ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY: When we spoke to Kristen for our cover story, she said it was your passion that really made her commit to the project. Does your interest in Diana go back to the '80s and '90s, or were you less caught up in the myth of it when she was alive, and that came later?
PABLO LARRAÍN: I remember two moments. I was very little when she was married, and I will never forget when she was walking into St. Paul's Cathedral in London. And then of course the day of the tragedy.
But I think the most clear memories are all related to my mother, how she and almost every woman I know somehow was following her. I always wondered why we are all so attracted and why we feel so close to her even though she's a person from the aristocracy that was linked to the royals from the day she was born. I guess some of those answers are in the movie, but those are the biggest questions: Why do we care about her?
The normality in her — it's a woman that feels regular, ordinary somehow, in this incredibly unusual and particular context. She behaved in a way that maybe many people would have behaved. I think that became really attractive. Whatever we would consider a fairy tale, she just didn't fit in that story and never did.
Obviously, you have The Crown, which is very much traditionally British. Did you see a particular advantage in two outsiders, a Chilean man and an American woman, telling this story?
Well to me, the royal family has become in the last years pretty much a universal concept, a universal drama where we can all relate in different levels. That's probably the biggest paradox. Because oftentimes I feel they don't love to be in the spotlight, but at the same time that's exactly what makes them interesting. I wonder maybe that's the reason why a lot of people in the U.K. love the royal family and want to keep them.
But yes [their story], its shape and the basis, is a very classic structure. From the Greeks to Shakespeare to a contemporary narrative, there's a lot of things there that work on a very human and simple level. And that simple element is what I think we are attracted to.
Obviously, you didn't have any interest in doing a cradle-to-grave biopic — the focus is really just a few days over the Christmas holidays. Was it hard to show such a big life in this very economical way, or did those boundaries maybe help you? One thing that Kristen mentioned was that the script was very tight, she doesn't recall shooting any scenes that got cut.
Yeah, I think that's the solution for the biggest issue that you were mentioning. This is how can you really get to know someone in just a few days and a few hours. Because that character is facing a huge crisis, and probably any of us would be easier to know when we are going through a crisis.
Because also of course, we all know a lot about Diana, whether you are more or less interested. You have to work with that, and you know that. There's the TV show. There's documentaries, the movies. There's hundreds of books. She's already an icon in culture, so you need to start from that base. And then we go and just choose a very precise moment of her life that could define who she was in a very simple way, or at least try to.
But about the script, yeah, the very first draft was pretty much exactly what the movie is.
So Steven Knight [Peaky Blinders, Eastern Promises] just sort of built a perfect machine for you?
Yes, his words are sharp and the emotional moments are very clear. I just really honed into that, and I had great actors. Kristen, of course, but Timothy Spall, Sally Hawkins, they are icons from my life. I've been following them since I have memory. It's not that they're that old! But they've been around for a while. [Laughs]
Especially, in the movies they made with Mike Leigh, all of them are just incredible. And they are coming from theater as well which is also a very important part of my background. I had such a joy working with them. They carry a sense of humanity, but they carry the truth as well. In these kinds of movies, that really matters.
I'm assuming that at least some of those secondary characters were real, and some are just an idea or a composite?
Well, that's probably a question for Steve. What I do know is that Major Gregory [Spall] and Chef Darren [Mission: Impossible's Sean Harris] are loosely based on people that actually exist. Not in the case of Sally.
It's funny, not everyone, but a lot of people that actually interacted with Diana — dressers, drivers, security, family members, you name it — they all wrote a book. When you dig into the books around her, you're going to find dozens that were written by people that met her.
She would connect with people, and for them those moments were some of the most interesting moments of their life. It was incredible, the energy that she had that made all those people create some sort of literature around her.
I know Kristen got very into the research, but she said part of the reason she said yes to the movie was because she felt like she would be a coward if she didn't. Actually what she said was "I'd be a pussy." But you had this unwavering faith in her. And in the screen test, it clicked.
That's very interesting because I never saw or felt that fear on her. She was always very confident. But it's funny that she said that, because I had the same experience. The operation is so complicated. It's such a sophisticated and complex structure to get there.... But [the screen test], yes. At some point, I showed it to her from the monitor, and it was like, voila. It was right there.
And the other side of it was [dialect coach] William Connicker, who is this incredible man, the person that knows the Diana accent. From the very beginning, he was very confident that Kristen was going to be successful in that. Once we had those elements, we were ready to actually make the movie and go through it.
When we first met you said that Kristen reminded you of a 1960s movie star, and I've never heard someone say that about her. I was curious what you meant.
I feel that, yeah, the '50s and '60s. There's something that's not entirely from this era, something that would come from other movies, from other decades. It's a combination of elegant and truthful and strange and enigmatic and magnetic, I don't know.
All these spaces [in the film], most of the furniture and the rugs and the curtains and the fabrics and the colors, the lighting, it's been like that for centuries. So there are a few elements that could let you know where we are — the television, an electronic device, a clock. And obviously the fashion. We were feeling that we were making a movie that had a very specific period. But if you take those elements out, it's a little bit out of time. The main element for that timeless feeling was Kristen.
Okay, we have to talk about the dance montage. Did you know from the beginning exactly where you were going with that?
I kept thinking and feeling that it is a very stressful narrative. It's an uncontrolled chaos. There's paranoia and visions. There's family. There are nightmares and dreams. It's so much pressure that we needed to find a moment to unleash that in a way that not only the character could decompress and breathe but also the audience.
My objective was basically to have Kristen dance to music, and that she would never know what I was going to play. Most of the time we had our Steadicam operator, Diego Miranda who we brought from Chile, and he would just basically follow her while we were playing something and she would have to interact with that music.
Sometimes I would play LCD Soundsystem, or Talking Heads. Sometimes it would be Elevator to the Gallows by Miles Davis, which is a very hard thing to dance to. But that would create a mood in her so she would move. Diego would start dancing with her. And then we just started doing it every day.
Dance therapy!
It's like doing yoga, right? And then after we did the fittings, we had so many incredible outfits and wardrobe, more than we needed. So we had all the things we could use for the montage. The [clothing] rack, there was someone from our team just carrying that all day long near us.
I had it really close to my monitor and when we had a minute, we would just choose something for her to wear and then I would bring a big speaker and I would hold it around my neck and I would just play the music. I would spin around, it was insane. But at some point we start breathing some sort of beautiful peace, I don't know. She just felt peace.
It's hard not to compare it to another film you made, Jackie, which is also so much about celebrity and controlling the narrative and using the tools that you have as a famous woman to handle this sort of golden birdcage that you're trapped in. Did these two films feel like really different moods to you though?
I think the movies are very different on almost every level, but I would say that what they share is what you were mentioning, how they needed to learn how to deal with the media. That doesn't mean that they were entirely successful. And that doesn't mean that they weren't affected by it.
There's a friction between both Jackie and Diana about that — whether they controlled it or not, everyone could have their own opinions. I personally think that they believed they did, but it never really happened.
You do wonder too if William or Harry will make it to see this movie.
I don't know! We will for sure invite them. I have a lot of respect for them. I just hope that they would connect with the film which is made with a lot of love and respect for their mom. As I said, don't forget it's a mom's movie. That's the thing, that's our main motivation. Or at least, mine.
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