Marie Antoinette

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To commemorate its anniversary, Vogue talked to the cast, crew, and more about how Marie Antoinette came together.

Following the Storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, the Assembly passed the August Decrees, which dismantled the system of feudalism, and adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. I wanted to adapt Antonia Fraser’s book because her attitude was so different from other biographies about Marie. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon this content non-commercially, as long as they credit the author and license their new creations under the identical terms. 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.

They were commissioned by people of wealth to make them look good and not an honest representation of what life actually looked like. The birth of a daughter, Marie-Thérèse, in 1778 would be followed by the long-anticipated birth of a dauphin, Louis-Joseph, in 1781, and another boy, Louis-Charles, in 1785. I was shooting in France at the time and we were all talking about the big Marie Antoinette movie coming to town. Antoine Lilti’s ground-breaking study about celebrity demonstrates that a phenomenon we generally associate with modern culture and cinema has much older roots: roots that go back to eighteenth-century Europe. Shannon: We would shoot in the castle during the day and then we would run around once it got dark because there were no guards.

The collection reveals the wealth of purposes this queen served and the rich variety of interpretations she provoked. He designed some dresses inspired by Marie Antoinette and I loved that mix of 18th-century fashion and couture.

From life in the Court of Versailles, through the French Revolution to Napoleon's rule, Lucie survived extraordinary times with great spirit. Phelan’s extraordinary farm animals are more than fearless aeronauts: they’re covert superheroes in a world of sinister secret societies, Benjamin Franklin, and the world’s first heat-ray. We invented a royal tent made for that moment with a long corridor passage where Marie gets stripped of her Austrian heritage. Because she was a foreigner and a woman, Marie Antoinette quickly became a favorite target of slanderous rumor. Her last child, Sophie, was born in 1786 and would live for only 11 months; a disturbing precedent, as only Marie Antoinette's eldest child would live to see adulthood.

Hopeful of rescue by the Austro-Prussian force, Marie Antoinette leaked French military secrets in her letters to Fersen and her friend Count Mercy-Argenteau. Reitzell: I asked Roger to compose an orchestral intro to “Hong Kong Garden” and he just mocked up a delightful little arrangement, threw it up on the stand one day, and had the musicians play it. Jamie is Irish, Al [Weaver] and Sebastian [Armesto] are English, Clémentine [Poidatz] is French, Rose [Bryne] is Australian, and Kirsten and Jason are American. Although she was an innocent victim in the affair, which involved swindlers using her forged signature to obtain an expensive necklace, Marie Antoinette was still widely blamed for the ensuing scandal.

Hilariously droll, Phelan’s illustrated fiction stars characters lauded for their pivotal role in early flight—the three barnyard aeronauts who made the very first ascent in a hot-air balloon. Blahnik had previously worked with Canonero when he provided the pair of classic black Julia pumps that Catherine Deneuve wears in The Hunger (1983) . Since her surviving son was being recognized by royalist émigrés as Louis XVII, rightful king of France, Marie Antoinette was separated from him on 3 July 1793. Brian Reitzell, Marie Antoinette music supervisor: Sofia asked me to be the music supervisor on The Virgin Suicides because I’m a geek about music and have a huge record collection. In the morning I’d be a 14-year-old arriving at the palace, and then in the afternoon I’d be grieving the death of my child.

Jeanne Hollande, shooting coordinator at the Palace of Versailles: Marie Antoinette was presented as an intimate film, more of an artistic creation inspired by the historical figure.

No one in America knew about them yet, so I felt so cool coming back to LA with my French-girl clothes. Shannon: I really began to understand what it must’ve felt like to be a child star from my conversations with Kirsten. Milena Canonero, Marie Antoinette costume designer: Sofia brought me a big box of delicious Ladurée macarons as a present, but she also said that she wanted the pastel colours to inspire the palette of the costumes in Marie Antoinette. Coppola: I definitely wanted the casting to have a pop aspect, hence having people like Marianne Faithfull and Molly Shannon. Manolo Blahnik, Marie Antoinette shoe designer: I’ve been mad for Marie since I was a little boy because she’s the maximum of elegance.