TIFF In Conversation With...: Spencer's Kristen Stewart on Princess Di's private hell and the power of silence

By Jim Slotek

To hear her tell it, only half-jokingly, Kristen Stewart’s search for the perfect filmmaking collaborator is a search for someone who can stop her from talking.

“I’m probably an incredibly annoying actor to work with, for a director, unless we’re totally in love with each other. I’m always like, ‘How are you going to see this, and where’s it going to be?’” the star of the impressionistic Princess Diana pic Spencer said Wednesday during TIFF’s online In Conversation With… session.

“Really, really, great directors, people I just jibe with, usually are able to shut me up,” she told host TIFF’s senior director of film Diana Sanchez.

Kristen Stewart as Princess Diana in Spencer

In many ways, silence is the star of Spencer, a film director Pablo Larraín (Jackie) describes as a “tone poem” about the Princess’s private hell. The Royals are practically still-life, while Stewart’s Diana communicates an existential cry from the soul with few words as she spends an emotionally cold Christmas at Sandringham. Larrain reportedly was taken with Stewart’s similar approach to roles in her acclaimed films for the French director Olivier Assayas, particularly Personal Shopper

“I love movies, and primarily ones that are actually able to externalize an inner life,” Stewart said. 

“I am just much more interested in films that reflect that inner life as opposed to plot heavy, pedantic, let-me-tell-you-something. I really appreciate movies that ask you questions as opposed to telling you things.

“I’ve always thought it would so great to have a lens that actually reflected what it was like to be in here,” she said, pointing to her head. “It’s frustrating.”

(As if by a divine sense of humour, the subject of silence brought a query from Stewart’s Apple digital assistant. “Siri, I am not talking to you. How many times do I have to tell you?” Stewart said mock-sternly).

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Spencer is the second movie in a row Stewart has brought to TIFF about a woman who impacted the culture and suffered for it. The other was Seberg, about the French New Wave actress Jean Seberg, who was targeted by the FBI for her romantic involvement with a civil rights activist.

“For both of these, it’s so satisfying to take somebody who feels so muzzled and give them a platform, and to have it be their very own in an imaginative version,” Stewart said of the biopics. “What a cool fantasy. It’s like voiceless people finding somewhere to scream.”

Stewart’s preconceptions of the Princess-who-walked-away were few. “I always knew she was different (from the Royals) but I didn’t know much about anything. My initial feelings about her were that she was attractive and cool. She just seemed like a lovely person. That sounds basic, but she also to me feels like such an odd mixture of things that don’t go together at all, confusing and disparate.”

She said yes to Larrain script unseen. “He called me on the phone, and he proposed doing a sort of weird tone poem essentially about Diana and asked whether I’d be interested in tackling the subject at all, before he sent the script.

“And kind of thinking irresponsibly, I said, ‘Yeah, absolutely.’ When you take a movie, you have to say, ‘Give me the movie, you can trust me, give me the job.’ And I did not have that. I could have totally fucked it up.

“And in the moment where I was going to decide whether to say yes or no, I was like, ‘Who are you if you don’t say yes? Just a pussy!’

“Sorry,” she added for the more sensitive ears in the digital audience.

Contrasting the styles of Assayas (whose Clouds of Sils Maria won Stewart a Supporting Actress CESAR, a.k.a. the French Oscar) and the Chilean-born Larrain, she said Assayas, is so interested and excited by hearing these words come out of someone else. And just intrinsically, our sensibilities match. We’re both kind of weird, like wallflowery freaks who oddly just want to be revealed. And he’s so curious and so unbelievably intelligent, I felt so unlocked by him and so visible.

“Pablo hates a lazy person more than anything. If it’s coming from the right place, you can really drive someone in the ground and they like it. And as somebody with ambitions to make movies, I was like, really, really revived by him and blown away by his commitment.

“Which sounds obvious, you need commitment to be the director. But his commitment to his vision, which was so particular and so weird, was feral, and it was very cool. Those are the only types of people that should be making movies.”

Oddly, in such a laconic film, Stewart’s Princess Diana seems to have more dialogue with her sons William and Harry (Jack Nielen and Freddie Spry) than with all other characters in the movie combined. 

“The strongest impressions I got from her were as a mother,” Stewart said. “It’s probably the only thing in her life that felt sure. She wanted to feel unconditionally about something. Her strength and her power and her unstoppable force-of-nature kind of really came out when she was with her kids. She wasn’t very good at protecting herself, but she was very good at protecting them. 

“It’s a scary aspect of making the movie, because if you don’t get that right you don’t get her right.”

The work ethic notwithstanding, Stewart said she felt fully supported by the production, particularly by cinematographer Claire Mathon. 

“I’ve just never been given such freedom and reverence. I felt so much love from all of them. I just felt so accompanied by Claire at my lowest points. The one difference between Diana and myself is that she was fucking alone and I was not. I had people holding me.”

CLICK HERE to read Jim Slotek’s review of Spencer.

CLICK HERE to read Bonnie Laufer’s Q&A with Spencer director Pablo Larrain.