Marie Antoinette

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Katz: There was a very good chance we were gonna get turned down. But one of the reasons the palace said they approved us was because Sofia’s film didn’t sound like another dusty costume drama. They said “Versailles is not a museum, it’s alive.” They didn’t want a movie that felt like a museum piece and Sofia presented a really vibrant take on a person we’ve only really seen in paintings before. I enjoyed this book because Ms. Fraser has a wonderful writing style and she weaves the story of Marie Antoinette from start to finish and even though we know the outcome, it is hard to put down this book. The author’s research is quite detailed and written with little-known facts including Count Axel von Fersen’s role with the queen and her family, attempts to save the royal family, and the king’s failure to consummate the marriage. Melery: We knew there were gonna be a lot of close-ups in the bedroom scenes so the amount of detail had to be immaculate. We wanted to recreate the feeling of this little woodland creature enveloped in a nest of luxury who still feels terribly lonely. We wanted it to look real to contrast with the scenes in the Petit Trianon where Marie has more freedom and there’s lots of flowy white curtains. Every set requires making choices that match the architecture of the period, but also help tell the story. “I Learned Everything Through Sofia’s Filter” I'm Professor and Director of the Gender and Women’s History Research Centre at the Australian Catholic University. I've always been interested in the power of ideologies about gender to shape people’s lives, and in the experiences of women in times past. I started off exploring these topics in early modern Europe and then looked at how women, and ideas about gender, shaped the ways European peoples engaged in the world at this period. This has helped me to see the very significant ways that the lives of women and men are always shaped by gender ideologies across the globe and across time, and the innovative ways that people respond to the challenges and opportunities that they encounter.

a b Fraser, Antonia (2002). Marie Antoinette: The Journey. Anchor. pp. xviii, 160. ISBN 978-0385489492. Coppola: Amy was totally behind me. She pursued the project so adamantly and was willing to give me the budget to make it the way I wanted. She totally got it, whereas some straight guy at another studio maybe wouldn’t have. “I’d Do Anything for Sofia” Coppola: A lot of friends came to visit, like Marc [Jacobs] and Anna [Sui]. Pedro Almodóvar was in Paris hanging out with Wes Anderson, so I invited them over too. We were just so excited to show everything off at Versailles.

Stefan Zweig based his biography of Marie Antoinette, who became the Queen of France at the age of fifteen, on the correspondence between her and her mother, and her great love the Count Axel von Fersen. Zweig analyzes the chemistry of a woman's soul from her intimate pleasures to her public suffering as a Queen under the weight of misfortune and history. Zweig describes Marie Antoinette in the King's bedroom, in the enchanted and extravagant world of the Trianon, and with her children. And in his account of…

Dunst: Getting to work with Molly was such a huge deal to me because I was the biggest SNL fan in the world. Sofia is so good at casting people who work well off of each other. The cast was her reimagining of what the court would look and feel like at that time – there’s the funny one, that one’s the gossip, she’s the mean girl. It was like high school at Versailles. Yet amidst the ceremony of the coronation, there was a major issue with the royal couple's marriage: Marie Antoinette had yet to conceive a child. In fact, by 1777, the royal couple's seven-year marriage had yet to even be consummated. Since producing heirs was an essential role of any queen consort, the longer Marie Antoinette went without bearing children, the less secure her position. The marriages of the king's younger brothers, the counts of Provence and Artois, threatened to undermine her influence if their marriages produced children before hers, a fear that was realized with the birth of Artois' son in 1775. Clearly, the king and queen needed some guidance. Eager to see a half-Habsburg heir to the French throne, Marie Antoinette's eldest brother, Joseph II, Holy Roman Emperor (r. 1765-1790) took it upon himself to save his sister's marriage. Dunst: Rip Torn was a little grumpy but I thought he was funny. He wouldn’t take off his cowboy boots so that just became his character’s “thing”.The phrase appears in book six of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiographical Confessions, whose first six books were written in 1765 and published in 1782. Rousseau recounts an episode in which he was seeking bread to accompany some wine he had stolen. Feeling too elegantly dressed to go into an ordinary bakery, he recalled the words of a "great princess": [5]