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Larrain\u2019s credo, \u201cthis is a fable from a true tragedy,\u201d drives everything from the script to the costumes and set design. A departure from fantastical sci-fi sets (Passengers <\/em>and Inception<\/em>), Oscar-nominated production designer Guy Hendrix Dyas created the English backdrop via German castles and hotels. \u201cIt was very clear from the beginning through my conversations with our wonderful director Pablo that this is a sort of fairy tale, and we need to design it as such,\u201d he details. \u201dWe coined the expression \u2018elegant prison\u2019 early on, and this was something we lived and breathed during our location scouts up and down Germany.\u201d Feeling the weight and the responsibility of displaying British aristocracy and royalty in all its glory (particularly as a fellow Brit), he and his crew spent months searching the German countryside for the perfect Sandringham, the six-story, 20,000-acre Jacobethan-style country house on England\u2019s Norfolk Coast. \u201cWe kept turning up things akin to Dracula\u2019s castle. In a nutshell, the Brits tended to sculpt lions and unicorns, and the Germans favor dragons and eagles. It was sort of a fundamental cultural gap we had to fill.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cThe real Sandringham is almost a character unto itself,\u201d says the designer, \u201cand is very warm, quirky, down to earth, and not widely photographed. Its classic Georgian foundation with this retrofitted Jacobean architecture is something you don\u2019t find in Germany. Pablo wanted something large, austere, and empty to convey the feeling of feeling lonely and being isolated.\u201d Referencing classic film locations such as The Shining\u2019s <\/em>Overlook Hotel and the set of Citizen Kane\u2019s<\/em> Xanadu (the latter being a \u201ctextbook way to present wealth with a sense of loneliness\u201d), Dyas felt the \u201cmasterful designs were unsettling to look at, but they stay with you.\u201d As a result, Nordkirchen Castle, located in the North Rhine region, stands in as Sandringham. Selected for\u00a0its symmetry and rectangular moat, Dyas notes, \u201cPablo is very driven by visual, emotions and immediate feelings he gets. The idea of having Diana stuck with these relatives for three days that she doesn\u2019t want to be with and surrounded by a moat is the perfect setting.\u201d The interior sets were also constructed on a soundstage and the 125-year-old, family-run Hotel Kromberg (chosen for its great bones and architecture), while rooms at a Berlin soccer stadium served as the royal kitchen.<\/p>\n Metaphors abound, particularly the concept of Diana trapped in a gilded cage. Surrounded by beauty and the trappings of wealth (from tapestries, aubussons and silk draperies to corona headboard treatments, old-world paintings and period antiques,) Dyas even incorporated a 1930s caged-style shower in her bathroom. Set decorator Ye\u015fim Zolan sourced furnishings and accessories from prop houses in England and scoured the German countryside, cherry-picking furnishings and cutting deals with the locals.<\/p>\n And while every effort is made to ensure an air of authenticity, the designer added unexpected design twists. \u201cI did not want to recreate what we have seen hundreds of times in those wonderful British dramas, and tried to give it a twist by supplementing all this English dressing with some standout German pieces,\u201d he details. Color is also an important tool used to reflect mood swings. \u201cThere is a scene where Diana approaches Charles to talk about the boys going pheasant hunting, and there is this rather attention-grabbing snooker table in the center. Traditionally you never have a red snooker table (British billiards) as it\u2019s always a green felt, so I used a very deep maroon. Pablo wanted something to pick up the spirit of the scene\u2019s anger and torment.\u201d<\/p>\n Successful production design is more than just set d\u00e9cor as the team found themselves immersed in, for lack of a better term, \u201cscenic food design.\u201d A surreal Christmas dinner dream sequence involves a strand of pearls and pale green soup (that had to match Diana\u2019s clothing and the silk wallpaper) and the fourteen attempts to obtain the right color and viscosity. \u201cThe pearls were beautifully crafted circular balls of chocolate with glaze over them to look like the perfect set of pearls. There is a real art to shellacs and frostings\u2026it was like an ongoing science department!\u201d<\/p>\n The sets along with Oscar-winning costume designer Jacqueline Durran\u2019s eye-candy looks create a magnificent backdrop for the film\u2019s deep dive into the character\u2019s lives and the subsequent dissolution of a royal marriage. \u201cWe really walked a fine line between reality and fantasy, and for me, it was really just about the feeling.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Undeniably one of the world\u2019s most iconic figures, the fascination of Lady Diana lives on. Case in point: this past year found the former Diana Spencer the subject of a CNN documentary, an upcoming Broadway musical and memorialized with an Ian-Rand Broadley statue at her former home in Kensington Palace. The film Spencer is the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":18619,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,43],"tags":[],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/fredericmagazine.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/L1150171-scaled-e1635884240677.jpg\")
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