INHABITING DIANA
Kristen Stewart tells Margaret Gardiner how she was able to reflect the inner turmoil of Lady Di
‘Kristen, I have an idea to make a movie about Diana, covering nothing anyone’s seen before. We tell everything we know about her and try and shove it into a dream like a weird poem.” So suggested director Pablo Larraín to Kristen Stewart in their first conversation about Spencer.
Larraín had previously made the film Jackie about Jackie Kennedy in 2016.
“I said, ‘Me, as Diana? It seems impossible. I’m from LA, I’m 5’5 [1.65m]. I have green eyes. You’re insane.’ But I can’t say no.”
So commenced the collaboration between the Chilean director and Stewart on Spencer, the much-debated depiction of Lady Di’s internal state during three days at Balmoral and the imagined events that led to the Princess of Wales’ decision to exit the royal family.
Love or hate the film, Stewart is mesmerising in it, not because she nailed the People’s Princess on the outside, but because she inhabits an internal state, how you feel when the world ignores you, shuts you down and restricts your freedom. When reality is unreal, the subconscious unravels.
One scene has Diana eating the pearls from a necklace her husband gave her, which she knows is a twin of one given to his lover, the current Duchess of Cornwall. The excruciating scene was made easier using a necklace made of chocolate. The scene captures Diana’s mental fracturing — and without the skill Stewart brings to it, it wouldn’t have worked.
Stewart, who’s been critically acclaimed for performances in Into the Wild and Panic Room before becoming everyone’s darling in the Twilight film trilogy, knows something about being hounded by the press and being framed as a brittle projection that’s far from reality. Two years ago she captured, in Seberg, the inner turmoil of French/US actress Jean Seberg, who was vilified for her political and social beliefs.
Stewart has directed Come Swim and is soon to direct The Chronology of Water. The actress has nailed the depiction of a woman on the edge, but in person there’s nothing fragile about her.
When Stewart began promoting Spencer, at the Venice Film Festival last year, it was clear that she didn’t care about being judged by people who compared her, favourably or not, to Princess Diana.
“She’s the most famous, most photographed woman in the world,” said Stewart. “I’ve tasted a high level of that, but nowhere near that monumental symbolic representation of an entire group of people, an entire country ... and then the world. My experience of feeling like you don’t have control over a situation or an impression of you, is ‘that’s life, that’s normal, everyone experiences it’. You can’t control people’s opinions of you.
“I feel like everyone thinks they know her, because that was her talent. That’s what’s beautiful about her — she was accessible. People felt like they were friends with her, like she was their mother or sister. But, ironically, she was the most unknowable person, who really never wanted to be alone. She was sad, but made others feel better about themselves. I genuinely thought, ‘God. Imagine just pretending to have that effect on people’. Some of that rubbed off on me. It felt good.”
An important lesson to learn as you grow older, says Stewart, is that you shouldn’t let things happen to you. “Things don’t just come at you, you choose every day which direction to walk, every step you take. You can take the reins. Diana wanted connections, she wanted people in her life and yet she was the most isolated human.”
Stewart didn’t try to impersonate Diana, but to inhabit the idea of her. She likens her performance to jazz. “It’s informed energy, inhabiting a space and taking an impression of her inside and out. I think the ironic part and the saddest part of the story is that we’ll never know her and she wanted to be known — to tell her story.”