There's been outrage over the casting of Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana. Photos / Getty Images
There's been outrage over the casting of Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana. Photos / Getty Images
COMMENT:
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 the Tooting branch of Chicken Cottage.
Happily, the new one sounds morepromising. Titled Spencer, and starring the Twilight actress turned film-festival queen Kristen Stewart, it will be set over three days at Sandringham one Christmas in the early 1990s, when Diana began to realise that Best Supporting Windsor was not in fact 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 Larraín, the Chilean filmmaker behind Jackie, the brilliant and idiosyncratic Jackie Kennedy biopic from 2016, which starred Natalie Portman.
Talking to the industry news site Deadline, Larraín 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. Larraín 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," he added.
Filming is due to commence early next year, Covid permitting, presumably with an eye on the 2022 awards season. And if it ends up premiering at Venice – as did both Jackie and Ema, Larraín's most recent film – that would mean an unveiling around, or possibly on, the 24th anniversary of Diana's death.
The Stewart-Larraín combination is so mind-bogglingly ideal for a Diana film that I'm ashamed I didn't think of it myself. Commercially speaking, the lynchpin is obviously Stewart, whose five-year 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 romance series.
She has a large and loyal international fanbase 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. (That's what happens when your star-making role is a lovesick teen whose signature look is checked shirts, bootcut jeans and cagoules.)
There's been outrage over the casting of Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana. Photos / Getty Images
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.
Stewart's Twilight years also gave her first-hand 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 '60s 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 Larraín'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. In other words, we know Larraín can ace this kind of film, because he already has.
And quite frankly, Diana needs the break: it's hard to think of anyone who's had a rawer deal from cinema 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 rom-com, ostensibly in the Notting Hill mould, and with DNA of purest chintz.
When Dr Khan, Diana's surgeon lover (played by Naveen Andrews), wasn't romancing the princess in South London's leading fast food joints, he was purring 13th century erotic poetry in bed – "If you can't smell the fragrance, don't come in to the garden of love" – while she'd reciprocate by ringing him up at work and putting on a phoney Liverpudlian accent. (The film is on Netflix if you need to confirm this.)
But there has also been a made-for-TV movie starring Genevieve O'Reilly, broadcast on Channel 5 in 2007, a hasty "tribute" film released in early 1998, mere months after her death – and a Broadway musical with songs by David Bryan, the keyboard player from Bon Jovi.
More promisingly, the young Diana will presumably take central stage in the forthcoming season of The Crown, in which she'll be played by 23-year-old actress Emma Corrin. Perhaps this figure, whose life and death were both defined by cameras, is finally going to receive her cinematic due.
