Meanwhile, production designer Barrett, who also collaborated with Coppola and Acord on LOST IN TRANSLATION, saw his role as creating a kind of infinite pastel bubble of surface beauty around Marie Antoinette. He too was excited by Coppola’s fresh vision of recreating history. “It was clear right from the start that Sofia was going to take a very impressionistic approach,” he says. “The focus isn’t on what the people around her thought about Marie Antoinette but on how she personally absorbed the world around her and that’s what the audience experiences. In a sense, it’s a very tightly focused, personal story just like THE VIRGIN SUICIDES and LOST IN TRANSLATION.”
From the start, Coppola had Barrett thinking in terms of a “candy and cake world.” “She put together a reference book that was filled with macaroon colors, with mint greens and magentas and canary yellows instead of the royal blues and burgundies you’d expect,” recalls Barrett. “We made a decision to stay away from all browns and beiges, to avoid the cliché of sepia that says ‘You’re in another time.’ We wanted it to feel like we were photographing in Marie Antoinette’s world, that we happened to be able to document it before it all faded with time. The idea is that you’re really there — with an immediacy and a youthful vitality.”
Barrett especially enjoyed creating Marie Antoinette’s private world at her retreat, Le Petit Trianon. “Her world there was lighter, more colorful, more natural, fanciful and relaxed — and much less imposed upon by the weight of history and protocol. Back in the King’s world of Versailles, we see the stiffness, the gilding, the mythic proportions.”
Because there were so many restrictions to shooting at Versailles and Le Petit Trianon, the production also utilized several other chateaus from the period to recreate the King and Queen’s bedrooms, and also Marie Antoinette’s pastoral, pond-side hamlet, known as the “Hameau,” that she built at Le Petit Trianon. “We found some châteaux that had wonderful period details but were in a good deal of disrepair,” explains Barrett. “So we were able to incorporate items and surfaces they had but also bring in new walls to embellish or manipulate, close off windows, add windows, build fireplaces, curve ceilings – we could do quite a lot. But no matter what, there was always a mind-set for us not to get too settled, to continually think of keeping it very alive rather than stiff and sedate.”
Of all the senses stimulated by MARIE ANTOINETTE, taste is among the strongest – and one of the most unusual for a motion picture. Throughout the film’s design, the gustatory delights of 18th Century France are on lavish display. The creation of the towering plates of food for Marie Antoinette and Louis to dine on was a favorite for Coppola.
“One of the ways that working in France brought so much to the movie is that we were able to find people who actually specialize in 18th Century food preparation,” she says. “There’s all this tradition to the way the food was made at that time. It was all so elaborate, so over the top. It was really fun as a director to have an entire ‘Cake Department’ devoted to creating macaroons and all these ridiculously cute pink pastries that we used as set dressings. The whole palette of the movie was a ‘cake and cookie’ kind of thing.”
Movie Database
In Theaters
