WHO’S IN IT?
Naomi Watts (Mulholland Drive), Naveen Andrews (The English Patient), Cas Anvar (Argo), Laurence Belcher (X-Men: First Class), Harry Holland (The Impossible), Douglas Hodge (Buddy’s Song), Geraldine James (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), Charles Edwards (Batman Begins), Daniel Pirrie (The Awakening), Art Malik (John Carter), Juliet Stevenson (Bend It Like Beckham)
WHO’S BEHIND THE CAMERA?
Oliver Hirschbiegel (Downfall), director; Stephen Jeffreys (The Libertine), writer; Robert Bernstein and Douglas Rae (Nowhere Boy), producers; Keefus Ciancia (The Poughkeepsie Tapes) and David Holmes (Ocean’s Eleven), composers; Rainer Klausman (Downfall), cinematographer; Hans Funck (The Invasion), editor
WHAT’S IT ABOUT?
Set across the final two years of her life, before her tragically fatal car accident in 1997, Princess Diana (Watts), fresh from her divorce from Prince Charles, is still heavily in the media spotlight. This, among other things, complicates her individual relationships with heart surgeon Dr Hasnat Khan (Andrews) and rich socialite Dodi Fayed (Anvar)…
WHY SHOULD YOU BE EXCITED?
Any film depicting members of the Royal Family, even if they are ex-members in this case, is always going to get a heap of publicity in the UK. After all, why else do you think films like The Queen, The King’s Speech, The Young Victoria and others did so well and continue to be household names to this day (aside from the fact that they were pretty good, of course)? And in the pre-Kate Middleton era of royal publicity, it’s non-arguable that Princess Diana was the absolute jewel of the public eye. Unfortunately, she was also the jewel of the media’s eye and it proved an annoyance and ultimately fatal, so there’s a sombre truth that Diana, a new biopic of the former Princess of Wales, comes from a form of media itself.
As such, very careful steps will need to have been taken to handle such a delicate subject which, even over fifteen years since her untimely death, still hits a nervous core with people. But it seems they have been careful enough, especially with the hiring of German director Oliver Hirschbiegel to helm the picture. His previous attempt at a high-scale biopic was Downfall, which brilliantly reconstructed the final few days of the life of Adolf Hitler and is now unfortunately known in pop culture today because of the various YouTube parodies which took one particularly powerful scene and placed various subtitles over the German-language footage (examples include “Hitler gets banned from Xbox Live”, as seen below).
Internet memes aside, Hirschbiegel made a compelling and focused biopic with Downfall, so his involvement on Diana is sure to be just as engaging. Equally so is his leading lady, who is already tipped for some nominations at least for playing such a pivotal public figure. Naomi Watts, already an established actress with a heavy fan base, appears to be a perfect match for Diana and inhabits the same elegance, charm and bravery that her real-life counterpart did. How she will handle the bigger events in her post-Charles life should also be worthy of the actress, whether it’s her scenes with on-screen love interests Naveen Andrews and Cas Anvar, her moments as a mother to her two young sons, or even the sadly inevitable reconstruction of the night of 31st August 1997.
Hopefully, they will deviate from bad taste territory by not exactly showing the fatal moments, since it has already been established that the incident still pains some people to relive, but even if it does we can feel comfort that one of the Royal Family’s most controversial and beloved public figures has been given a decent turn on the big screen, with the right talent on and off screen to make it all work in Diana.
