Sticking with stylistic choices, what makes the film masterful—in my opinion—is how it shifts from this decadent playground to the French Revolution without showing any revolutionaries. I think here about your ability to show the crown’s extreme isolation through discussions of, for example, planting slightly fewer trees due to the citizenry’s tax complaints. Even when they’re drawing closer to the revolution, you have revolutionary slogans covering faces on portraits, and you don’t even see anyone’s faces as they march to the gates. You hear their voices first; you actually don’t see them attack Versailles; you just see the still shot of the destruction of property.
I wanted her to be in a bubble, but the audience had to know that the uprising shouldn’t be as much of a surprise to them as it was [to her court], because they were so detached. I wanted it to feel like they’re coming at them, but they’re cut-off and removed from their world. So it’s slowly approaching. At the time, they were still going along with their dinner parties and their life, even though the revolution had started. But I always wanted to stay in their point of view, and even when the party’s clearly over, they’re still pretending, acting like it’s still going on, until the torches are outside. And they’re so surprised by it that I do think they’d see it as a destruction of their grounds more than awareness of the reasons they marched.
Twenty years since its release, we are in an extended period of unrest. Massive inequality, food prices and gas prices are being discussed all the time, as well as how beholden society is to billionaires’ whims and desires. How do you see Marie Antoinette sitting in this contemporary moment? It’s certainly critiquing wealth and privilege, though with an empathetic eye on Marie herself.
Yeah, I was surprised that people didn’t get it, and I never understood how some didn’t. Just because the subject is frivolous doesn’t make the filmmaker’s approach frivolous. I thought it was critical of both their isolation and overzealous spending—and still she’s sympathetic because she’s young, and she was raised to become royalty. I am seeing the restoration soon, but I haven’t watched the film in a while, so I do want to see it with that modern-day lens, because the extreme level of disconnect now is similar to then.