Off with her head

It's definitely an interpretation,' begins filmmaker Sofia Coppola carefully - as well she might. Ever since the boos at Cannes, her Marie Antoinette has split audiences more than any guillotine.

'I didn't want to make a dry, cold, Masterpiece Theatre movie that looked at the past as if it were a distant historical tableau. I wanted you to feel you'd spent two hours in Versailles. It's meant to be impressionistic.'

That it surely is. Frothy, frivolous and fun, Coppola's Pretty In Pink adaptation of Antonia Fraser's highly acclaimed biography feels more like an extended pop video than period biopic.

A loveable Kirsten Dunst plays the shopaholic, 18thcentury teen queen as a party-mad rock'n'roll princess addicted to cake and shoes, who grooves to Bow Wow Wow and the New Romantics, and triumphs against high school, sorry, court bitchiness. With little character development (Marie remains naive and sweet throughout) and barely a dusting of politics, it's as light as meringue.

It's a surprise for those who expected something weightier from the Oscar-nominated writer/director of quietly profound relationship drama Lost In Translation. 'I just wanted to make things that I would want to see - and that I think my friends would like,' shrugs Coppola, as if major movie making were a sort of social hobby. 'I never wanted to be a director for hire.'

An even bigger surprise is that the curtain falls before the familiar off-with-herhead stuff threatens to spoil our good time. 'I didn't have another two hours to tell the rest of her story,' she explains. 'And what moved and surprised me more, particularly when reading her letters, was how much things haven't changed. Marie was 14 when she went to Versailles, only 18 when she became queen. She was a teenager who went through what everyone does growing up - finding the person you want to be - though her circumstances were extreme.'

This is something Coppola clearly connects with. Daughter of acclaimed director Francis Ford Coppola (and cousin of Nicolas Cage), she is, after all, Hollywood royalty. Movies were her kingdom from the cradle. Her first role was 'baby boy' in The Godfather (generally considered finer than her adult performance as a lastminute stand in for Winona Ryder in The Godfather III).

Deciding, at art school, to step behind the camera like daddy was clearly a defining moment. All three of her major films (the other is The Virgin Suicides) are to an extent about young, apparently enigmatic women on a quest for purpose.

Determinedly private in buttoned-up smock and stylishly anonymous in skinny jeans and black ballet flats, this make-up-free, schoolgirlish-looking 35-year-old certainly doesn't court celebrity status. 'I'm six months pregnant,' is the nearest we get to personal: hardly a revelation when her bump is in full view.

She's an unlikely creator of such a girlie movie but is bemused at my astonishment that she wanted to keep the Manolo Blahniks she commissioned for the movie. 'It was just fun to think that, if Marie Antoinette was alive today, who would make her shoes?' she says.