Eleanor Coppola died before she could finish ‘Making Marie Antoinette.’ Sofia saw it through.

In 2005, Eleanor Coppola shot 80 hours of behind-the-scenes footage during the production of “Marie Antoinette.” It was her daughter Sofia Coppola’s third feature and a quite ambitious one at that, with unprecedented access to Versailles, a budget of $40 million and 57 shooting days on the schedule. Though Eleanor had made one of the great documentaries about the filmmaking process in “Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse,” capturing the chaos of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s film “Apocalypse Now,” she hadn’t come to “Marie Antoinette” to make her own film. She was there to help capture moments for marketing.

“She loved to show how things are made,” Sofia told The Associated Press in a recent interview. “The truth of what’s really going on behind that was always interesting to her.” Eleanor Coppola had a vision for a documentary The film’s release came and went, and life moved on, but it frustrated Eleanor that her work was never put together the way she wanted, that Milena Canonero’s beautiful costumes that she so lovingly captured were never highlighted. Then one day during the COVID-19 pandemic, Eleanor decided to revisit the footage and started dreaming a little bigger: Maybe there was something there after all.

Though Eleanor wouldn’t live to see it finished, she was right: There was something there. And Sofia would see it to completion: “Making Marie Antoinette,” a luminous and intimate look at the creative process, is now playing in select theaters. 6, it’ll be available to stream on Mubi.

“I always loved Frederick Wiseman’s films that don’t have any plot. They’re just like fly on the wall,” Sofia said. “And I thought, oh, maybe it’s cool for the movie just to feel like what it was like on the set.

So that was kind of the starting point.” Eleanor and Sofia worried early on about the lack of drama. There were no “Hearts of Darkness” crises. Sofia even finished “Marie Antoinette” on time and on budget.

“It’s like the opposite of ‘Hearts of Darkness,’” Sofia said. “In a way it’s sort of a nice counterpoint because that movie’s so macho and masculine and this is so feminine.” And it’s also true to what really happened. Going through the footage they discovered a trove of gems that Eleanor captured, including the first time she met Sofia’s then-boyfriend Thomas Mars, and the late Marianne Faithfull, in her beautiful costume, praising …