As Oscar winning costume designer Milena Canonero faced the tall task of creating the looks for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette, the filmmaker happened to arrive in Italy with a gift from France.
“We decided to make own costumes, and not rent them. We made them in a workshop that we set up in Rome,” Canonero recalled on Friday during a Cartier masterclass conversation presented during the Venice Film Festival. “Sofia came to visit and arrived with an enormous box of macarons. Everybody knows them now, but in those days they were quite new, especially in Italy. In a very gentle way, she did not say that it was going to be the palette, but rather, ‘I really like these colors.’”
Canonero got the hint and used those colors as a “principal focus” for the entire 2006 period piece starring Kirsten Dunst in the title role as France’s rebellious queen. “In the macaron, you go from very pale pastel to dark chocolate to noir, black. I had the whole palette in front of me and it was a good idea,” she added.
Coppola credited Canonero for bringing “so much style” to the film, which fit neatly into the world she hoped to create with the adaptation. “I wanted to make this period film feel alive and fresh and not like an academic historical piece,” explained Coppola, who came to the project after having directed the critically acclaimed films The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. “I knew that Milena would help me make what I had in mind and bring a fresh eye to this time.”
They also had a strong bond to lean on, built from knowing each other for decades.
“I met Milena when I was 11 or 12 years old on my father’s film The Cotton Club. I would always love to come to the studio after school and see what they were making,” said the filmmaker, referencing her legendary father, Francis Ford Coppola, who is also here in Venice. “I spent a lot of time in the costume department because it was always magical. Milena had an atelier. She was making all these incredible costumes, and that’s such a beautiful film and a great memory.”
Canonero has won three Oscars, for Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon, Hugh Hudson’s Chariots of Fire and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel. Coppola is in Venice for unveiling of her first documentary, Marc by Sofia, about fashion designer Marc Jacobs. “I wanted to make a portrait of my friend of 30 years, designer Marc Jacobs, and show his creative process, connecting his inspiration and references to future generations,” Sofia offered by way of an official director’s statement about the film, which is described as an “intimate, unconventional portrait.”
Cartier’s masterclass presentations in Venice roll on through the festival with upcoming conversations featuring Sergio Castellitto with screenwriter Margaret Mazzantini, Alfonso Cuarón with cinematographer Michael Seresin, and Jane Campion with producer Tanya Seghatchian.