‘Spencer’ Production Designer on Creating “Elegant Prison” of a Royal Estate

Director Pablo Larraín and production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas coined the term “elegant prison” to describe Sandringham House, the setting for much of Neon’s Spencer. Kristen Stewart stars as Princess Diana in the intimate drama that takes place during the period toward the end of her marriage to Prince Charles. “This was going to be an exploration into somebody’s psyche and the way they feel,” says Dyas. “For me, how to enhance the feeling of that character [was] through the sets and the environment, the things she was eating, that synergy and connection with costumes and makeup.”

Dyas — a two-time Oscar nominee for Inception and Passengers who worked with Larraín on the helmer’s Apple TV+ series Lisey’s Story — says they created a “complicated jigsaw puzzle” of sets and filming locations in Germany. “The most frightening thing for me, partly because I’m from England, is how do I re-create that sort of Jacobean style architecture, that very distinctive British red brick, in Germany, where everything’s sort of neoclassical and Gothic.

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“It became clear that we weren’t going to actually find anywhere or want to find anywhere that really looked like Sandringham,” Dyas says of the Norfolk, England, estate where the royal family spends several days during the Christmas holidays. Ultimately, for the exterior, he selected Nordkirchen Castle in the North Rhine-Westphalia state of Germany. “We wanted this opulent and austere space that on perhaps the first look gave you sort of the ‘wow factor’ of how royalty live. … But at the same time, underneath that thin surface, we wanted a feeling of anguish and isolation and sadness.”

Dyas adds that the castle featured the desired red brick, “which is quite unusual for Germany. It really hit that balance between enough Englishness, without the building necessarily being a blueprint for the Sandringham that we know. And it gave us all these other wonderful advantages — [for instance] this building has a huge driveway.”

Interiors were shot at locations including Nordkirchen and Schlosshotel Kronberg near Frankfurt, which was used for the main interior and Prince Charles’ library. And the library was critical for Dyas, as it’s the setting for “a high-tension scene” between Diana and Charles. “Pablo and I were scratching our heads about how to create a room in which you could have these two people having this conversation,” says Dyas. “We talked about them walking around the room or leaning over a desk, and none of it worked. It suddenly struck us that it would be nice to have a big feature in that room, like a snooker table.”

A deep red snooker table became central to the scene. “You never have a snooker table that’s red — a snooker table is always green,” explains Dyas. “It’s just absolute sacrilege to do this. … I pleaded and begged these experts from England to refurbish this incredibly beautiful snooker table into red.”

During the scene, Diana and Charles stand at opposing ends of the table. “It really helps create that visual barrier between them,” Dyas continues. “They could stake their position and have this confrontation with something that was completely believable within a royal library but just a little off-kilter. And that rich red really is supposed to be as attention-grabbing as it is because it’s telling you that there’s something between these people. And we played a lot with those kinds of subtleties in the film.”

The production designer also focused on the importance of food within the production. “Diana was dealing with bulimia, as we all know, at this time, a very serious disease. And we struggled a lot, Pablo and I, with how to present the food. We knew it had to look great. But just how great?” The production worked with two food stylists, says Dyas. “We had a permanent department within my props department that was set aside purely for the sort of chemical experiments on how to make food look even more enticing, more beautiful, with heightened levels of glazes on the food.”

On the set of Sandingham’s pantry, “Pablo wanted the spontaneity of Diana coming into a pantry that [Stewart] was not allowed to see before the take so that she could walk in and pick anything and just eat it.” This required multiple replacements for subsequent takes. Says Dyas, “A lot of these things are so strange to talk about because you’re straddling the idea of beauty with repelling feelings of disgust.”

This story first appeared in a November stand-alone issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. To receive the magazine, click here to subscribe.