“If you want to be like me you have got to suffer,” Princess Diana said in a taped phone conversation with one of the producers of the documentary about the inquisition into her death, Unlawful Killing.
The trailer for Diana, starring Naomi Watts, has just been released. The biopic focuses on the last two years of the princess’s life, while she was advocating for militaries to stop the use of land mines and dating Dr Hasnat Khan. The two were no longer together when Diana died in a Paris car crash in August of 1997. Diana was seeing Dodi Fayed, who also lost his life in the Pont de l’Alma wreck. Dodi was the son of billionaire Mohammed Al Fayed, owner of the Paris Ritz and Harrods and one of the executive producers of the documentary Unlawful Killing.
When Naomi Watts was on Ellen a few months ago, the host asked her what she’d learned about Diana while preparing for the role, and Naomi said that she found her to be “a rebel.”
Definitely. One of my favourite books is Diana: Her True Story, by Andrew Morton. It’s the closest thing to an autobiography Diana could’ve written at the time. She was still married to Charles, Prince of Wales, and she wanted to reveal the truth of her life, her suicide attempts, bulimia and her husband’s affair with Camilla Parker-Bowles. It’s filled with Diana’s own quotes. Andrew Morton would write questions and give them to Diana’s butler, Paul Burrell, who would record Diana’s answers at Kensington Palace and then bring the tapes back to Morton to transcribe and piece together the manuscript. Many of her closest friends, like her former flatmate Carolyn Bartholomew, were interviewed and agreed to let their names be used as sources in place of Diana’s in an attempt to keep her involvement a secret from the palace.
The making of the book would make an epic book of its own!
I’m excited for Diana, because I have high hopes for Naomi Watts’s performance and a newfound appreciation for Princess Diana’s life after watching Unlawful Killing. It’s a documentary that goes undercover during the inquisition into Diana’s death at the Royal Courts of Justice in 2007/08, and gives startling insight into the night she died. The verdict reached by a jury of 11 was that Diana was the victim of an “unlawful killing” in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel by “following vehicles.” Not paparazzi, as often perpetuated in the media but which the inquisition disproved. The drivers of the vehicles involved in the crash have never been identified, and there has been no official inquiry into discovering who they were.
Check out the trailer:
I couldn’t find Unlawful Killing for a long time because it was banned in the UK, but Pirate Bay had some seeds recently.
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