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Wednesday, October 27, 2021
Kristen and Pablo Larrain talk with Variety at the 'Spencer' LA premiere
Kristen Stewart wants you to know that “Spencer,” her new movie in which she stars as Princess Diana, is not a biopic or documentary. It is a fictional take on what happened when Diana decided during a family Christmas that she wanted out of her marriage to Prince Charles.
“We’re not trying to educate anyone, we’re not trying to solve anything,” Stewart told me Tuesday night at the film’s Los Angeles premiere at the DGA. “We’re also not trying to like figure out whether or not we should have a monarchy. It’s what did it feel like to be her, think about what those nights were like, think about what those meals were like.
“It’s the moments in between,” she continued. “They could have done the dinners and opening presents and the photo ops, but they didn’t. They did getting dressed, cleaning up dirty dishes, and you know, crumpled up wrapping paper, I just think that’s such an interesting way to tell the story that everyone thinks they know so well.”
Not that she didn’t dive into research about the late People’s Princess. She had four months to prepare before filming began. “The script doesn’t profess to know anything, it doesn’t cover any black-and-white detail,” Stewart said. “But I read everything. And somehow, in a sort of abstract way, the script substantiated everything I learned in detail. So it was really nice that ‘The Crown’ existed. And it was really nice that we’ve had all these documentaries and this evolved relationship with what happened.”
Writer and director Pablo Larraín told me that the idea of casting Stewart came about because both women faced immense fame and unparalleled media scrutiny. “It’s this uncrackable mystery that Diana has,” he said. “How do you play that? You have to carry some of that mystery to be able to put it on screen. Kristen has that. If you put a camera on Kristen and you have her stand and just saying nothing, you start looking at her and you wonder what’s going on. It creates tension and it creates intrigue.
“Of course, you can look alike, we help with costume and [an] incredible makeup team, and hair, and then [Kristen] got [the voice] right…but if she doesn’t have that thing that she’s carrying, it will never work,” he continued.
Stewart trained with dialect coach William Conacher, who also worked with Emma Corrin for “The Crown” and with Naomi Watts when she played the titular role in 2013’s “Diana.” Stewart says she wasn’t sure if she got Diana’s voice correctly until “probably the first day I had to put it on camera.”
But still, she was nervous. “Pablo had to come up to me and like, tug the leash a bit. I think I wanted to put everything I learned about her condensed in a moment in the first few lines that I said on screen or on the first day of shooting and he was like, ‘Kristen you got it. You have to trust that you’ve been spending months and you have this beautiful coach and you’ve learned everything, so now chill a little bit,’” Stewart remembered. “I was like ‘OK, OK, OK, I’ve got this.’ I would say on the second day we were we were sprinting.”
Of knowing that Prince William and Harry are probably aware of the film, Stewart said, “We loved this person. We were curious about this person. We leaned all the way in. We played make-believe and hypotheticals to the extent that we do as filmmakers. … She absolutely — I can say unequivocally — believed in in bridging gaps and that human connection being the sort of driving force of her life. I would like to think — obviously because we made this movie — that she would appreciate the fact that we were still talking about her in the most beautiful way.”
Video: Kristen and Pablo Larrian talk to THR at the 'Spencer' LA premiere
“I have a lot of cameras in my life; I have to talk to people about things that I cherish,” says Stewart, but with one key difference: “I’m allowed to do that in a really unencumbered, free way.”Looking at the lives of Kristen Stewart and Princess Diana, it’s easy to make the comparisons: two young women growing up in the spotlight, with nonstop scrutiny of their public and private lives.
The star steps into the royal world in Spencer, taking on the daunting task of portraying one of the most famous women of the modern era. The Neon film, which follows three days in December 1991 as Diana and Prince Charles near the end of their marriage, premiered in Los Angeles on Tuesday after a successful international festival run and growing awards season buzz for Stewart.
Along with that has come conversations about the similarity between the two women, which Stewart says she’s been reticent to acknowledge “because [Diana] is running swiftly away from something that feels dishonest, and I am doing the polar opposite.
“I am fiercely running toward and bashing my face into lenses being like, ‘Wait, does this come through? Does this come through?'” she told The Hollywood Reporter on the red carpet. “I’m allowed to make mistakes and change and evolve and grow with time and with my audience and with the world in a way that she wasn’t initially, and got to the point where she started scheduling her own interviews and made a pretty groundbreaking decision that allowed her to have a voice.
“It’s difficult to compare because I think it’s really easy to be like ‘Oh, it’s so annoying that so many people take my picture’ — the reasons for why those lenses are there are so different,” Stewart added. “I can’t even imagine what it would have been like to be forced to perpetuate a lie.”
Stewart — whose career in recent years has ranged from emotional indies to more mainstream flicks like Charlie’s Angels and Happiest Season — said she was drawn to the film both for the subject (“Princess Diana was a pretty rad figure in our history, man”) and the filmmaker Pablo Larrain (“a fucking auteur”), along with the chance to tell the story from Diana’s perspective.
“We lost her too soon,” Stewart said. “If she was able to fill in those gaps, she would do it herself, but we’re doing it for her because we love her.”
Of the enthusiastic reaction the film has already garnered — from that Oscar buzz to the Spencer trailer’s internet-breaking moment — Stewart admitted, “it’s tight.”
“I would be so surprised if people weren’t kind of stoked on the movie because I loved making it and I could tell when we were doing it that we were doing something kind of transcendent and honest and powerful,” she said. “If people disagreed, or if people were very starkly like, ‘Oh, fuck that movie.’ I would be like, dude, I don’t even know who I am, how human am I?” noting how public reaction is often reflective of how she feels about a project.
“We were all very truthful in our experience, and if people didn’t see that, I’d be like, ‘Well, let’s stop making movies, I’ll go do something else,'” she added.
Director Larrain, who was also behind Jackie, said that he knew Stewart was his Diana because “besides the incredible amount of talent that she has, Kristen can play that mystery,” as he characterizes the princess as the most mysterious person of the 20th century. “It’s not just the voice and the mannerism and the way she walks and looks, it’s what she’s not saying, what she’s hiding.”
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