Drama about Princess Diana with Kristen Stewart as a lead will be presented at Cannes Market
The details about the latest Pablo Larraín project "Spencer" are out!
At the 2020 virtual Cannes Market, one of the presented projects will be Spencer, a drama that will cover what will become a pivotal weekend in the life of Diana, Princess of Wales. Produced and directed by the Chilean filmmaker Pablo Larraín, the film will star Kristen Stewart.
Spencer will be set in the early 90s, around the time when Diana realized that her marriage with Prince Charles is over. The biopic will take place during the Christmas holidays, one of the lasts she spent with the royal family, in Windsor's estate in Norfolk, England.
Speaking of choosing Stewart as the lead, Larraín said to Deadline: “Kristen is one of the great actors around today. To do this well, you need something very important in the film, which is a mystery.
Larraín added:
"Kristen can be many things, and she can be very mysterious and very fragile an ultimately very strong as well, which is what we need. The combination of those elements made me think of her. The way she responded to the script and how she is approaching the character, it’s very beautiful to see. I think she’s going to do something stunning and intriguing at the same time. She is this force of nature.
The drama will be the first film to focus on the life of the people's princess since the 2013 Diana, which starred Naomi Watts and was directed by Oliver Hirschbiegel - Downfall. Outlining the last two years of her life, Diana centred around her humanitarian trips and her love affairs and it endured a brutal response from the critics.
On the other hand, Larraín's history with biographical dramas has been marked by a particular style that christened his work as anti-biopics. In 2016 premiered both Neruda – a story of the Pablo Neruda's escape to Argentina and later Europe, partially told through the eyes of the policeman in charge to find him – and Jackie – a portrayal of the former First Lady Jackie Kennedy that depicts her days in the White House and those surrounding Kennedy's assassination, remembered in retrospective during an interview.
In both cases, the filmmaker takes a nonlinear approach, not showing interest in a standard narrative, but trying to bring to the surface the inner spirit of its subject while depicting them in the larger context of their lives. The film, which should start production in early 2021, could be expected to move in the same direction with the script written by Steven Knight - Dirty Pretty Things, Locke.
