London, Aug. 13 (BUS): You might think the last thing the world needs is another documentary about Princess Diana.
It’s a fair idea considering that almost 25 years after her death, her life and influence are still media fodder. Whether it’s a magazine cover or a book claiming to have new discoveries or just a picture of Kristen Stewart re-creating her wedding dress for “Spencer” or Elizabeth Debicki wearing “the revenge dress” for “The Crown,” culture continues to have an insatiable appetite for all things that Diana carries it.
However, documentary director Ed Perkins was able to find a new way: by flipping the lens back at us.
“The plain truth is that Diana’s story is probably one of the most told and retold in the past 30 years,” Perkins said in an interview this week. “We felt it was only worth adding to that conversation if we really felt we had a fresh perspective to offer.”
The “Princess” has no talking heads and no traditional narrator. Instead, he tells her public life story using only archival footage from newscasts, talk shows, and radio shows. It starts from the time the cameras first traced the news of her property courtship to after her death in 1997.
Perkins never met Diana. He was 11 when she died and he remembers his mother who woke him with tears in her eyes. The following week, they were glued to the television screen leading up to her funeral, as was the case in most parts of the world. At the time, he remembered being confused and bewildered at what he said was a “very unBritish flood of grief”.
He believed that this is someone most people know only through the media. Why do they act like they’ve lost a mother or a sister? Why cheered millions at her wedding? Why, for 17 years, has everyone dissected “everything she did, everything she said, everything she wore?”
“There is something in her story that has always felt so strange to me,” he said. “I think millions of people around the world have some kind of similar relationship. There is something about her or what she represents that kind of people have become part of that kind of collective awareness or understanding of who we are.”
They were questions that lingered over the years. And at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and lockdowns, he and his team at the archive decided to try to answer why. As you can imagine for one of the most photographed people in history, the archive was enormous. For six months, Perkins watched the footage for eight to 12 hours a day, trying to find the moments that spoke to him (and stay awake).
“It was often about trying to find subtext and body language,” he said. “Diana is more like a silent movie star. She doesn’t speak much in public throughout her public life. However, I think she was incredibly skilled, almost adept, at publicly telling her very public/private story and kind of trying to tell us how we feel and how she was feeling.”
He also used the many hours of audience telephone commentary that had been broadcast on British radio programs over the years to function as a sort of Greek chorus.
The film, which hit audiences at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year, attempts to take audiences on an emotional and intellectual journey as it unfolds in the present tense. For Perkins, it’s not just a historical document either: it’s an origin story for some of the things that happen today.
“I want the film to allow us to bring the camera back to all of us and force ourselves to ask some hard questions about our relationship, yes to Diana, but perhaps more broadly, our relationship to the royal family and more broadly, what is our relationship to fame,” Perkins said. “So the most important and interesting—but perhaps the most difficult—thing we talk about in connection with this story is what is our role in this story? What was our complicity in this tragic tale?”