A MOVIE FIT FOR A PRINCESS — MAYBE
Will Hollywood finally do right by Lady Di? Robbie Collin believes it’s a possibility.
Is the world ready for another Diana film? Personally, I’ve barely recovered from the 2013 one, which featured such deathless cinematic coups as the People’s Princess, played by Naomi Watts, meeting Hasnat Khan for a date at a fast-food joint.
Happily, the new one sounds more promising. Titled Spencer, and starring Kristen Stewart, it will be set over three days at Sandringham one Christmas in the early 1990s, when Diana began to realize that best supporting Windsor was not the role she had been born to play. It has been written by Steven Knight, the creator of Peaky Blinders, and will be directed by Pablo Larrain, the Chilean filmmaker behind the 2016 Kennedy biopic, Jackie.
Larrain described Diana’s life as a “fairy tale upside down.”
“When someone decides not to be the Queen, and says, ‘I’d rather go and be myself,’ it’s a big, big decision,” he said. Larrain also clarified that Spencer would not cover the tragic events in Paris in 1997. “We all know her fate, what happened to her, and we don’t need to go there. We’ll stay in this more intimate space where she could express where she wanted to go and who she wanted to be.”
Filming is due to commence early next year, COVID-19 permitting, presumably with an eye on the 2022 awards season. And if it ends up premièring at Venice — as did both Jackie and Ema, Larrain’s most recent film — that would mean an unveiling around, or possibly on, the 24th anniversary of Diana’s death.
The Stewart-larrain combination is so mind-bogglingly ideal for a Diana film that I’m ashamed I didn’t think of it myself. Commercially speaking, the linchpin is obviously Stewart, whose fiveyear stint in the Twilight franchise has left the 30-year-old’s career in an almost unheard-of condition — shared perhaps only by Robert Pattinson, her co-star in the vampire series. She has a large and loyal fan base in their 20s and early 30s — otherwise known as Hollywood’s dream demographic — yet can choose any project she pleases, since she’s under no pressure to maintain a carefully cultivated star image. What’s more, her screen persona is already note-perfect:
She’s a fearless and spontaneous performer who can turn from demure to defiant on a hairpin, and even in the most intimate and chaotic scenes she somehow always seems alone.
Twilight also gave her firsthand experience of extreme, surveillance-level fame, which she has already been able to channel into her work — most notably in Seberg, last year’s film about the FBI counter-intelligence campaign against 1960s actress Jean Seberg. She has the background, the looks and the chops. All that remains to be seen is whether she can pull off the accent.
The voice certainly played a central role in Larrain’s Jackie Kennedy biopic, in which Natalie Portman attacked the former first lady’s mid-atlantic drawl with gusto. But that film wasn’t just a soap-opera-like vehicle for Portman’s (I thought out-of-this-world) performance. Rather, it was a smart and stylish deconstruction of Jackie Kennedy the public figure, which explored the gap between the woman and the image, and what it was about her tragic story that made her so irresistible to the public. So we know Larrain can ace this kind of film, because he already has.
And Diana needs the break: It’s hard to think of anyone who’s had a rawer deal from moviemakers over the years, besides perhaps Doctor Dolittle and Batman’s parents. The 2013 Watts Diana film was of course the nadir: a scream-out-loud-awful princess-meets-pauper romcom, ostensibly in the Notting Hill mould, and with DNA of purest chintz.
But there has also been a TV movie starring Genevieve O’reilly, broadcast in 2007; a “tribute” film released in 1998, months after her death; cringeworthy romance Charles & Diana: A Love Royal Story — and a Broadway musical with songs by David Bryan, the Bon Jovi keyboardist.
More promisingly, the young Diana will presumably take centre stage in the forthcoming season of The Crown, in which she’ll be played by Emma Corrin. Perhaps this figure, whose life and death were both defined by cameras, is finally going to receive her cinematic due.