The Idea

While I was at dinner with a group of friends, I was talking to my good friend Dean Tavoulatis. He was mentioning how interesting he thought were my two movies. How both of them were related. Both of them were about young women who were not really understood. They were finding a way for their lives to have meaning. I was doing that with my two past films. The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation. Then, somehow we started talking about historical figures; he started talking about Marie Antoinette, saying that it was related to the topics I used in my previous films. Marie Antoinette the Austrian teenage girl that married the Dauphin of France (Louis XVI) at young age and became the queen of France. Marie Antoinette spent like crazy; she didn’t care about politics and took France to ruin. “For me, Marie Antoinette remained, above all, the symbol of a completely declining life style. He started to describe to me his daily newspaper in details, his particular relation with her husband. He brushed me a portrait of it, in particular on a psychological level, which was quite different from the stereotypes that I had been done.”
Dean was making a point there, and that interested me. I had to see a lot of perspectives in order to understand her. That’s when I started to do some research; I was captivated by her story. Then that’s when I came across Antonia Fraser’s book, Marie Antoinette: The journey. This book is different from anything I’ve read about Marie Antoinette. It gave me the impression as if instead of becoming the queen of France she was just a High School Student that wanted to fit in. No one really understood what she was going through. You have no idea what to do with your life if all of a sudden your queen of a foreign country.