18th century France. Surprisingly, Coppola got permission to shoot in the real Versailles castle on days it was closed to tourists, and wardrobes stuck to the frilly frocks. No T-shirts or blue jeans. In spite of all its liberties, Marie Antoinette required an equal attention to accuracy.
“When I was reading the book, I thought it would be interesting. There hadn’t been a film about Marie Antoinette since the late ‘30s and it’s such a visually interesting world, I think, to create in a film. I like to see a movie where you get lost in another world and 18th century France, with the wigs and the costumes is so different than our daily life. So just when I was reading the book, I thought about it as a film, and also for me, it was a challenge personally. How do I make a period film that isn’t in the genre of period films but in my own style? It was pretty overwhelming to look around and see so many extras on horses and coordinating. You just really rely on your team to help you so that I can focus on the actors and the core of the scene.”
In Marie Antoinette’s day, she was the center of public gossip. Everybody knew the Queen and criticized her extravagant spending on gowns, jewels and royal parties. Today’s celebrities don’t have countries riding on their shoulders, but could still take a lesson on behaving in the public eye.
“There is definitely a lot of frivolity, and I don’t really want to judge people,” Dunst told Dish, speaking of today’s young stars. “Girls are trying to grow up in a business that is very difficult and you lose yourself, and I think that you compare Marie Antoinette to high school and they are just teenagers. I think that you can relate it to a lot of different circumstances and not just young Hollywood. But, I guess growing up and having that attention and having people gossip about you and all of that, yes [I can relate], but they’re not running a country. They’re acting. You can move to Austin, Texas and be okay if you don’t want to be followed and you don’t want that life. She really had no choice, Marie Antoinette, I mean.
Celebrity is not the only parallel between Marie Antoinette and today, says Coppola. “There are definitely correlations and there are definitely bored wives that you see shopping in Barneys when their husbands are ignoring them,” she said. “I was more interested in seeing what we could relate to about it, just on the human level, that people still go through these things. I know what it’s like to go into a new family after you’ve been married. But then, I think it’s interesting to look at how differently they lived and how at that time, all the rituals that went into their lifestyle. That to me is interesting also. I tried to show the differences and some similarities just to be relatable. I think it’s interesting to look at both.”
Coppola used some of those parallels to evoke performances out of Dunst. Her musical choices spoke volumes as well. “Sometimes she would compare things, especially in the shopping scenes and things like that,” said Dunst. “She’d give me little analogies at times, but usually there were so many personal moments and that would evoke certain feelings. Like at the party she had the ‘Suzy and the Banshees’ song playing which, when you’re shooting at 8am in the morning, you just got done with tons of makeup and wardrobe and everyone’s a little tired, to have that kind of energy really helps so much.”
Some Frenchmen may still harbor resentment for Marie Antoinette, but there would be little point in actors or filmmakers vilifying her. In all her research, Dunst found enough material with which to empathize so that she could portray her fairly.
“I had to love her. I was playing her and we wanted to make her understandable. I couldn’t hate her or think she was stupid or frivolous for the things that she did. When she wants to plants trees, I think she probably wants to feel rooted in her life. I was trying to figure out my own descriptions for things because you don’t have video. You don’t know what she sounds like. We did speak to different historians and everyone has a different opinion. It’s about Sophia’s take on this film and then how I can facilitate that and how I can feel as best as I can as to what she might have been feeling.”
With Coppola’s film ending before Marie Antoinette’s prison term and ultimate execution, perhaps there is a sequel in the works. “In the early draft, I wrote to the end of her life and then I realized that I was really rushing it and that’s a whole other movie,” Coppola said. “We weren’t making a miniseries. We only had two hours, so I had to focus on what I want to tell. So then I decided to just focus on her time in Versailles and start the film with her arrival in Versailles, and end it with her departure at the Revolution. For me, the end of the story is her personal evolution and the scene on the balcony of her coming into her own and implying what happens, but it’s a really long story of her in prison and a trial and I felt like it was another movie.”
In the end, Marie Antoinette does not require Dunst to shed too much of her modern girl personality, despite taking place more than two hundred years in the past. Packed with a rock music soundtrack, Marie Antoinette lets its star speak as a California valley girl. She still moves from Austria, marries Louis XVI to strengthen political ties and parties Versailles into the ground, but she does it in English.
Marie Antoinette opened October 20
