Sofia Coppola is ready to get back to telling stories she invented. The filmmaker behind Lost in Translation and The Beguiled has signaled that her next narrative feature is taking shape, marking a return to scripted fiction after a stretch of projects that kept her closer to the worlds of fashion, archives, and other people's lives. But before she steps back behind the camera for that film, Coppola has one final piece of family business to shepherd into the world: a documentary built around her mother's account of making Marie Antoinette.
That project, Making Marie Antoinette, centers on Eleanor Coppola, the filmmaker and artist who died in 2024 and who spent decades documenting her family's creative life from the inside. Eleanor Coppola was already known to film audiences as the director of Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, the landmark documentary about the tortured production of her husband Francis Ford Coppola's Apocalypse Now. With Marie Antoinette, she turned her camera on her daughter.
A Mother's Behind-the-Scenes Record of a Polarizing Film
Sofia Coppola's Marie Antoinette arrived in 2006 and immediately divided critics and audiences. Starring Kirsten Dunst as the doomed French queen, the film traded the stately rhythms of traditional costume drama for a pop-inflected, anachronistic portrait set partly to music by New Order, the Strokes, and Aphex Twin. It won an Academy Award for costume design, for Milena Canonero, and over the years it has been reclaimed by many viewers as one of Coppola's most personal and influential works. At the time of its release, though, it faced boos at the Cannes Film Festival and a noisy debate about whether its modern sensibility was an act of interpretation or an act of disrespect.
Eleanor Coppola was there for all of it. Her documentary records the production from the inside - the scale of the Versailles re-creation, the pressure of a big-budget studio assignment, the intimate dynamic of a mother watching her daughter navigate a vast and scrutinized set. For Sofia Coppola, releasing this material now means revisiting a chapter of her career that was unusually exposed, both professionally and personally.
The timing gives the documentary a dual role. It functions as a portrait of Eleanor Coppola's own filmmaking practice, which often involved observing her family with a mixture of affection and detachment, and it serves as a coda to a body of work that spanned documentary, books, and visual art. Eleanor Coppola published Notes on a Life and Notes on the Making of Apocalypse Now, and she directed the narrative feature Paris Can Wait in 2016, proving that her creative curiosity was not confined to documenting others.
A Return to Fiction, After a Detour Through Other Forms
Sofia Coppola's move back toward narrative film follows a period in which she worked in formats that sit outside the traditional feature pipeline. She directed Fairyland, a drama based on Alysia Abbott's memoir, and she has been attached to a range of projects that never quite came together, including an adaptation of Edith Wharton's The Custom of the Country and a planned film about Priscilla Presley that ultimately became a different project under another filmmaker. More recently, she has been linked to fashion-world subjects and archival material rather than original screenplays.
That makes the prospect of a new Sofia Coppola narrative feature a genuine event for the independent film world. Her sensibility - slow-burning, visually precise, preoccupied with the interior lives of women in gilded cages - has been widely imitated but rarely matched. From The Virgin Suicides to Somewhere to Priscilla, she has built a filmography that treats celebrity, girlhood, and isolation as interlocking themes.
No details about the new narrative project have been confirmed, and it would be premature to speculate about casting, financing, or a start date. What is clear is that Coppola intends to return to the kind of filmmaking that made her name, and that she wants to close the loop on her mother's final documentary first.
Why the Order Matters
Releasing Making Marie Antoinette before moving on is not just a scheduling decision. It is a statement about lineage, about the ways creative families pass work between generations, and about the value of the unglamorous, patient labor of documentation. Eleanor Coppola spent years filming other people's productions; her last major subject was her daughter's. Sofia Coppola now becomes the one presenting that record to the public.
For audiences, the documentary offers something rare: a firsthand account of what it felt like to make a film that was both a critical lightning rod and a lasting cult favorite, told by someone with nothing to prove and unrestricted access. For Coppola herself, it is a chance to honor her mother's work on its own terms before turning the page to whatever comes next.
The new narrative feature has no announced title or release window, and Making Marie Antoinette has not been given a confirmed distribution date. Both remain works in progress. But the sequence Coppola has chosen - mother's film first, then her own - says plenty about how she sees the two projects, and about the creative inheritance she is still sorting through.
Source: Hollywood Reporter