How ‘Spencer’ Filmmakers Avoided Another Royal Scandal to Offer a Fresh Take on Princess Diana

Depicting Princess Diana onscreen is a potentially precarious road for any filmmaker to go down. One only has to take a look at 2013’s biographical drama Diana and the pummelling it received — particularly in the U.K., where it was described by one critic as “car crash cinema” — to see the possible pitfalls.

A tactic taken by Steven Knight, the pro- lific British screenwriter who penned the screenplay for Pablo Larraín’s Venice-bowing Spencer that stars Kristen Stewart as the iconic late royal — still a hot-button subject in the British press nearly a quarter of a century since her death — was simply not to look.

“I didn’t watch [Diana]. I haven’t watched any of the films. I never even watched The Crown,” Knight tells THR. “I’m not even someone who’s followed the whole Diana thing. I’m just interested in England, and here is something that happened in England among English people that was quite exceptional.”

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Set over a single weekend in 1991 during Christmas at the royals’ Sandringham House, Spencer follows Diana — putting the audience “in her head,” says Knight — as she decides to shock the British monarchy to its core and end her doomed marriage to Prince Charles.

For producer Jonas Dornbach, it was important to maintain a “huge respect” for the particular and somewhat unique sensitivities in the U.K. when it comes to the royal family, especially those concerning more contemporary controversy and upheaval. (Diana director Oliver Hirschbiegel told THR in 2013 that he “knew he was going to be in trouble with the British press when I decided to tell Diana’s story with irony.”)

Dornbach acknowledges that having a U.S. actress in the lead role and a Chilean director for a film shot almost entirely in Germany may “not be a perfect fit” to appease any naysayers in the U.K. However, he claims Knight’s script — “the backbone of the project” — gave them “a lot of confidence in the film.”

To understand what may have occurred during this seismic weekend and to get inside Diana’s head, Knight spoke to several people who were actually there at the time and researched the procedures of what happens at such events.

“What I wanted to do was to not tell the story that everyone knows, but to try and do something else, which is try and understand one individual who was a human being thrown into an exceptional situation and how she did or didn’t deal with it,” he says.

Thanks to The Crown, more people around the world probably know about the increasingly unpleasant Christmases the late Princess of Wales spent at Sandringham House, the finale of season four set during 1990’s festivities that saw, according to the Netflix show, Diana (played by Emma Corrin) being ignored by her husband and most of the other royals.

But it was precisely this portrayal of Charles — seen as deeply unflattering in certain segments of the British press, which would regularly quote various outraged Buckingham Palace sources — that got The Crown in hot water in late 2020. Calls for Netflix to add a disclaimer underlining the fact the show was a “fictional drama” even reached Parliament, with the British culture secretary adding his voice to the mix. Netflix didn’t relent.

For his part, Knight says that there are “no goodies and no baddies” in Spencer, which avoids any “finger-pointing.” Dornbach suggests that compared to The Crown — which is burdened with the weight of having people thinking it to be an “official version” of events — his film has more “freedom” to be seen as an interpretation.

However, it seems the production has already mitigated any immediate questions of historical accuracy. Alongside the newly released trailer, U.S. distributor Neon clearly describe the film as a “fable.”

This story first appeared in The Hollywood Reporter’s Sept. 3 daily issue at the Venice International Film Festival.