Marie Antoinette
Coppola, Dunst, Schwartzman on Marie Antoinette Clothing
“Nothing was a problem,” she said. “Any discomfort I was feeling I just felt she might have felt. All the hours of getting ready, people around you and holding your dresses and trying to fit into this Versailles and think that it’s a place where you can live.”
Today, women still contort themselves for fashion while men get away with jeans and T-shirts. Back then, even the king had to look dainty. “I just had to learn to accept that and know that I couldn’t move the way that I personally move in my day-to-day life in those costumes,” said Jason Schwartzman. “And if I tried to go against them, it just didn’t work, but if you go with the flow of the costumes, they’re alright. I wore a garter belt every morning, which is really funny, and vests. The vests hug you in strange places, and they’re very tight in the back and just you have to act different, but once you just accept it and learn the movements, they’re actually really comfortable and I came to love them. I actually went out to lunch one day in them because I wanted to see if the people in Versailles would even pay any attention to me, and they didn’t. I walked out in complete wardrobe and I even halted a car, and I got nothing. Nothing at all. No one even cared.”
Director Sofia Coppola enjoyed the fashion show she commissioned. “It was amazing working with Melina Canonero,” she said. “It was so much fun to go to her costume shop and there were all these Italians selling these dresses and feathers. It was important to me to build a lot of the costumes that just weren’t the standard ones that they use for everything. So yeah, it was always fun to come to set and see how they all came together. I had certain costumes that I loved from the fabrics and the colors and everything but there are so many of them, it was a fun element.”
For Dunst, the costumes represented her character’s growth. “Melina built my character through my clothing and I felt differently in every dress that I wore,” said Dunst. “She evoked things in me and I paid attention to everything and she collaborated with me on colors. Sophia definitely knew that she wanted us to look like a macaroon box in the beginning. I went through kind of a gauzier lighter feeling and than black obviously when she’s mourning her children. The cuts are more adult as I got older.”
Despite all of that, Dunst still got out of the wardrobe trailer faster than her costar. “She could just throw it on and take it off and do all that stuff,” said Schwartzman. “I was like, ‘What is a garter belt?’ Actually I feel like the costumes and Versailles, besides Kirsten, are my biggest co-stars because you get in there and you really feel different. The way your feet sound in Versailles when you’re wearing heels, it’s just nice. It’s nice. For a person with an active imagination, it’s like pretty vital.”
Marie Antoinette opens this Friday, October 20th.
For more interviews, posters, trailers, additional movie info and synopsis, go to the Marie Antoinette Movie Page.
Stay tuned for updates.
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