Video: Kristen and Pablo Larrain's interview for 'Spencer' with Collider

 

COLLIDER: I like throwing some curve balls at the beginning. I promise these are easy. I think. If you guys could get the financing to make anything you want, what would you make and why?

KRISTEN STEWART: Not to sound whatever, but like, I think he is doing exactly what he wants to do. I think that he's actually in a position of being able to dream of yeah, kind of the...

PABLO LARRAIN: I would go back and make this movie again. That's for sure. If I could. And I remember that when we finished the movie, when we wrapped, I told you that I would keep shooting this film for another two or three months easily. It's just was such an incredible experience that I didn't want to finish that.

STEWART: He's like, I just did that. Yeah. And if I were to green light anything right now, it would probably be the movie that I would like to make. I'm going to direct a movie soon called The Chronology of Water and that's like not, and not like shamelessly plugging that because it's nothing to... It's a small thing. But if somebody handed me money to make that right now, I would jump for joy.

You guys, if someone has never seen anything that you have ever done, what is the thing that you want them to start with?

STEWART: Well, maybe like start with... I'm like, watch every movie I've ever made, start with The Safety of Objects, get all the way to Spencer, please before you have any... I'm like see everything I've ever done. I don't know. That's like, if just like one thing, Spencer. At this point, definitely this one.

LARRAIN: I did a movie that I don't think other people have seen that I love that's called Post Mortem. So that would probably be my choice.

What do you think it actually is about Diana that has kept her in the limelight and so many people care about her so many years after she's gone.

STEWART: I think she jutted out of an institution that has kind of infamously stiff up her lip. Obviously the entire Royal family upholds an ideal and an identity that is starkly and really just very different from what Diana energetically brings to the table. I think that there are certain people that are born in this world that have a talent, like a real physical and emotional talent to bring people together. Her kind of isolation was something she wore her and was really visible on her skin. I think people just intrinsically sensed that and wanted to be human and get close to that person. I think that it was just sort of this like mutual contagious craving for human connection that made everyone go, we're here for you. That's what people do for each other. I just think the stark contrast of that in a Royal setting was pretty foundationally rocking.

LARRAIN: It's empathy, I think. Empathy towards a person that was born to privilege was born in the very unusual particular circumstances. And for some reason she was very normal and regular and people could see themself in her and the things that he went through, they were just normal and her pains are most people's pains and her joys were most people's joys. It's a very mysterious thing, but there's obviously an element of an incredible amount of humanity. And that's why, I guess the movies also tries to work with.

Kristen, I think you're one of the few people on the planet who maybe could understand a little bit of what Diana went through in terms of the paparazzi, the magazines, the focus on you, did that actually help you in playing the role?

STEWART: She has been deemed the most hunted person of our era. I think that our movie very much examines the jail break aspect of her life and her kind of sprinting swiftly towards having a life that was connected to her, an outer life, an exterior life that connected and was more in balance with her inner life. I guess I have a hard time comparing my experience with hers because I'm not running away from anything. I'm kind of moving towards people. And look, of course, I'm not like begging paparazzi to come hang out with me every day. That is annoying. They're looking at me for such different reasons that I don't feel as I just don't feel as taken from it in such a way.

I feel also that she was just somebody who there's a huge dichotomy in terms of her relationship with being photographed, because on one hand, she loved it. On the other hand, it was just like, she couldn't actually be her completely true self all the time, therefore the pictures feel fraudulent and I'm very lucky that I'm allowed to be a real person. I don't have a Royal title. I don't have to uphold some sort of like farcical ideal. I get to make mistakes and choices and do them freely and sort of move towards people that attract me in art. I get to be a little more sprawling. So it's hard for me to compare. I do know what it feels like to always kind of go like, I'm pretty sure people are looking at me right now, but the reasons are so foundationally different that it's hard. It's like kind of apples and oranges.

I completely get it. Pablo, I really enjoyed your aesthetic choices in this film, the way you shot it, the camera moves and the choice of music. Can you sort of talk about the choices you made, especially with the camera work and the music?

LARRAIN: Well, in terms of the camera work, with Claire Mathon, our cinematographer, we made two very simple choices at the beginning. One was to be really, really close to Kristen, like physically close. That makes us very close, like here. And then the other one that I made to myself was to avoid any type of audio/visual fireworks and be very simple and be in the story and with the characters and specifically with Diana. I felt that the movie would only succeed if we were able to have the audience experience what she was experiencing. And that is about simplicity, a proximity. There are things that of course we try to make them beautiful and they have their lenses and camera movements, but it's all really chasing the tone and the mood of the film.

Of course there's an incredible work made by Johnny Greenwood and that really helps that. The combination of the baroque music with the jazz created an incredible friction with both the picture and sound that just elevated the result into something that is different, that it has obviously the baroque style that it feels very close to what could think is Royal music or could sort of match that space, but then Johnny brought the jazz into it, which is very much what the character's experiencing. So it's a very free form of music that is based on improvisation and other guidelines, but it's very free and can be very stressed and mad somehow. At the same time, very free and unique. So I think that it really helped. I don't know it was a beautiful process with Johnny and whatever he did for the movie just made it what it is. I'm happy with it.

My last question, Kristen, I really enjoy your work. And I'm curious when you are say you have a really big scene, a big dramatic scene on a Monday, how are you actually getting ready for that scene in advance? Are you like a week out you're already thinking about it? Could you sort of maybe just take me through your process?

STEWART: It's different in every circumstance, in every movie. In this case, I was running the longer dialogue scenes with my coach four months in advance and we kind of went through the whole script. And then about a week out, as you say of bigger scenes, we would start running them again. But those were really only the ones that were dialogue heavy. If in this case, when we had something incredibly heavy emotionally that wasn't technical, because there was no dialogue in it, he would come in and spring a scene on me out of nowhere. I think the most emotional I have ever got on this whole experience was when I had absolutely no idea we were going to shoot a particular part of the movie when we did. It was the end of a long day.

He was like, I think we're just, we're in the hallway. We're just going to do the part where you run down the hallway. And I was like, right now? Okay. Then suddenly I just like, started losing my mind. And like, if I had to sort of harbor that energy for a week beforehand, it was just would've dissipated. You get leaky. It's like that emotion just falls away from you, but you go like, I'm like totally chilling, haven't thought about anything. You're doing the biggest scene right now. That's like... That helps. But also I had every single one of these scenes in my fingers and toes. They were sort of at the ready the whole time. I put in so much work before we started that I never looked at a schedule other than for the scenes that were very dialogue heavy. But even in those cases, I knew everything before we started shooting and I've never had that experience before. I'm usually kind of fly by the seat of my pants, stand and deliver type of guy.

It shows in the movie. On that note, congrats. I wish you guys nothing but the best. Hope it's a huge hit. Thank you for your time.

STEWART: Thank you.

LARRAIN: Thank you. 

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Jacqueline Durran talks 'Spencer' and mentions Kristen with The Times (UK)

 

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In one memorable scene in the film Spencer, Kristen Stewart, playing Diana, Princess of Wales, rages against protocol and wears a bright red Chanel coat and black netted hat to church — a look that had been reserved for Boxing Day. The choice rings alarm bells throughout the household, where her wardrobe would have been tightly managed by her personal team, and is read as rebellion. “No one is above tradition,” warns the draconian equerry Major Alistair Gregory (a fictional character played by Timothy Spall).

The film, directed by Pablo Larraín, takes place over an imagined Christmas holiday weekend in 1991, as Diana comes to terms with Charles’s infidelity, as well as the pressures of what it means to be a royal, and it is a masterclass in how our wardrobes define our sense of self — as well as how important the optics are for figures in the limelight.

Stewart is a highly believable Diana, but it is her clothes — which segue from a bold tartan trophy jacket through a demure chartreuse evening gown and a dazzling Chanel strapless evening dress to her “liberation” outfit of blazer and high-rise jeans — that set the scene and give her portrayal a halo-like aura. While the rest of the royal household are dressed in the muted greens, greys and blues of country tweeds and corduroys, Diana stands out like a symbolic firework.

The wardrobe for Spencer is the work of the costume designer Jacqueline Durran, 55, whose credits include Anna Karenina and Little Women, for which she won Academy awards. In preparation she took an almost forensic deep dive into a particular period of Diana’s life, from 1988 to 1992. “In making the film I was never under the impression that this was a documentary in any shape or form. It was about making a believable Diana,” says Durran, who pored over thousands of images of the late princess from archival picture sources, books and magazines during her research. “I tried to get a feeling of what she was wearing and why she dressed in that style at the time.”

The early Nineties was a key moment in Princess Diana’s life. “It was a period of transition, and it seemed her choices got bolder and bolder to the point of being almost confrontational,” Durran says. “Diana’s clothing was like an armour and she appeared like a great, confident woman. She wore a lot of British designers including Bruce Oldfield and Murray Arbeid, as well as Catherine Walker, who was instrumental in defining her image at the time. Beyond 1992 Diana seemed to become much more herself in her style choices.”

The focused timeline also allowed Larraín and Durran to draw a line under the depiction of Diana in The Crown, with which there are certain to be comparisons. However, Larraín’s tense emotional drama, as well as Stewart’s formidable portrayal, puts Spencer in a different league from the romanticised myth-making in The Crown. The choice of outfits helped to guide the scene-setting, and Larraín photographed the fittings with Stewart to help craft the film. “It was Jackie [Larraín’s 2016 film about Jackie Kennedy] that made me so interested in the project. It’s a close look at a style icon, how an iconic look is built and what that means to everyone over time,” Durran says.

Because of the Covid restrictions the designer had limited time with Stewart, who flew to the UK for a lengthy fitting that involved trying on looks that had been made for her (from archival images), archive pieces from Chanel (that would be remade in its Paris atelier) and a cross-section of vintage pieces. “Kristen really knows about style and how to wear clothes, and she can look at something and intuit a way of wearing it,” says Durran of the 31-year-old actress. “There’s a scene with Diana dancing down the hallway in an evening dress and Kristen embodies that moment, walks so brilliantly in the midst of the downward spiral of the day.”

The relationship between Princess Diana and her maid, Maggie (played by Sally Hawkins), is a study in friendship and love when Maggie reveals her devotion to Diana on a windy Norfolk beach and both fall about with laughter. Diana is wearing a Mondi baseball jacket (sourced from a vintage site) and jeans, and with that outfit you understand that she is readying herself to break free with her beloved boys from Charles.

Although Durran’s research was thorough, she did not feel the need to remain true to history. “I mix it up — some are true replicas, some hybrid and some made up. What was important was to have that feeling of Diana. Finding those items was a constant search, and Kristen is small. Original Eighties clothes are boxy, so we needed to find and design pieces with the right proportions for her,” she says. One Larraín favourite was a tailored coat and tricorn hat ensemble that Diana originally wore (albeit in red) on a visit to Britannia Royal Naval College, Dartmouth, in 1989. The look, with the rebellious pirate hat, was adapted in primrose yellow for a feverish reverie scene.

As a viewer you are put wincingly close to the characters over this claustrophobic weekend at Sandringham. At one point the camera zooms in on Stewart’s neck, which is almost being strangled by a huge pearl necklace — a Christmas gift from her husband.

The magic of Durran’s costume design is her ability to build an aura through fashion. Durran, who was fascinated by London designers and street style as a teenager, studied philosophy before learning her craft at Angels Costumes in London. She then got her big break with the award-winning costume designer Lindy Hemming.

Durran remembers the furore surrounding Diana in the Eighties and Nineties. Musing on why the younger generation are so besotted with the princess’s style today, she says: “When I was growing up Diana was not fashionable — royal family fashion was a parallel universe. It’s fascinating that her style is now so fashionable and how the process of reappropriation has changed that over time.’’

With such strong performances, breathtaking cinematography and a peach of a wardrobe to boot, there’s a lot to look forward to in Spencer.

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Pablo Larrain talks to the Independent UK for 'Spencer' and mentions Kristen

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I’m an outsider to the UK and an outsider to the royal family,” says Pablo Larraín. “But I don’t think I’m an outsider to Diana.” The Chilean filmmaker is making his case for why he wanted to make a film about the Princess of Wales, the forthcoming biopic Spencer. Diana was a “world icon”, he says, and he was taken with the story that she was an “incredible, mysterious woman, trapped in the wheels of history and tradition”.

He was just the director, he felt, to explore the enigma – and perhaps too her familiarity. “Even though she was born to privilege, and she eventually became Princess Diana, she was someone that felt very ordinary. Someone that you could relate to. That’s one of the mysteries – how was she able to create that amount of empathy?”

Whatever your take on the royal family, it is impossible not to empathise with Diana as imagined in Spencer, the 45-year-old’s unprecedentedly visceral exploration of the woman behind the image. Taking a loosely factual (but, one might argue, emotionally honest) approach to history, the film looks at Diana through the lens of a nightmarish Christmas sojourn at the Queen’s Sandringham House, when her marriage to Charles was on the precipice of collapse. “It’s the story of the broken princess,” says Larraín, sipping tea while sitting across a small table in a Soho hotel suite. “She gets into a fairytale, and that fairytale is turned upside down the moment she decides not to be part of the family.”

There are many aspects of Spencer that might peeve purists, not least the decision to cast Kristen Stewart, an American, in the lead role. And also because the film is quietly scathing of the royal family as an institution. In Stewart’s Diana, we see a woman on the verge of a breakdown (Larraín says she is “like a Greek tragic character”), hounded by the media and smothered by the cold austerity of “the firm”. We see her fight with bulimia re-enacted in horrible detail. We see acts of self-harm that are painful, even shocking to watch. Nonetheless, Larraín says that the film wasn’t meant to be provocative. “I’m not chasing controversy,” he says. “I’m just trying to chase something that feels real.”

He continues: “I think the movie does a proper depiction of Diana’s internal distress. And that’s what I care about. An eating disorder is never just an eating disorder. It’s a consequence of a mental health problem. It’s a consequence of an internal crisis that she’s going through. It’s important to me, if you’re going to show that someone is harming themselves, hurting themselves, you want to know, why is that happening and how. But controversy, it’s completely irrelevant. It’s not a real human concept.”

Larraín has previous in unusual studies of well-known people, no one film the same but all striking in their visual elegance. Two of his last three films have also been biopics – wildly unconventional ones at that. To English-speaking audiences his most well-known film is Jackie, the 2016 drama that starred Natalie Portman as JFK’s shell-shocked widow. That same year he released playful cat-and-mouse drama Neruda, starring Luis Gnecco as fugitive poet Pablo Neruda and Gael García Bernal as a fictional police investigator on his trail. After that, Larraín returned to his roots with the low-budget, exhilaratingly kinetic 2019 Chilean drama Ema, before hitting biopic mode again. What prompted him to choose Diana as his next subject? For one thing, he tells me, his mother.

“She was the first person that I saw as I grew up, who I was really interested in,” he explains. “When the tragedy happened in 1997 and Diana died, my mum was really sad. Later I realised that she was just one out of hundreds of millions around the world. And I became very curious. Why? Why does this person, who was a princess in the UK, have such an impact on my mother’s life? After an extensive research process that included movies, TV shows, articles and books, I knew less and less. The more I learned, the more mysterious she became to me, the fewer answers I could find. And that mystery is essential to cinema, I think.”

Timeliness is perhaps essential, too. One of the key themes in Spencer is escape – from a ruined marriage but also from the suffocating, impersonal ritualism of the royal family. It’s all too tempting to relate Spencer’s depiction of the royals to Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s situation, and their decision to break with royal tradition and flee to the US, although it does feel eerily prescient. Spencer was still midway through filming when the couple’s bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey aired earlier this year. But Larraín insists any parallels were not deliberate.

“It’s not the intention that we had when we did the movie,” he says. “But we look at reality from where we’re standing. From the present. So of course people will relate it to whatever’s happening right now, and whatever is going to happen tomorrow, yesterday. But I would be very specific and clear, that it’s not the reason that we did it. And we weren’t specifically chasing it. But I don’t think it’s avoidable.”

Larraín has never shied away from politics before; his early films, including the wonderful Oscar-nominated 2012 drama No, delivered pointed criticisms of Pinochet’s dictatorship. Spencer is a less overtly political work, though it still condemns the royal establishment in its scenes of queasy wealth and excess, and in the toll it takes on Diana. What is framed as well-meaning concern – sewing Diana’s curtains shut to prevent paparazzi from seeing through her window, for example – reads ultimately as oppression rather than protection. In any case, Larraín seems happy to let the film speak for itself. “Whatever I think about the current situation of the royal family, I deeply and honestly think [my opinion is] irrelevant. Who would possibly care what I think? I will say that I have enormous respect for both William and Harry. And I think they have gone through a lot of difficult times.” It’s Charles that, somewhat predictably, gets short shrift in the film – played with buttoned-down frustration by Poldark’s Jack Farthing – while Camilla is nowhere to be seen.

The remaining cast is not as starry as Stewart but populated with recognisable faces: Timothy Spall plays a hard-nosed equerry; Sean Harris the house chef; Sally Hawkins plays the royal dresser and Diana’s sole adult confidant. It is these parts that offer small telling insights into the below-surface operations of the royals, while Charles and the Queen (portrayed by Stella Gonet) are confined to small roles in the narrative.

Larraín is unbothered by any criticism that his cast, especially Stewart, aren’t the spitting image of the royals themselves. “When movies are portraying real people and all they care about is how similar the actors look to the real people, you are in danger of getting into a lookalike contest,” he muses. “You might win! But it could end up being distracting for everyone involved. And what is really beautiful is when someone like Kristen, who is American, can travel towards the character and deliver something that is completely believable.”

Larraín is effusive in his praise for his lead actor, whom he describes as “like an old-school movie star in the best sense – like those actresses from the Fifties or the Sixties”. Recalling their time on set, Larraín says he didn’t end up directing Stewart in the “regular, conventional way”. He continues: “There was a point that she had such a control of the character, she was so into it so deep… I discovered that on many occasions my best instruction was no instruction. Just stay silent and film her. I wish I would’ve known it before, honestly. You understand your own limitations as a man when you’re portraying a female character.”

Stewart herself has spoken about the role in spiritual terms; it was by all accounts an unusually intense undertaking. She has said that she would break down regularly over the “lacerating” remembrance of Diana’s death and described having “spooky, spiritual feelings” on set. “There were moments where my body and mind would forget she was dead,” she told the LA Times. Larraín doesn’t go quite so far, but when talk turns to the star’s performance, his tone is one of awed reverence. Was he aware of just what Stewart was going through? “It’s not that you were more or less aware. I saw it. It was just happening in front of me.

“There’s a point on a process like this where there’s an actress, Kristen, and then you’re on a set, and then it’s make-up, and then there’s another actor, and then there’s more make-up, more things, and then there’s props; lights; a microphone. The mechanics of a production. But there’s a point, where you see something that has a cosmic truth. On a monitor. And you look up from the monitor, and you see her, and you say, ‘this is what it is’.  She’s not impersonating her, she’s not just playing her. That’s not acting. It’s something else.

“And that is incredible, when that happens. It’s a f***ing miracle.”

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Kristen's interview for 'Spencer' with La Presse (Canada)

Google translated. 

Canadian-French media outlet.

When Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín asked her to play Princess Diana in a film that is far from a classic biographical drama, Kristen Stewart had no idea whether she could live up to it or not. And that's exactly why she took on this great role in Spencer . Maintenance.

To say that she was surprised that Pablo Larraín called on her to play Diana Spencer hardly describes the extent of her astonishment. At 31, and with more than 20 years of experience behind her, Kristen Stewart had never before experienced such vertigo.

“Before accepting a role, an actor must assess his own skills and take responsibility for what he claims to be able to do,” she confides in a videoconference interview with La Presse . Diving into the unknown and trying to tame the chaos a bit as it presents itself is obviously part of this job, but you still have to be confident in your abilities. In this case, I had absolutely no idea. I also told myself that at this point in my career and in my life, as an artist, I had to move towards terrifying things. Otherwise, you might as well stop everything! "

An ambitious summit

A planetary star since the first installment of the Twilight film series , the actress has over the years made a point of lending her talent to filmmakers from elsewhere, just to transform an image that may be a little too smooth for her liking. Walter Salles called on her in On the Road . She recently told the Sunday Times that the two feature films she shot with Olivier Assayas, for her , amounted to an ambitious summit, of a genre that had never before appeared on her path.Sils Maria and Personal Shopper , are among the few that she is truly proud of. Benedict Andrews had him play Jean Seberg in Seberg . That said, that role of Diana in Spencer.

During a recent presentation of Spencer at the London Film Festival, Kristen Stewart saw Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry, the two young actors who, in Pablo Larraín's film, play Prince William and Prince Harry.

“I was completely ready to navigate in there and get involved in the character,” she explains. I wanted to learn everything from Diana to better forget everything then so that the instinct is installed through the soul of the character, his way of moving, of expressing himself too. Even if Spencer is not a classic biographical film, it was necessary to keep a background of truth. "

Even before the appearance of the first image, we are also warned. Spencer is a "fable inspired by a real tragedy". The setting in which the plot takes place is real, but Pablo Larraín, to whom we owe in particular No , Neruda and Jackie , nevertheless offers a fictitious vision, sometimes even bordering on surrealism. The screenplay, written by Steven Knight ( Burnt , Allied ), focuses on Diana's last Christmas party with the Royal Family, at Sandringham House in 1991, before she divorced Prince Charles.

A story exploded

Kristen Stewart evokes an experience that is both “strong and strange” and praises the quality of a work where “no one claims to know anything”. Even though the tale is shattered and sprinkled with evocative mental imagery (Diana even has visions of Anne Boleyn, whom her husband Henry VIII ordered beheaded), the craftsmen still followed certain rules.

“As long as something seemed wrong, we gave up,” explains the actress. For example, we wanted me to smoke a cigarette in a scene, but in the end we didn't because Diana hated smoke. On the other hand, the episode of his life that the film echoes has been the subject of so many contradictory interpretations that we liked to play on this mystery. Everyone wanted to know her, but, ironically, and sadly, no one could claim to really know her. "

When the Princess of Wales tragically died in a car accident in the tunnel under the Alma Bridge in Paris in 1997, Kristen Stewart was a little girl. She grew up keeping the image of a simple, honest and open-minded woman, in whom there was some discomfort because she was unable to cheat and hide anything. Like a thread constantly under tension.

“It is also completely paradoxical to note the discomfort of a woman who nevertheless had an exceptional ease to approach people, to make them feel good. It was innate in her, like a natural talent. "

At turning point?

Since the launch of Spencer at the Venice Film Festival, several observers have claimed that Kristen Stewart offers a composition worthy of an Oscar citation. In the eyes of an actress whose career began at the age of 9, it is difficult to determine if this feature film will mark a turning point, but it is certain that the role she plays in it is undoubtedly one of the most important. that she will have played. Having grown up on movie sets thanks to her parents, both part of production teams, Kristen Stewart could not have seen her life elsewhere.

“I believe I have been biologically contaminated! she says. When I was little, I insisted that my mother let me audition. I was extremely embarrassed and found a way to express things there. If it hadn't worked out as an actress, I would probably work in a film profession, maybe in artistic direction. In any case, I would try to get as close to the movie sets as possible, that's for sure. "

Kristen Stewart felt that it would have been better to stop everything rather than turn down the difficult role Pablo Larraín offered her in Spencer .

Now in her thirties and having access to more complex roles, the actress is reluctant to talk about new maturity, but she appreciates the range of characters she has access to.

“If I could pull myself away from myself and look at myself from the outside, I would no doubt see a progression that I am proud of. I admit that for the moment, I like to age. It's a great feeling. As if heart and mind could finally meet. As for the Oscars, it's not for me to decide… ”

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Kristen on the cover of Sight and Sound Magazine UK - December 2021

 

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Kristen's interview with the Irish Times for 'Spencer'

Kristen Stewart was just seven years old when the news broke that Diana, Princess of Wales, had died in a car crash. The Los Angeles-born actor has something more than a sense memory of the days of global mourning that followed. 

“I remember all the flowers in front of Buckingham Palace and I knew something terrible had happened,” Stewart recalls. “I could feel the emotion around it. There are certain events in history that stick out for you as a kid. You are a bubble. I wasn’t old enough to remember how I felt. I just remember it happening. And now it’s hard to sift through my relationship with her as a figure from any perspective because I’m so in it.”

Not everything you do in life is going to hit. I went into this fully prepared to fail. But, you know, Diana was not allowed to make mistakes

She smiles from under a sweep of blonde hair and a baseball cap. “And I’ve kind of become so obsessed with her. I think she was amazing. I think she was cool. She made the world feel pretty special. I want to be near that.”

In an era when biopics are increasingly characterised by turns that are muscular but removed from their subjects – Joaquin Phoenix’s Johnny Cash, Lindsay Lohan’s Elizabeth Taylor – Stewart’s astonishing turn as Princess Diana in Spencer is a welcome anomaly. A startling portrait that captures the voice, the walk, and every tiny mannerism (however paradoxically theatrical) of its subject, it is an uncanny performance, one that goes for broke and places Stewart as an early bookies’ favourite for best actress at next year’s Oscars. 

An eye-opening sequence sees Stewart running – just as the former Lady Di would have sprinted – wearing all of the subject’s most iconic costumes in succession.

“It was so extremely physical,” says Stewart. “It was like taking up a sport. It’s funny, you know. You wouldn’t think that just pretending to walk and talk like someone would be so muscular, but I can’t sound like her without literally working out my face for months. And there’s something about the movie. Once it finds its footing, it really just never stops. It takes place over three days and the movie is a little over an hour and a half, but we shot it for three months and so to sustain that was genuinely exhausting – in a good way. It’s a good feeling to come home and just kind of collapse.” 

This writer remembers interviewing a spooked Naomi Watts in 2013, after the actor, who had come under heavy fire for playing Diana in the eponymously titled film from Oliver Hirschbiegel, walked out of a high-pressure interview with Simon Mayo for BBC Radio 5 Live. More recently, Daily Mail readers watching The Crown have been horrified to learn of actor Emma Corrin’s scenes headlined thusly: “Royal experts slam The Crown’s Diana bulimia scenes as ‘too graphic’ after viewers see her gorging on desserts before forcing herself to be sick in palace toilets”. 

“Of course, I was petrified that people were not going to respond well,” says Stewart, as we meet in the hours before the film’s London premiere. “But as soon as I saw the movie, and even before – as soon as we started making the film together – I knew that we had such pure intentions that even if we completely missed the mark – a mark which didn’t exist – but even if we fell flat on our faces, it was worth trying. Not everything you do in life is going to hit. I went into this fully prepared to fail. But, you know, Diana was not allowed to make mistakes. She wasn’t allowed to make choices. I read this thing, and I was like, how lucky am I. I took the lead from her.”

Spencer, the ninth feature from Chilean film-maker Pablo Larraín, who previously directed Natalie Portman to an Oscar nomination for her depiction of Jacqueline Kennedy in 2017’s Jackie, is daringly impressionistic. Set over an awful Christmas break with the British royal family at the Queen’s Sandringham Estate, Spencer casts Stewart as the eponymous princess who, by 1991, is struggling with an eating disorder, constant surveillance, her husband’s infidelity, and duty.

Stewart went all out in her preparations for the role – including more than a few wild fantasies – even if practicalities prevented her from growing her own hair into the iconic Lady Di hairdo. 

As long as I stayed present and honest, people will bring their own memory of her and their own projections. My job was to allow for people’s own relationship with history

“It was a lot,” says Stewart. “Every part of it. I am not a sporty person. From the first time I put the wig on. I really wanted to have my own hair but I couldn’t. It was a logistical thing. I spoke to the woman that designed the hair because I was really sure that I wanted to be able to run my hands through and be able to get it wet. She said: you will literally be in the haircare for three hours a day. And we will shoot for eight. It was going to be such a difficult job to maintain.

“I felt like she already has so many layers on. So many veneers. I knew that we were allowed to deconstruct Diana. Her aesthetic is iconic. But Pablo gave me a really good bit of advice towards the beginning, when it was quite daunting. If you get one or two details. If you pick a few things that you identify with – specific things that you feel are really defining for her – then others will fill in the blanks. As long as I stayed present and honest, people will bring their own memory of her and their own projections. My job was to allow for people’s own relationship with history.”

Stewart was born in Los Angeles to John Stewart, who worked for Fox TV, and Jules Mann-Stewart, an Australian script supervisor and film director. When she was just eight, an agent signed her after watching her sing in a school play. Aged 12, she proved a capable screen partner for Jodie Foster in David Fincher’s Panic Room. Aged 17, she was an overnight global sensation at the centre of Twilight. She has, in common with the princess she has just essayed, been a tabloid and paparazzi favourite ever since.

Stewart has parlayed her fame into a fascinatingly international career. Interestingly, she and Robert Pattinson, her co-star in Twilight, have been equally determined to explore interesting work with challenging directors. Neither has slipped into the easy option of endless empty blockbusters (though there have been a few here and there). She has become something of a regular at Cannes. Her spooky performance in Olivier Assayas’s Personal Shopper thrilled the 2016 event and, no doubt, helped Assayas to the best director prize. In 2014 she won a César Award – often dubbed the French Oscars – for her performance in Assayas’s Clouds of Sils Maria and remains the only American actor to have secured a prize at that ceremony. 

The European experience did much to help her escape from the Twilight shadow. The French critics were quicker to accept her as a serious performer than the scribes in America. Few can now dispute that she is among the world’s most respected young actors. The Oscar nomination is practically nailed down. 

“Well, I love Hollywood,” she says. “I love making movies in America. It’s undeniably an industry – the Hollywood movie business. You know what I mean? People want to make money doing it. That’s the fuel in the engine. But there are artists that rise to the top there. They have specific perspectives that transcend and are beautiful and are true. Their catalyst is more pure than wanting attention or fame or money. But primarily it’s glitz and glamour.”

There is, of course, some of that in Europe. But the attitudes remain different.

“There is a reverence for directors,” she says. “I love romanticising. Good movies are made by a singular director. Sure, it’s a collaborative experience, but somebody needs to carve that path and allow everyone to walk through. I think when something is good it’s because it’s from one person’s perspective.” 

She continues to attract the attention of the best directors. Next up, she appears alongside Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux in David Cronenberg’s Crimes of the Future. Cronenberg has previously used Pattinson as a something of a muse. It all ties up.

“I love European cinema. I love them both. I love American independent cinema. I love movies from the 70s. I really identify with that steadfast passionate attitude – ‘we’ll do anything to make our movie’. It’s just kind of viewed in a different light there. Also, apples and oranges. You know what I mean?”

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Kristen and Pablo Larrain at a 'Spencer' screening Q&A in LA - 29 October 2021

 

Click on pics for full view.

ByClaytonDavis Stopped to hang and moderate a convo with Kristen Stewart and Pablo Larraín for their gem called 'Spencer' for some Academy and industry voters.

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Video: Pablo Larrain talks 'Spencer' and mentions Kristen with Bonnie Laufer Krebs

 

Kristen will moderate a virtual town hall with Joan Jett and Kenny Laguna on 3 November

 

...it's a VIRTUAL Town Hall with Joan Jett and Kenny Laguna to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of Joan’s two breakthrough albums, moderated by Kristen Stewart on November 3rd! 

Details below for your chance to attend.

EMAIL rsvp@siriusxm.com

INCLUDE “Joan Jett” in the subject line of the email and include your full name, valid email, and cell phone number in the email.

All requests must be received by 7pm ET on November 2nd. Forty (40) eligible responders will have their chance to be a part of this Virtual Event on November 3, 2021. Must be a U.S resident least 18 years of age to participate. Incomplete responses are ineligible to be selected. Limit one participant per household. Only winners will be notified via email.

We will post details on how and when this can be viewed when available.

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Video: Kristen and Pablo Larrain's interview for 'Spencer' with ET Online

 

Source YT Korita05

Video: Kristen's interview with CBC News for 'Spencer'

 

Scans: Kristen's interview for 'Spencer' with Newsweek

 

Click on scans for a readable view.

Scans thanks to ksqmedia

Photos and Video: Kristen preparing for the 'Spencer' LA premiere - 26 October 2021

Click on the images for full view.

You can also find the video in our main post for the LA premiere.

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Audio: Kristen's interview with The Home Podcast for 'Spencer'

 

Source YT thanks Korita05

Kristen talks 'The Chronology of Water' and 'Love Me' with EW

 

Do you want to be the next Kristen Stewart?

Then she might have a gig for you: The Spencer actress, who's currently in the thick of major awards buzz for her role as Princess Diana in Jackie director Pablo Larrain's lauded indie drama (out Nov. 5), is branching out into directing with an adaptation of Lidia Yuknavitch's harrowing memoir, The Chronology of Water.

"I don't want to be in it," she tells EW of casting the long-gestating project. "I want to find someone a little younger." So — someone like herself maybe? "Yeah, I need to find the next Kristen Stewart, basically," she jokes, eyes rolling playfully. "Just please describe the look on my face while I'm saying that." But it's necessary, says the 30-year-old L.A. native, since the book "takes place over at a really fast period of time."

Stewart, who calls Yuknavitch "incredible, she's like my favorite contemporary author," has been working on bringing the Oregon-based writer's award-winning memoir, which explores themes of sexuality, grief, and addiction, to the screen for almost five years. "It's a lot of ground to cover," she admits. "It's a whole life, but my favorite thing about this book is how it externalizes her inner life."

"I read it and felt like I was allowed to have a voice. You know what I mean?" she goes on. "Not that it was the only key to that lock, but... This woman finding her voice was just sort of the most violently physical thing I've ever experienced in a book. I mean I cannot wait to visualize this. And

I can't wait to throw somebody into like the deepest, coldest, scariest water," she says of her future casting choice, laughing. "See what happens to them, yeah."

In addition to what is sure to be a long season of awards campaigning over the coming months, Stewart is also shooting the sci-fi film Love Me with costar Steven Yeun, which she describes as "a love story between a satellite and a buoy."

"It's hard to explain," she admits. "I hope I don't botch it, because it's a really revolutionarily written script. Just a really, really brilliantly conceived idea." (The project came to her at the same time as the upcoming David Cronenberg horror film Crimes of the Future, which she recently wrapped shooting in Europe with a cast that includes Viggo Mortensen and Léa Seydoux.)

Love Me, she says, is set "after we're all dead. It's like the earth is freezing over, and the trace that we have left behind is the internet. And the overriding idea behind the movie is that this buoy, myself — Me is the name of the character — is everything we left behind. Which is kind of just, 'Look at me, look at me, love me, love me, love me,'" she explains. "So this satellite pings, and we connect. And I'm just trying to give him all the information I have of what we as humans have left behind."

"Every version of a person, and every avenue that we try and connect to each other with is represented. There's a lot of visual transformations," she teases of the film's fluid roles. "I rifle through being a boy, a girl, really ambiguously gendered, different races. [Steven] does the same thing. There's a lot of fighting and loving and sex. It's basically that we are all so starving for attention. And we don't always know how to convey ourselves truthfully, in order to get a validating form of true love."

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Kristen and Pablo Larrain interview for 'Spencer' with The Guardian

 

Spencer, the new film about Princess Diana, is very definitely not The Crown. Not for director Pablo Larraín the comforting grandeur of Peter Morgan’s Netflix series, whose tapestried locations are the scene of inner turmoil as private desires hit the buffers of public duty. Spencer, the imagined story of which takes place over three ghastly days at Sandringham in 1991, veers far more gothic. The Norfolk stately home becomes a kind of Overlook Hotel from Stanley Kubrick’s horror classic The Shining, through whose endless, confusing corridors the camera harries and chivvies Kristen Stewart’s Diana as her psyche crumbles.

Stewart and Larraín are with me in a Zoom room: the director has his camera off, a mere black square and a courteous Chilean voice; Stewart, a relaxed, enthusiastic presence in a depersonalised domestic space, wearing a baggy red top, her hair loose and blond.

Larraín loves the Kubrick comparison, originally made in the Guardian’s review from the Venice film festival, where the movie premiered. “He was so excited when he read that,” says Stewart.

For the character of Diana, however, the “tentpole reference”, Stewart says, was that unforgettable portrait of a mind cornered into insanity, Gena Rowlands in John Cassavetes’s 1974 film A Woman Under the Influence – “not maybe in the detail of the character,” says Larraín, “but in the sensibility”. In Spencer, which is set over the royal family’s three-day Christmas get-together, we see the princess desperately wielding wire-cutters in a ballgown; breaking into her crumbling childhood home; and, weirdly, clutching so ferociously at her string of pearls during a terrible Christmas Eve dinner that the beads clatter into her bowl, which she then spoons up with her soup and has a good chew on. The film, in case it isn’t already clear, leaves the borders of realism far, far behind. I am not sure it is recommended viewing for the real Diana’s sons; although, as with A Woman Under the Influence, the one place of stability for the protagonist is her tender relationship with her children.

Stewart spent some months perfecting her Diana, she says, coming up with an evocation of the princess’s whispery, rushed diction and wry little laugh that was pitch-perfect enough to allow her to feel a sense of freedom in the role. Her dialect coach was William Conacher, who turns out to be all the Dianas’ coaches: Emma Corrin (The Crown) and Naomi Watts (Diana) also worked with him. The accent, she says, was important, but more so, the whole manner: “She had such a particular way of talking, and she makes me feel something so specific to her,” she says. “It was like a full-body exercise – the most muscular, unintuitive, yet extremely instinctive thing. It was weird: I needed to master it in order to kind of mess it up.”

She continues: “I don’t know if I believe in anything. I don’t believe in ghosts, but I don’t not believe in ghosts. I believe in a lingering energy. I took her in, whether or not it was my idea of her or there was some actual literal remnant of her.”

Perhaps I look a little alarmed, because she adds: “I guess it sounds kooky to start talking about stuff like this. But there wasn’t a day that went by that I wasn’t like: ‘What does she think about this? I wonder if she can see me?’”

It does indeed sound kooky. There again, I say, it must have been strange to immerse oneself in the world of this most famous, loved and vulnerable of women. “I guess the difference between playing somebody who existed in real life versus in someone’s imagination exclusively, is talking about it afterwards and wondering how people are going to receive it,” she says. “Because when you are creating a character from scratch you still create a mythology, a list of facts that are true to the person you construct so that that person feels whole to you.

“I’m not actually Princess Diana, I can’t know everything about her. She’s in our movie. She is a character: she exists in this story as something that I feel to be whole,” she adds. Having Larraín talk about A Woman Under the Influence, telling her, “I think we go that far, I think we go that hard” was, she says, exhilarating and terrifying, like the feeling “right before you ride your bike fast down a hill, and you’re like: ‘Oh, fuck!’”

In Spencer, the viewer is edged into seeing events from Diana’s off-kilter perspective, just as in Larraín’s Jackie (2016), where the days following the assassination of John F Kennedy were seen through the grief of his widow, played by Natalie Portman. (“I don’t think I would have made Spencer without Jackie,” Larraín says. “One thing led to another. Both women that had to deal with the press and media in different ways, both women that were linked to very powerful families married to powerful men, and they were both women that find the way to create their own story and find their identity. But if Jackie’s a movie about grief and memory and legacy, I think Spencer is about identity and motherhood.”)

At the start of Spencer, Diana is driving down to Sandringham alone in her open-topped Porsche – a rebellious move in itself, since she is without security or minders. “Where the fuck am I?” she asks, out loud. She is completely lost, physically and spiritually, and gets more so as soon as she enters the gloomy portals of Sandringham.

The fact that the “Sandringham” exteriors were in fact filmed at a vast German schloss, its facades as blank and regular as a prison, rather than anything resembling the chaotic 1880s architectural bodge that the Norfolk house really is, adds to the sense of Diana entering, in Larraín’s words, “a labyrinth that is endless” – a place that is, in some chilling way, “an extension of her own psychology”. Later, I wonder whether the screenwriter Steven Knight (who wrote Dirty Pretty Things and was one of the creators of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) imbibed the remarkable private notes James Pope-Hennessy made about Sandringham in the 1950s, collated by Hugo Vickers in the recent book The Quest for Queen Mary. For Pope-Hennessy – the official biographer of Queen Mary, the Queen’s grandmother – Sandringham was “emphatically, almost defiantly hideous and gloomy … a hideous house with a horrible atmosphere in parts, and in others no atmosphere at all. It was like a visit to a morgue …”

Diana is trapped there as surely as Wendy Torrance is trapped in The Shining. “It’s a cold space of repression,” says Larraín, “a space that represents oppression and fear next to, and in crisis with, a character that is as fragile and warm as Diana.” Not that Diana is wholly sympathetic. Stewart describes her character’s contradictory interior life as “this bingeing, purging, self-hating, arrogance and entitlement”. A shot of darkness can be no real surprise from the director of the bleakly funny Tony Manero (2008), Larraín’s early, Spanish-language film set during the Pinochet dictatorship, about a man who will commit murder in pursuit of his obsession with John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.

Labyrinths generally contain monsters. Spencer stops just short of suggesting that the real minotaur at the heart of the maze is the royal family. The Queen et al are rendered as mere suggestions, vague spectral presences, with the exception, perhaps, of Prince Charles, who is not so much diabolical as just terribly chilly. It’s Timothy Spall’s appallingly sinister equerry, his face like a tombstone, who really scares the bejaysus out of Diana (and the viewer). In one memorable scene, he apparates into the walk-in refrigerator, to which, in the small hours, the princess, in the grip of an eating disorder, has ventured to contemplate tottering towers of cakes, pastries and petits fours.

It is scenes such as these that send out early alerts not to mistake Spencer for anything like realism. (The film did, in fact, employ two advisers on royal matters, one of whom dishes out protocol wisdom on The Crown, the courtier-ish David Rankin-Hunt, who worked in the royal household for 33 years.) The film is inviting us to see the food here not as an accurate rendering of Christmas dining at Sandringham (which I imagine is a good deal plainer than what we see), but, as something that, viewed through the lens of Diana’s eating disorder, becomes tempting, threatening and overwhelming. This all plays out particularly twistedly during that Christmas Eve dinner scene, extravagantly candlelit à la Barry Lyndon – a film that, Larraín says, was a more conscious Kubrick reference point than The Shining.

A string quartet plays for the assembled family, but as the scene develops, gradually the music deliquesces from a stately Handel-esque dance into jazz. Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead wrote the score. “The original idea I talked Pablo into,” he tells me by email, “was to hire a full baroque orchestra, write some Handel-inspired pieces, and while they were playing, substitute the players one at a time with free jazz musicians – so, a jazz trumpeter for the natural trumpet player, jazz organist taking over from the church organist, and so on. And have these transitions happening at various speeds.” That is more or less what happened, although due to Covid restrictions, they could use only eight players in a room at a time. “It mostly worked, bar one disastrous cue which sounded like the Antiques Roadshow theme played by drunkards,” he adds. “Gothic horror was certainly the aim. I mean, here’s the innocent girl lured to the gigantic, cold castle, with servants appearing from nowhere, and impossibly perfect mountains of food. I think those are all tropes which were interesting to focus on. And just play with the colourful contrast between the baroque and jazz stuff; Diana was pretty wild and colourful in that setting.” Larraín cut the scene to the score. For him, the jazz motifs represent how the movie adjusts its perspective from one of royal calm and formality to “inside Diana’s psychological crisis”. The jazz signals Diana’s internal chaos, but also, ultimately, her way out of the nightmare.

Because Diana does have allies in the film, one of them a dresser, Maggie, played by Sally Hawkins, who at one point (spoiler alert) avows her love – her real, in-love love – for the princess. It is a somewhat jolting moment. Was there any basis for it in reality, as far as Larraín knows? “It’s probably a question for Steve,” says Larráin, “but I think probably it was complete invention.”

Stewart chips in. “Diana was a frustrating person, a divisive person, but there were a lot of people that were truly just taken, and in love with her, unbeknown to her; and ironically, she was also somebody who was deeply rejected … what I really loved about [that scene] was watching someone naively, out of this deep dark hole of isolation, be presented with stark, honest love and care.”

Diana is given, then, a temporary reprieve. Lightness infuses the dark. Nonetheless, it seems that the film – via all sorts of hints, not least some perhaps heavy-handed imagery to do with a dead pheasant – invites viewers to form the conclusion that the royal family were directly or indirectly responsible for Diana’s death, six years after the events depicted. Is that what Larraín thinks? “It’s not that I want to avoid the question, but I don’t want to be the one who is telling the audience what to see and what to feel,” he says. “My job is to put those things on screen so everyone can have their own conclusion.” Take from that what you will.

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Video: Kristen and Pablo Larrain's interview with HCA for 'Spencer'

 

Kristen talks to Variety about starting casting for 'The Chronology of Water'

 

It’s been known for some time that actor Kristen Stewart has been gearing up for a trip behind the camera with her the adaptation of the memoir “The Chronology of Water.” For an upcoming episode of the “Variety Awards Circuit Podcast,” Stewart spoke with Variety about the feature and its current status, which is currently casting for the lead role of author Lidia Yuknavitch.

“We’re casting right now,” Stewart says. “We’ve been putting together and have been thinking about this for a really long time. I’m so stoked. It’s taken the time it’s needed. Some of these take a decade to put together. I just jump every gun in my life and start talking about stuff before they’re really relevant, but it’s more relevant than ever. Now we’re casting the movie. We’re finding our Lidia Yuknavitch.”

According to Stewart, she was taking it out this week to find potential investors. “We don’t need that much. It’s a really small movie. It’s something I would have wanted to be cast in when I was younger.”

As the writer and director, Stewart was asked if she had any plans to make an Alfred Hitchcock-like appearance in the film, to which she replied, “No. There’s actually no part for me. I guess depending on who plays Lydia, I could maybe play her older sister but probably not. I keep trying to figure out a way to get in there but I don’t think so.”

The actor is garnering a ton of awards buzz for her performance as Princess Diana in Pablo Larraín’s “Spencer.” The Neon film has thrust her to the forefront of the best actress race and could bring her first Oscar nomination.

On top of promoting the upcoming release of “Spencer” from Neon and Topic Studios, she just wrapped filming on writer and director David Cronenberg’s “Crimes of the Future” with Viggo Mortensen, Léa Seydoux and Scott Speedman.

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Kristen's interview with The Playlist for 'Spencer'

 

As a public figure who has had numerous experiences with interview quotes being twisted into clickbait articles, Kristen Stewart admits she did not think a stray comment she made about her career would blow up like it did this past week. In a conversation with the Sunday Times of London that posted over the weekend, Stewart noted that out of all the films in her career that she’s “probably only made five good movies.” Two days later she’s in the middle of a press day for her performance as Princess Diana in Pablo Larrain’s “Spencer.” And, of course, this writer is asking about it. She’s visibly annoyed at having to address it once again on this specific day, but understanding…to a degree.

“I’ve reverence for films. I think when something’s good, it’s a fucking miracle and that’s why we tirelessly…I will never stop trying to slip into being that lucky because it takes a lot of people and a lot of disparate desires to come together under the sort of umbrella of one perspective – which is the director – and it’s just super rare,” Stewart explains. “I wasn’t saying like, ‘I think I’ve only done like five good movies, even though I’ve made 50.’ [Laughs.] You know what I mean? I know it’s totally not what I was saying. We were having a larger conversation about movies and what I’m aiming to do and just ambition and all of that. And it was not something that I thought was going to be like such a click-baity thing. But most people aren’t film nerds. I think the only people that would really get that, like what I was saying, were people that were like, “It’s true,” of a great film, like a fucking untouchable, singular, great film.”

She adds, “How many of those are there? I would say in a year there aren’t many that are made. So, the fact that I’m in five is pretty fucking cool.”

For the record, we’d suggest Stewart has seven of those films on her resume, but that’s not the point of our discourse. The subject of the day is “Spencer,” a critically acclaimed drama that imagines what might have occurred over one Christmas weekend in Diana Spencer’s life. After listening to Larrain’s pitch and reading Steven Knight’s screenplay, Stewart agreed to take on what was arguably the most challenging role of her career.

“I did a real, a deep dive [over a] couple of months of consuming all the materials. And at first, Pablo kind of encouraged me to not put so much pressure on myself in terms of learning all the details because they didn’t really matter,” Stewart reveals. “But I needed to learn them in order to believe that. I needed to know everything before we could forget about it and just make sure that we weren’t being kind of egregiously wrong about anything. I kind of fast-forwarded and thought, ‘What if I’m sitting in an interview and someone says, ‘Did you not know this incredibly important thing?’ You’re going to go, Oh, gosh. No, I didn’t.’ I need to be on lock with this. I need to be prepared.”

No actor should fear being quizzed over the life story of a public figure they are portraying, but, knowing those details were important to Stewart. Especially in the context of the film Larrain has made.

“I thought about it because this conversation does matter because also the movie is about trying to convey truthfully to the world through the lens of media. It is kind of what the movie’s about,” Stewart says. “Anyway, so it wasn’t something that I toiled over, but I also wanted to just follow the saga as a curious human person. I knew that if I watched ‘The Crown‘ and watched every documentary, and read her housekeeper’s memoir, and her personal protection officer’s memoir who loved and adored her, I just knew that I would embed little emotional buttons and triggers into my experience that once we were on set, I didn’t have to go for the first time, like, “Oh, what would it be like if someone was analyzing the hairs on your bed pillow?” Do you know what I mean?”

Over the course of the rest of our interview, Stewart discusses working with the two young actors who play Diana’s sons Willam (Jack Nielen) and Harry (Freddie Spry), the problem with biopics attempting to cover too large a canvas, and much more.

Note: The end of the interview features a quick discussion about the last scene in the film.

The Playlist: Congrats on the movie. How are you feeling about all the love for your performance? Or are you trying to put it out of your head?

Kristen Stewart: No, it’s pretty tight. No, I’m not like, “I’m just ignoring everyone’s beautiful reactions to something I tried really hard to make beautiful.” I mean, no, I’m so excited. That’s why we make movies is I want a big, huge banging conversation about it, so…

So before we talk about this one, though, you did an interview recently that is sort of been blowing up because you said that you’ve only made five…

[Stewart gives a look akin to roller her eyes, but not that exactly]

Someone else already asked you this today?

Well, I mean, it’s blowing up on Twitter. What do you think? [Laughs.]

Sure, but I feel like you’ve actually made like seven or nine very good movies? Do you feel like you’re being hard on yourself…

This isn’t like a self-critical thing.

O.K.

I’ve reverence for films. I think when something’s good, it’s a fucking miracle and that’s why we tirelessly…I will never stop trying to slip into being that lucky because it takes a lot of people and a lot of disparate desires to come together under the sort of umbrella of one perspective – which is the director – and it’s just super rare. I wasn’t saying like, “I think I’ve only done like five good movies, even though I’ve made 50.” [Laughs.] You know what I mean? I know it’s totally not what I was saying. We were having a larger conversation about movies and what I’m aiming to do and just ambition and all of that. And it was not something that I thought was going to be like such a click-baity thing. But most people aren’t film nerds. I think the only people that would really get that, like what I was saying, were people that were like, “It’s true,” of a great film, like a fucking untouchable, singular, great film.

I buy that.

How many of those are there? I would say in a year there aren’t many that are made. So, the fact that I’m in five is pretty fucking cool.

And you’re in one of them this year, which is also cool.

Yeah. Thank you.

So, Pablo calls you, or emails you, or whatever. What was your initial reaction when he asked you about this project?

I mean, it’s a doozy of a subject to present. I spoke to him before I read the script. Sometimes it depends on how people want to approach you. Sometimes they’re like, “Read this and then we can talk about it.” He was like, “I want to talk to you first before you even… ” My agents hadn’t even told me what the idea was. They were just like, “Pablo Larraín wants to speak to you.” And I was like, “For sure.” So, he presented this abstract landscape, takes place over three days, is kind of precise in a way, but also lives in a serious gray area in terms of what we know about her factually. And, “I think you should do it,” and I was like, “O.K.” So, I was super attracted to the idea of not doing a biopic. Biopics have gotten a bad rap lately probably because most of the successful attempts at conveying a life on film is they’re usually not…what’s the word? You know.

Factual or historically accurate?

Not accurate, full. Like you don’t usually try and do 15 years of someone’s [life] or like a whole life. You end up doing a movie where you take a stone and you skip it across the body of water, and the stone comes out dry. You never fall into anything. You never actually end up knowing someone or feeling like you fell into any true emotion. It’s just sort of like skipping along the life going, “Look, we showed you everything they ever did.” It’s like, “Yeah, but we already know all that shit.” So, when he said this, I was like, “But the thing about her is that we don’t know her. How do we know what those conversations were like behind closed doors?” I think it’s kind of easy to forget in doing all these interviews though, is that she did electively in the last few years of her life engage publicly and really try very hard to bear herself in a really articulate way. So, any question of like, “How could you trace some material that you can’t confirm? Why would you subject a character, a historical figure, a real person who already felt so stolen from to kind of more unasked-for attention?” I think once you call into question the stories that you’re entitled or allowed to tell, it’s like, “Am I only allowed?” It’s like the person directing this movie, did they need to be an English white woman from the aristocracy? It’s like, “No, he’s a Chilean man from fucking… ” You know what I mean?

Yeah.

Some of the most interesting parts of making anything is always the perspective of a different perspective and sort of going, “Gosh, this person brought me to a thought process that I would’ve never had without her and I couldn’t be more different from this person.” So, please. I think if you look at Diana as a figure, as the way she functioned in the world, the way she reached out, the way she wore this palpable craving, physically, you can see her just kind of begging to be touched and to touch other people. For me, it felt a bit like a call to arms. It almost felt like, “Yeah, we should keep this conversation going.” So, I definitely was really, really moved by the whole idea of getting close to the idea of this woman.

Pablo has said that the last thing that he’d want is for an actor to mimic a public figure and, obviously, you don’t with your performance. But was there any particular interview or anything you read that sort of stuck with you while you were making the film about her?

I mean, yeah. Lots of things, like I did a real, a deep dive [over a] couple of months of consuming all the materials. And at first, Pablo kind of encouraged me to not put so much pressure on myself in terms of learning all the details because they didn’t really matter. But I needed to learn them in order to believe that. I needed to know everything before we could forget about it and just make sure that we weren’t being kind of egregiously wrong about anything.

I kind of fast-forwarded and thought, “What if I’m sitting in an interview and someone says, ‘Did you not know this incredibly important thing?'” You’re going to go, “Oh, gosh. No, I didn’t.” I need to be on lock with this. I need to be prepared.

That’s unfair though. No one should have to have a master’s degree in someone they’re playing to do press. That’s ridiculous.

Yeah. But I thought about it because this conversation does matter because also the movie is about trying to convey truthfully to the world through the lens of media. It is kind of what the movie’s about. Anyway, so it wasn’t something that I toiled over, but I also wanted to just follow the saga as a curious human person. I knew that if I watched “The Crown” and watched every documentary, and read her housekeeper’s memoir, and her personal protection officer’s memoir who loved and adored her, I just knew that I would embed little emotional buttons and triggers into my experience that once we were on set, I didn’t have to go for the first time, like, “Oh, what would it be like if someone was analyzing the hairs on your bed pillow?” Do you know what I mean?

For sure.

I’m like, “I’m already pissed about that.”

It’s different.

Know what I mean? The housekeeper comes in without knocking and I’m like, “Get the fuck out!” I’m so angry for her. So, the research was not necessarily because we were trying to be correct, but just because I was trying to know her, get as close to her as I could emotionally.

One that I love about the movie is how it focuses on her as a mother and how important her sons were to her. Pablo says he feels like the film is a often a movie about motherhood. When you read the script, was that something that popped to you? Or is that just Pablo’s perspective?

I think in going through any of the stuff with her, it’s the most embodied, unconditional, absolutely pure, true, confident version of her and everything else feels tenuous, and shaky, and kind of like desperate and not in a bad way. That can be a really strong thing to see in someone as being kind of honest in a vulnerable position and going like, “I need, and it’s very clear, and I’m reaching out.” And so that was always very present. But then the other thing that was in stark contrast to that was anytime her kids were around, it was like that wasn’t there at all. I mean, she was fairly untouchable energetically and in the scenes that were in the script with the boys, it suddenly felt like we weren’t telling a story about Princess Diana. It was suddenly a movie about a woman who could be anyone. That’s a very noble aspect of her. Because she is this ironically kind of singular figure who’s always yearning for more human connection than is possible for her to have, the most poignant part of the movie is not hard to relate to at all. I mean the most poignant part of the movie is that she’s normal and that she had this kind of disarming, really relatable thing that Steven Knight did really beautifully. Those scenes are very, very touching in the script and I will say because of the boys and the way that they were shot, possibly more touching in reality.

Oh.

They were the only scenes that were improvised.

Oh, really?

Yeah. Pablo was so smart. He just wanted the kids to feel happy and comfortable like they’re having fun actually playing a game. And those kids are so steeped in British culture, they know more about the Royal family than I do. So, they start ad-libbing things like, “Do you really want to be the king?” And like, “Are you…how? You guys are really spot on.” [Laughs.] They killed it and it was something that Pablo wanted to cultivate and preserve, and did so beautifully. I mean, he has kids. I’m the youngest in my family. Obviously, I am a kid. I am a child of my mother, so it’s not like I’m outside of the idea of what this feels like. But he kind of helped alleviate any stress and made it fun. He was great because he hired kids that were fun to play with and who were really game and honest, and we all really wanted to love each other, and it was kind of easy once we got there. It was like, “Oh, we got this.” They carried me through. They were incredible. I was so lucky that the one kind of wild card element that I could not control ended up supporting me.

At the end of the film, there is an unexpectedly euphoric scene centered around a familiar ’80s pop song. Pablo says it took him a long time to figure out what that song was going to be. When you got the script, it clearly didn’t say, “It’s this song,” but did you have a sense that it would have this sort of uplifting sort of ending?

Yeah, it was in the script. The song, not specifically, but I think it says like, “Harry turns up the radio.” Do you know what I mean? His hands explode over his head and it looks like he’s going to ride… Do you know what I mean? By the end of the script, there was elation, like, absolutely. Although the first time I heard that song, though, I was shattered.

Why?

I mean, I love that the movie has the ending that it does because it finishes the story without having to actually articulate what happened. As soon as you hear Mike & the Mechanics go, “All I need is a miracle,” you’re like, “Oh, get out of the car.” You’re just like, “It’s true,” and you’re not going to get it. And it for me, when after having seen the movie I think three times now, I can’t breathe at the end of it.

Oh.

I just can’t believe that what happened [to Diana, happened], but it is uplifting momentarily.

“Spencer” opens in limited release on Nov. 5.

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Pablo Larrain talks 'Spencer' and Kristen with Backstage

Pablo Larraín may be creating a whole new genre: the “fictional fable.” Sure, his films are connected by a dotted line to the traditional biopic, but don’t expect him to define the forthcoming “Spencer” or 2016’s Oscar-nominated “Jackie” as such. “I understand that we need to put things in boxes,” he says, but he’s more interested in the psychological truths of his heroes than biographical ones.  

“My personal starting point is to understand that you would never be able to capture anyone. It’s not possible, because that person is so unique and singular,” he says. “But what you can do is create an illusion that works on a more emotional level and an intellectual level. All you can do is try to capture the essence of that person through what you believe is humanly relevant.”

His interest in Diana, Princess of Wales (born Diana Frances Spencer) began at a young age. From his childhood home in Chile, Larraín remembers his mother not just being interested in, but invested in, this distant woman’s fashions and hairstyles, the royal family’s dramas, and ultimately, Spencer’s tragic death. What fascinated the filmmaker was the question: Why?

“I realized that my mom was just one among millions around the world,” he says. “The more I knew about Diana, the more I was interested [in trying] to understand why such a particular cultural and pop icon was so interesting for so many people.”

“Spencer,” led by a career-best Kristen Stewart, takes a stab at answering that question. Larraín reflects that the princess’s inherent mystery and the difference between her public and private personas are what has enraptured the world—both then and now. 

“I think Diana had an enormous amount of mystery, and the more I learned, the more questions I had,” he says. “Now, after I’ve made the movie, I’ve had more.”

That kernel of truth led to Stewart’s casting as the late icon. As a fan of the star’s work in Olivier Assayas’ features “Clouds of Sils Maria” and “Personal Shopper,” Larraín says that “she obviously has the skills and the elegance and the beauty to play Diana; but most importantly, she has the mystery.” The inscrutability of his subject and the leading lady playing her served his interpretation of Spencer’s crumbling marriage and relationship with the Crown, “because that’s how each of us can see the version of Diana that you think you see.”

“It’s hard to define,” he adds, “and the harder to define, the better it is.”

Looking back at his time filming in Germany earlier this year, Larraín recalls that Stewart was “a force of nature,” “so confident,” and “so fearless” from beginning to end. “It not only speaks [to] the talent she has, but also [to] how much of a hard worker she is. She really studied and went through a very tough process.”

As to the beguiling traits that first lured the filmmaker to the performer, Stewart’s mystery, even after the intimacy of a demanding shoot, remains intact. That, Larraín believes, is the mark of a true movie star and artist. 

“We get along well; we started a friendship. I love her, and it’s fantastic. But the process requires a camera and a lens; I wouldn’t be able to define her on a personal level,” he says. “What she does really well—and it’s why I keep thinking she’s like an old-school movie star—is when she’s in front of the camera, it just blows. That’s something that I [don’t see] in other actors, and I just don’t know how or why it happens…. I find that incredible, spiritual mystery that comes out after you film someone and create the illusion of, in this case, Diana, so beautiful.”

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Kristen and Pablo Larrain at the SAG screening in LA of 'Spencer' - 27 October 2021

 

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