Coppola's two babies: Her own and 'Antoinette'

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NEW YORK -- Sofia Coppola takes a sip of tea, breaks off a chunk of her croissant and absently rubs her belly.

"I'm so excited to have a little girl," says the director, 35, seven months pregnant with her first child.

Daddy is Thomas Mars, a singer with the French band Phoenix. Coppola, who split from Spike Jonze in 2003 after four years of marriage, met Mars when he recorded a song with the band Air for her 1999 film, The Virgin Suicides. She started dating him later.

Leaning back against a wall at Soho's Cafe Colonial, around the corner from her apartment, she acknowledges they don't have a name for their daughter picked out yet. "We're going to wait and see," she says. "When you're writing, you pick names for characters, but it's harder in real life."

Mars is on tour, leaving Coppola free to focus on her other big fall project: Marie Antoinette, which opens Friday. The movie drew passionate reactions at its Cannes Film Festival debut in May -- earning both boos and applause. It tells the story of the doomed French queen (Kirsten Dunst) from a distinctly feminine, frolicsome and sympathetic point of view.

"I wanted to tell the story behind the person, as opposed to the queen," Coppola says. "I don't think that story had been told from a girl's point of view. She had a good heart but was just so unaware."

Marie Antoinette is Coppola's third film, after the critically lauded Suicides and 2003's Lost in Translation, which won her a screenwriting Oscar. She got access to shoot in Versailles to "try and make it as real as possible," to show where Marie Antoinette and her husband, King Louis XVI, lived until she was imprisoned and beheaded in 1793.

A film that opulent didn't faze her.

"She's very calm," says Molly Shannon, who plays one of Marie Antoinette's gossipy French aunts. "That was a big production, shooting in Versailles, but she never seems to get upset. She's very solid."

Says Dunst, who also starred in Suicides: "She has her vision, and she surrounds herself with everyone who will protect that."

Coppola dismisses any heckles at Cannes, attributing the response to her being American and tackling French history. "It's such a loaded subject, but I'm excited that it sparked conversation," she says. "(The French) want to write her off because there's a frivolity aspect to her. But just because she liked pretty dresses doesn't mean she's an idiot."

Coppola knows something about pairing brains with fashion. Even on a grim, rainy afternoon, she is all effortless, downtown boho-chic. Her oversized blue T-shirt, paired with gray sweats, black slip-on sneakers and a sleek black Chanel bag, drapes around her growing belly. The fashion trendsetter, who favors Marc Jacobs and Chloe, hasn't shopped up a storm for baby -- yet.

"I haven't gone crazy, but I feel like I'm on the verge," she says. "All those little dresses. I tried to be open about both sexes, but it's so fun to have little girl stuff."

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