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FIGURES IN A ROYAL LANDSCAPE
On location with The Queen’s Sister, a provocative new
T
MOTION PICTURE & PRO-VIDEO tv production
Channel Four drama about HRH Princess Margaret
he nameplate on the trailer says, simply, ‘The Princess’. The call sheet refers to the production as ‘Margaret’. Put it all togeth- er and you have The Queen’s Sister, a decidedly
unconventional Royal biopic.
You get more of a clue to the actual
tone of this Channel Four film watching the final shot before lunch as ‘Tony’ (Tony Armstrong -Jones/Lord Snowdon, played by Toby Stephens) engages in a furious row on the stairs about access to his children with a prissily obstruc- tive courtier (Benjamin Whitrow).
At Brocket Hall - one stately pile standing in for another, Kensington Palace - it’s Scene 61, set in 1965, on Day 19 of a frenetic four-and-a-half week shoot. Earlier in the day, they had filmed another, gentler, encounter from 1973 as posh gardener Roddy Llewellyn (Simon Woods) told a clear- ly captivated Princess Margaret about his royal bluebells.
Two contrasting decades with entirely different settings in one morn- ing is one of the many challenges not just for the filmmakers - led by director Simon Cellan Jones, producer Kath Mattock and cinematographer David Katznelson – but also for British actress Lucy Cohu, in her first starring role.
The real HRH died aged 71 three years ago but Cohu – whose previous roles range from The Bill to Gosford Park via ‘Dolores del Rio’ in RKO 281 – is play- ing her in a twenty year, lives-and-loves, period from the Fifties to the Seventies, book-ended by Peter Townsend and the aforementioned Roddy.
Both Cellan Jones (Eroica, Some Voices, Our Friends In The North) and Mattock (The Cops, Buried) agree that they could have gone the way of a
more famous name but neither, adamantly, actually wanted it that way. Says the director: “I wanted to find
someone who didn’t bring baggage onto this. That way, it’s an open can- vas. I was particularly keen the actors didn’t research because I felt it was important the characters needed to live by themselves rather than accord- ing to people’s perceptions of them. The actors have had to find the char- acters from the script and from within themselves. I want them to own the characters rather than rent them from someone else.
“What’s great about Lucy and the way we’re playing it is that although I hope the audience find her ultimately sympathetic, we’re also prepared for them to think she’s an absolute bitch sometimes – selfish, horrible and cruel, yet also, on other occasions, kind, vulnerable and even abused.”
He admits he was, at first, wary of the project which originated with Touchpaper Television. “It seemed on the face of it to be another royal biopic, which is my nightmare. Before I read the script, I was wondering, ‘why am I bothering?’ But then I read it and thought, ‘wow, this is mischief’. It’s a window into a very surreal world. We all have various images of the Royal Family and what it must be like to be Royal. Mostly we tend to think only of the huge ceremonial, the formality and the protocol. Of course, that’s just the surface. While I would- n’t say they were the same as us, underneath they sort of face the same problems as us.”
What Mattock certainly didn’t want the film to be, and Cellan-Jones concurs, was a “drama documentary. I think we’ve had enough of those. It’s a piece of drama, which can be read in
any way you want. Our writer, Craig Warner [an American] has manipulat- ed facts and invented stuff but it’s cer- tainly not a stitch-up.”
The story, she says, walks “a nice line” between the real and the imag- ined, adding, “there is a really playful quality about it. But it is, essentially, a piece of fiction. It’s not quite a comedy of manners, but there is a genuine the- atricality about it we have to embrace.”
Real-life supporting characters include not only her various beaux but also, in “enforcer” mode, Prince Philip (played by David Threlfall who, buffs may recall, portrayed Prince Charles in one of the Princess Diana tele- movies a dozen years ago), as “the fic- tionalisation of Royal power.”
Cellan Jones wants “the look of a very high-budget film shot in a very natural, simple way. Yes, I’m hoping the sets look like they’re full of extras, symptomatic of a luxurious lifestyle. It’s very tempting when you get some- thing like this to revel in the lovely, fancy locations, the frocks and smooth tracking shots. But here, everything’s shot handheld and there’s natural light where possible.”
For this, he’s teamed up again with his DP/camera operator from last Christmas’s lavish BBC ‘special’, Sherlock Holmes And The Case Of The Silk Stocking.
Danish-born Katznelson, a graduate of the National Film & Television School, has since gone on to build up an impressive list of credits here. These include the BAFTA-winning drama, This Little Life (he eventually married its director, and fellow NFTS graduate, Sarah Gavron) and Mr Harvey Lights A Candle, shown on the BBC at Easter.
He explains: “It was good to have worked before with Simon because we
have a kind of shorthand now. He’s very ambitious, which is great and wants everything to be ready all the timesoastobeabletofilm360 degrees. Yes, he makes life difficult – but in a good and creative way.
“We didn’t want it to shoot it in the conventional way of period drama so we decided to do it all hand-held and make it a bit rougher. Which means we looked at films like Breaking The Waves and Eyes Wide Shut where they pushed the film stock a fair amount to get some grain back into it. All right, it’s not quite as wobbly as Waves but it goes part of the way.
“Of course, we do have these grand locations [Brocket Hall, The Drapers Hall doubling for Buckingham Palace, and the Café de Paris] but while we want to see them, we don’t want it just to be about them but rather about the people within these amazing big spaces.” Also crucial to the ‘look’ are production designer Michael Pickwoad and costume designer James Keast who recently worked together on Archangel.
Cellan Jones, who secretly har- bours cinema ambitions for the film, offers this rather startling if slightly cryptic final POV: “I don’t care about the facts, but I really care a great deal about the truth.”
Pressed, he elaborates, “my little leitmotif for the film is that it should not be cluttered up by the facts but that we should absolutely search for a truth. I hope people will view it as a series of very strange portraits of this character then add up those portraits for themselves before finally drawing their own conclusions.” ■ QUENTIN FALK
The Queen’s Sister was originated on the new Eterna 500 8673
Photo main: Toby Stephens as Tony Armstrong-Jones and Lucy Cohu as HRH Princess Margaret on a scooter; above l-r: a scene from The Queen’s Sister; Lucy Cohu; Brocket Hall, standing in for Kensington Palace and production HQ; on the set with cast and crew (photos: courtesy Alfie Burgess)
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