When commenting on her third feature, Marie Antoinette, screenwriter and director Sofia Coppola claimed that she ‘wanted to avoid doing a biopic because [she] hate[d] that kind of typical structure’. She wanted it to be ‘more impressionistic’ instead, ‘more a portrait of what it might have been like from [the Queen’s] point of view’ (quoted in Freer 2006: 150 [emphasis added]). Her statement is emblematic of the tensions that have long existed between genre and authorship, especially as they play out in the so-called indie or Indiewood landscape. Usually associated with independent features and a consistent impressionist, directorial signature, Coppola clearly adopts an authorial stance here in an attempt to distance her work from the ‘typical’ genre structure of a biopic. This strategy of denial recurs in the discourse of independence, which tends to posit its cultural artefacts against the mass-produced and formulabased Hollywood genre films. As Michael Newman puts it:

The process of authentication in independent cinema, which relies largely on authorship as an important category of validity, might be seen as one of the main reasons why many filmmakers would want to dissociate themselves from ‘the mainstream’ and ‘the generic’. This is evidenced by Kelly Reichardt, when she adamantly claimed that Meek's Cutoff was not a Western, emphasising her (authorial) rewriting of a historical event instead (see Chapter 4). Coppola's film practice has been likewise defined through a focus on creative autonomy and the personal nature of her films, rather than complying with the ‘simply’ generic. However, even though it might, initially, seem that her films present a radical departure from genre – to the point that it is doubtful whether they can be analysed through this framework – there seems to be a conscious positioning which depends greatly on generic devices. This is particularly evident in the case of Marie Antoinette.