PRODUC T I ON . SPENCER
LOOKING AT A WINNER? From sets to wardrobe, and Stewart’s Diana, Spencer could see lots of nominations this award season
Wigging it Princess Diana has very architectural hair, which had to be built by hair and makeup designer Wakana Yoshihara, because it couldn’t be done with Kristen Stewart’s natural look.
Queen Mary, the Queen’s grandmother – felt this malaise. He said Sandringham was an “emphatically, almost defiantly hideous, and gloomy house with a horrible atmosphere in parts, and in others no atmosphere at all. It was like a visit to the morgue.” The omnipresent feeling of being trapped is similar to Wendy Torrance in Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining . Interestingly, Larraín referenced to Mathon the use of evocative locations by Kubrick. “I like that the sets are a space for freedom and staging. They’re very expressive and participate in the mystery of the film,” she says. But there are other layers of Kubrick’s style visible here; because his films, like Spencer , are often fleshed out with a suggestive musical score. When the family assemble for the Christmas Eve dinner, a string quartet plays and moves from Baroque into jazz, as the reality of Diana’s eating disorder becomes ever more fraught and crushing. Though Spencer clearly novelises Diana’s narrative – we wonder if she did ask a dresser to leave her alone by simply declaring, ‘I wish to masturbate’. But Larraín is careful not to let the unfaltering love for her sons go unspoken
or undemonstrated. From the time they were born, Diana pushed the boundaries of what was expected of a mother to royal heirs – she chose their names and breastfed them as infants. That rebelliousness is portrayed here, as they drive around in her car while listening to Mike and the Mechanics and eating KFC. In other interviews, Mathon expressed that she was motivated by Princess Diana’s relationship to her sons, and would be constantly drawn to images of the three of them during her research. She said that it helped inspire “the most touching” aspects of the film. STEWART’S DIANA Mathon also said that she wasn’t particularly familiar with Diana growing up, unlike Larraín, who felt the icon was a large part of his childhood, due to his mother’s fascination with the woman. “To be honest, I wasn’t an immense fan. I was maybe too young,” she says. “She wasn’t something that was really spoken about in my family.” Spencer , then, was her looking glass into the icon’s life, with Kristen Stewart a perfect embodiment. Mathon and Stewart first encountered each other in pre-production: with the
“There was lots of work upstream on the sets with the production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas; the choice of circulations, colours and lamps,” she explains. The fact that the Sandringham exteriors were filmed at an enormous German schloss, with blank and imposing architecture – nothing like the sprawling 18th-century spoil of the Norfolk country home – adds to the sense of Diana entering a place that reflects her own psyche. In private papers compiled by Hugo Vickers, James Pope-Hennessy – while researching the biography of
20. DEFINITIONMAGAZINE.COM
Powered by FlippingBook