Zoe Whitfield
In addition to a much-mythologised shoe obsession (she famously acquired four new pairs a week), Marie Antoinette had a not-insignificant enthusiasm for flowers. When dressing the Palace of Versailles then, for her 2006 film about the Austrian teenager who became the Dauphine of France, Sofia Coppola leaned in, installing epic vases of fresh blooms all around the set. “The florist would travel from Brussels every week with these beautiful arrangements,” remembers Andrew Durham, whose new book Making Marie Antoinette features one of these elaborate displays – the work of Thierry Boutemy – on its cover. “They could have just been plastic flowers, but that was the attention to detail on this movie.” And the scent? “I can’t recall, everyone had so much hairspray.”
The photographer, producer and director was introduced to Coppola in the early Nineties, and they would subsequently work together on the series Hi Octane (1994) and short film Lick the Star (1998). When Coppola set out to make her third studio movie, she invited Durham to join; he quit his TV exec job, flew to Paris on his own dime and crashed at her studio-provided apartment in the sixth, capturing behind the ...