The highly anticipated ‘Diana’ film project has started shooting in the summer – with Naomi Watts taking on the lead role as the Princess.
Naomi is an uncanny look-alike for certain.
The British born actress will be taking on the challenging job of portraying Princess Diana during the final two years of her life.
The film will apparently chart how Diana found -temporary- personal happiness and look at her role as an international campaigner and humanitarian.
Naomi said: ‘I’m excited and honoured to be playing the role of a truly remarkable woman, who had such a positive and profound impact in so many ways.’
The actress has been to Croatia, Mozambique as well as filming in locations in London and the South of England for the nine week filming schedule.
Discussing the film with Manhattan magazine, the actress admitted that playing Princess Diana was unlike any character she has previously portrayed.
“It was the hardest thing I’ve done because of the pressure of everyone’s beliefs about who she was, and the fact that it was just really hard to claim her as my own, since everybody else feels they know her,” she explained.
“I don’t want to get caught up in mimicry and have a mannered performance – that’s the worst thing,” she insisted. “I want to try to embody her and get the essence of her. Those things are really important to me.
“The film concentrates on a story that people don’t know much about – her love affair with a Pakistani heart surgeon, which I didn’t even know about. That love story ended sadly. Everyone remembers the Dodi story, of course.”
Diana also stars Naveen Andrews as surgeon Dr Hasnat Khan and Cas Anvar as Dodi Fayed, who died with the princess in a car crash in 1997.
The film sets out to prove a cover-up by the “establishment” over the death of Princess Diana. It has caused outrage in sections of the British press and is not scheduled for a UK release.
It will be very interesting to see if the film shows the other side of Diana. The bulimic, mentally ‘unstable’ and often emotionally tortured -Prince Charles’s affair didn’t help- woman she was. She also loved the media’s attention. Despite of what the naive public believes, she was often responsible for the media attention she received. She would often call the newspapers and photographers DIRECTLY and let them know her whereabouts with times of arrival/s and departure/s from late night hospital visits, restaurants et al.
Hirschbiegel’s movie is expected to be released later this year.
