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Marie Antoinette has ''Sofia Coppola'' written all over it. ''There's a lot of period films that you watch, and you don't know who made them,'' says the Lost in Translation director, who wasn't about to fall into that trap for her third movie. Her one-of-a-kind punk twist on the French queen's life, she says, comes from when she was a kid. ''My introduction to 18th-century France was from New Romantic music, from the imagery of Bow Wow Wow and Adam Ant, and Vivienne Westwood, and the whole scene that was going on post-punk, when I was an adolescent,'' Coppola says. ''That was probably my first impression of that period, through their take on it.''
In this gallery, we've lined up a few of the album covers, films, and artists that Coppola says influenced her vision of Marie. Coppola first got the idea to do a biopic after a friend told her about how Marie was just a teenager when she took the crown. The conversation inspired her — after she made her first feature film, The Virgin Suicides — to read Antonia Fraser's biography of Marie Antoinette, which, she says, played up Marie's human side. ''I was thinking of this story from a teenage point of view,'' she explains. ''I wanted the movie to have a playful nature, because it's really a kid's world, and I wanted it to have a kid's spirit.'' One might even look at Marie Antoinette as part of a trilogy alongside Suicides and Translation. Coppola does. ''I see them as connected, and there's a theme that runs through them about girls finding their identity, and transformation,'' she says. ''I feel that this is the final chapter of the series.''
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