Billed as “a fable from a true tragedy,” the new movie Spencer imagines Princess Diana behind Sandringham palace walls as they begin to close in on her during an early 1990s Windsor family Christmas gathering. Kristen Stewart plays the radiant but vulnerable royal who is bulimic, paranoid, and haunted by the ghost of a 16th-century monarch. She delights in a reunion with her boys, Prince William (Jack Nielen) and Prince Harry (Freddie Spry), but chafes at the weekend’s antiquated holiday traditions, including a customary weigh-in to confirm pounds have been put on, and endless formal meals. Worse still, she’s trapped in a loveless marriage to Prince Charles (Jack Farthing) and knows she’s not the only one to whom he has gifted a luminescent pearl necklace.
Production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas did extensive research into the design and customs of the Queen’s Norfolk estate to fashion the look for this fractured fairy tale, but wasn’t wed to them. “[Director] Pablo [Lorraín] and I talked about creating an elegant prison,” he tells AD. “We allowed ourselves to move away from just simply replicating Sandringham…to express Diana’s feelings of isolation. The fact that there was no escape, no end in sight, a permanent game of dress up.” So audiences are immersed in an aristocratic environment that’s “beautiful and inviting on the surface, but with an undertone of misery and anguish for Diana.”
Two German palaces—whose architecture doesn’t match each other, or Sandringham’s Jacobean style—are stand-ins for the country retreat. Baroque Nordkirchen Castle, now a university, was used for exteriors; Tudor-style Schlosshotel Kronberg, a castle that is currently a hotel, provided some interiors. British Dyas was so conscious that the “fanaticism” surrounding the royal family and Diana would lead to intense scrutiny, he purposely created “an insanely complicated jigsaw puzzle [of scenes] designed to confuse the audience.” A soccer stadium kitchen served as the spot where delicacies are delivered to the castle with military precision; part of a brewery was the staff’s subterranean quarters; and a mix of locations and sets became the gilded dining room, antiques-filled bedrooms, and a mirrored corridor.
To achieve the film’s clean, slightly cold aesthetic, set decorator Yeşim Zolan adapted a less-is-more approach to decorating, feeling the grandeur of the rooms meant they could be furnished selectively, although the team didn’t skimp on symbols of Diana as a caged bird. The 16th-century Watts of Westminster tapestries covering her oversized custom bed and hanging on her bedroom wall depict what Zolan describes as “desperate” flying pheasants—perhaps to be hunted, as they are in the film, she says. In Diana’s turquoise bathroom, there’s an authentic freestanding Victorian ribcage shower, and the room’s walls are covered in hand-painted de Gournay paper with birds.
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The film’s many food sequences required a separate department with three food stylists and a team of painters. The color of Diana’s soup during a surrealistic dinner scene matches her green silk dress, and Stewart could actually chomp on Diana’s detested pearls because they were made of chocolate covered in a pearlescent candy glaze. “Every cake, every chicken wing, every piece of fruit was personally inspected by me and dressed into the set with specially designed edible glazes, shellac, and frosting,” Dyas says, adding Stewart told him how tasty everything was.
As for the scale Diana balks at being weighed on, it’s a Victorian jockey scale that the production rented from a private German collector. (Zolan says a similar piece recently sold at auction for £30,000, or about $40,467.) It closely resembles the Sandringham device Dyas says was given to Queen Elizabeth’s mother.
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As minimal as the decor was, Zolan did commission over 60 framed paintings, each with its own story. One large work, which hangs in an opulent gold frame in the entrance hall of Sandringham in the film, was done in the style of 17th-century Flemish Baroque painter Jan Fyt and features a woman with dead animals after a hunt. It is somewhat ominous, but that’s the point. In fact, Zolan says she knew the creative team had achieved its goal after reading a review of the film that said, “If you are ever invited to Sandringham, don’t go there.”
