#like the characters themselves are set in stone but i am STRUGGLING with outfit design

[thecrownnet]

October 3, 2020

Series four of The Crown takes on Princess Diana: exclusive pictures and interviews Charles has found a wife, Andy’s got a racy new girlfriend and Thatcher’s coming for tea... Megan Agnew gets an exclusive tour behind the scenes of the most wild and lavish series yet

Lasers. That’s what helped Emma Corrin understand Princess Diana in the latest series of The Crown. When the cameras were rolling, she imagined that lasers were pointing at her, as if she were in a spy film or a bank heist drama. It was her way of imagining hundreds of people staring right at her. Lasers helped her with the iconic Diana head tilt. She pretended she was shying away from them.

Corrin could also draw on her own trajectory as a 24-year-old actress. Before landing her part in The Crown, she was an unknown. Suddenly “there’s a huge amount of pressure”, she says.

When I visit the set at Winchester Cathedral, which is pretending to be St Paul’s, the paparazzi arrive to catch Corrin pretending to be Diana. She’s dressed in a replica of the outfit they papped at the actual royal wedding rehearsal almost 40 years ago. Every time she moves between buildings and trailers, Corrin has to be shielded with umbrellas. Life imitates art imitates life.

Almost every person Corrin has spoken to since getting the role has their own “Diana moment” — they might once have waved at her car in the street, been a pupil at a school she visited or knew someone who sat next to her at a dinner. Diana was one of the first celebrities to whom people laid claim. “Everyone has this ownership,” says Corrin. She was, and still is, the People’s Princess. But Corrin is trying not to think too much about it. Public expectation has been “overwhelming since the beginning”, she says. She wants to do Diana “proud”. “I know that’s strange and cheesy, but I feel like I know her.”

Emma Corrin as Princess Diana/ NETFLIX

The first television series of The Crown, which aired in 2016, was at the time the most expensive in history. Each series since has been estimated to have cost upwards of £50 million. The first two covered the first decade of Elizabeth II’s rule to wide acclaim, but series three — in which Her Majesty Claire Foy was succeeded by Olivia Colman — had mixed reviews. “The jewel in Netflix’s tiara has lost its shine,” said one. It was “okay”, said another.

Now, with series four’s reported £100 million budget eclipsing the Queen’s own sovereign grant last year of £82.2 million, The Crown is barrelling straight into the Eighties era of celebrity glamour and modern party politics grit. Peter Morgan, the show’s creator, is taking on two of the most controversial public figures of the past 50 years: Princess Diana and Margaret Thatcher. “The word ‘iconic’ is overused, but in the case of these two women quite justified,” Morgan says. Both have passionate fans and detractors. “Writing them was a bit of a high-wire act, but it was exhilarating.”

We meet Diana as a teenager, scampering around her huge family home in Northamptonshire. She is young and apologetic. The Prince of Wales, at that time dating her eldest sister, is rather distracted. A number of years later, Diana is leaving her relatively modest flat in Earls Court and her job as a nursery school assistant to move into Clarence House — but finds herself in solitude. Bored and lonely, 19-year-old Diana rollerskates down corridors to Duran Duran and sits all by herself in her chamber. One night, after finding out about Prince Charles’s affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, she gorges on puddings and makes herself vomit them back up.

Behind the scenes: the latest series of The Crown/ NETFLIX

*Spoilers*

It is a dark moment that Corrin wanted to get right. She listened to real-life accounts of people who had suffered from bulimia and talked with experts from the eating disorder charity Beat. Diana herself said that it was the most “discreet” way of harming herself: “Everyone in the family knew about the bulimia,” she said in recordings from the 1990s later made into a Channel 4 documentary.

“Drawing on my experience,” says Corrin, “not that I’ve experienced that kind of self-harm, but mental health in general, it can lead you down a very dark path when you’re struggling to cope, when things feel out of control. Diana very much doesn’t have the love and comfort and attention she needs from the man she loves or the family, who aren’t really acting as a family to her. There is a build-up of emotion she can’t deal with and making herself sick is a way of taking back control.”

When Josh O’Connor, who plays the Prince of Wales, first read the script for this series he thought: “Oh God, how can Charles be like that to Diana? But he feels wronged. He feels like she has an addiction to the spotlight,” he says. “I have to feel sympathy for him in that world. This is a family who have an intense inability to be emotional and he has inherited that awkwardness. In this series there’s an awful lot of Charles trying to explain himself and not being allowed to. He’s trying to say that if he can be with Camilla, then at least two of the three people can be happy. As it is, there’s three miserable people.”

The Crown works differently to other shows in that the “writers’ room” is not made up of writers but researchers, who constantly feed back to Morgan, the king of The Crown. It means that for each word eventually spoken on film, there are pages and pages of briefing notes. Annie Sulzberger, head of research, started this series by hiring a young team. “I wanted people who did not grow up believing one or the other [Diana and Thatcher],” she says. “You have to be curious enough and ignorant enough, I suppose, to write the kind of work we need.”

This series will span the Thatcher years — 1979 to 1990 — and will include the assassination of Charles’s great-uncle, Lord Mountbatten, by the IRA, Charles and Diana’s wedding, and the Falklands War. Once the team has laid out a timeline, Morgan picks out the events he wants to feature. The research team starts to hone in on each, getting increasingly “micro” in their investigations. In the making of this series, one of the team spent two weeks researching the label on a bottle of wine from which a character briefly swigs.

Dress rehearsal: Josh O’Connor and Emma Corrin act out Charles and Diana’s wedding run-through/ NETFLIX

As the show has progressed, the fact-checking work has multiplied, thanks to the tabloid journalism of the 1980s. “It’s not just about words being printed,” Sulzberger says, “but who wrote it. Diana will become very close with a journalist called Richard Kay and feed him information, and Charles’s team will do the same. So you need to start unpicking the biographies of all the writers in order to know that what you’re doing has some objectivity.”

Did the team speak to any of Diana’s family or friends? “No.” Do the producers give any material to the Palace to see beforehand? “No. We have no connection to them that would result in editorial shifts. These are real people, these are real stories and we are filling in the moments that aren’t recorded — private conversations, moments of reflection, philosophical moments.”

When I ask Morgan if it’s true that he meets high-ranking courtiers four times a year, he is keen to clear up that he doesn’t. “I have never had any discussions with anyone actively working at the Palace,” he says. “The two worlds, the royal household and The Crown, exist in a world of mutual deniability, which I’m sure is every bit as important to them as it is to us.”

Corrin, though, did speak to Patrick Jephson, Diana’s private secretary, who appears as a fictionalised character in this series. “I got a sense of her joy from him,” Corrin says. “He said she was so naturally happy. When she joined the royal family, she had come from living with flatmates in Earls Court and she was a very normal girl. Patrick said she was still full of that girlish silliness, very down to earth.”

The couple themselves at the real thing in 1981 MIKE LLOYD/SHUTTERSTOCK/REX

The executive producer Suzanne Mackie says that “particularly now” The Crown team feels a sense of responsibility “to living people, people’s children, people’s parents. Obviously what we don’t do is engage on a fact level with the royal family. We have a tacit understanding that they need distance from us and we need distance from them.”

It is a cold day in January and I am watching Charles and Diana’s wedding rehearsal in Winchester. About 75 per cent of the show is filmed on location around the world, over the course of seven months. The rest is filmed at the show’s base, Elstree Studios, just north of London.

Today in Winchester Cathedral there is a crew of 78 and a cast of almost 200. The sight is as epic as the show’s budget would suggest. Between takes, Corrin sits on the stone steps by the altar, scrolling on her iPhone with one hand and biting her fingernails on the other. Even before the clapperboard snaps shut, the resemblance between her and the princess is uncanny.

Sidonie Roberts, head buyer and assistant costume designer, has a timeline of photos of Diana covering the wall of her studio at Elstree. Roberts is devoted to the cause. She travels to Paris to buy buttons from the same shop the Queen’s dressmaker uses (it sells more than 30,000 types of button) and to Soho to rummage in basements for fabric. Last year she was in a Bangladeshi fabric shop in Brick Lane, east London, when she saw a roll of material right on the very top shelf. “It was still in its plastic, but I just knew — that’s Diana’s colour,” Roberts says. She got a ladder, climbed to the top, pulled down the fabric and bought it for £3.50 a metre. When Roberts got back to the studio at Elstree, she unrolled it and saw a stamp at the bottom: “The Lady Diana Collection, made in Japan.” Roberts did some research. It was real silk, from a collection made in the princess’s honour.

In the corner of the studio an assistant is gluing tiny pearls to Diana’s flat wedding shoes. She has been decorating them, exactly like the originals, for a day and a half. “We’ve had a long conversation about the size of those pearls,” says Roberts. David and Elizabeth Emanuel, who designed Diana’s original wedding dress, donated patterns to the show, which were used to make the new version. With its 25ft train, it took ten people to get Corrin into the dress. In the show it is seen in full, and only from behind, for no more than 15 seconds.

Paying their respects: Olivia Colman as the Queen and the rest of the royal family at the funeral of Lord Mountbatten/ NETFLIX

Corrin is masterful at inhabiting Diana’s coyness — hunching her shoulders towards her ears as she walks, the smirk, her intonation. Diana’s voice was the “polar opposite” of the royals’, says William Conacher, The Crown’s dialect coach. “She moved her jaw twice as much, so her voice was more forward, open, easier to access, and I don’t think it’s especially revelatory to suggest accessibility was her shtick,” he says. “She used a minor key that made her seem vulnerable. Despite the Queen’s and Prince Charles’s accents being ‘stiffer’ to listen to, I think it comes entirely naturally, whereas I find Diana’s voice more studied. I think she spoke to have an effect.”

What sort of research did Colman do for series four’s Queen? “Yeah, I don’t do research,” she says when we speak on the phone in the summer. “The research team on The Crown is a bit like the British Library. It’s extraordinary, and when they kick in, your computer can’t really cope with the amount of stuff they send you.” Was there something in particular that the team sent her that made things click? “No.” There is a longish silence. It seems Colman’s royal duty is waning. “They’ve got every image and film of the Queen ever made. I’ve also got three kids, so I can’t spend all my time going through all of it.”

As she wraps up a second series of The Crown — Imelda Staunton will take over for five and six — Colman knows that she would “really not like” to have the Queen’s job. “There are very few people who are forced into a job and have no choice about it,” she says. “She’s done it with dignity, for decades, bless her. It’s amazing.”

The funeral of Lord Mountbatten took place in 1979 BENTLEY ARCHIVE/POPPERFOTO/GETTY

If there were rumours of Elizabeth II being unhappy about the last series of The Crown, I can’t imagine she’ll be too chuffed about this one. Series four’s Queen is colder and more distant, and the effects of her duty on her children more obvious: Charles is heavy with melancholy, Anne feels unheard, Edward is portrayed as a spoilt bully and Andrew is dangerously arrogant.

Speaking of Andrew, there is a subtle nod towards recent events. At one point the prince discusses a young American actress he is dating. The actress had recently played a 17-year-old who must entertain several “old predators who seduce the vulnerable, helpless young Emily”. The real prince dated the actress Koo Stark in 1981, who had starred in The Awakening of Emily, which had a near-identical plot.

In series four, the pivotal relationship between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher begins well. They are respectful of one another as no-nonsense working mothers, but tensions arise — not least, over tea etiquette at Balmoral.

In preparation for her role as the Iron Lady, Gillian Anderson met Charles Moore, Thatcher’s biographer, as well as secretaries who worked with her. “The only way for me to go about sitting inside of her was to find the reason behind her actions — growing up, what she learnt from her father, how much she truly believed that she was the answer and as long as we all took the sour medicine now we’d be able to turn around this country, completely shutting her eyes to the people that she was turning out on the street.”

Anderson eventually “settled into” the body of Thatcher. “She walked very fast, always up ahead,” Anderson says. “She would power forward in front of presidents. With [Ronald] Reagan she would supposedly be alongside him, but was walking ahead. Always walking ahead of [husband] Denis, telling him to catch up.”

Thatcher’s barnet also features. In one scene she spends an asphyxiating four seconds hairspraying it in preparation for a showdown with the Queen. The hairdo took endless camera tests before Morgan was happy with it. “It essentially meant destroying it so it had an overprocessed ‘frothy’ quality,” says the hair and make-up designer Cate Hall. “To treat a wig so badly was against all of our instincts — they’re so expensive — but I’m grateful now that we went through the process with Peter, with him saying no, more, it’s not right, try again.”

Clash of the titans: Margaret Thatcher, played by Gillian Anderson, is filmed meeting the Queen, played by Olivia Colman, in a memorable scene from series four/ NETFLIX

Series five will have a whole new cast. Colman says she is “not the sort of person who keeps the shoes of a character they played 20 years ago”. But Helena Bonham Carter is going to miss Princess Margaret. “She does pop out [in everyday life],” she says. “The other day I was at some public event and there was the normal scramble of people and I just told them, ‘No, shut up.’ The finger came out, which is very her, and I said, ‘Shut up and wait. Don’t get hysterical.’ So I’ve got the bossy side of her.”

Originally Morgan said there would be two more series after this one. Then he changed his mind, describing series five as “the perfect time and place to stop”. Now there are two more again (“To do justice to the richness and complexity of the story,” he reneged). The show is creeping closer to the modern day. It is now said to be ending in the 2000s, spanning, perhaps, Charles and Diana’s divorce, the deaths of Diana, Margaret and the Queen Mother, the marriage of Charles and Camilla, and the teenage and twentysomething princes. “I want to end it close enough to present day to feel that we have completed a long journey and distant enough to feel historical,” says Morgan. “I have a specific incident in mind, but until I’ve actually written it and seen if it works, I can’t commit to discussing it.”

On set with Mackie, I mention Harry and Meghan. “Too often,” the couple posted on their Instagram page that month, “we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring.” Is it possible, I ask Mackie, for the royal family to humanise themselves while still justifying their existence as something mightier, more important, regal? “That’s where you go wrong, as a public figure, letting light in on the magic, especially as a monarch,” she replies. “You have to be an ideal. After years and years of that subjugation of self in order to put duty first, you, the essence of you, is buried somewhere. The Queen is a tiny little person inside many, many Russian dolls.”

Series four of The Crown is available on Netflix from November 15

[nofomoartworld]

Bad at Sports Sunday Comics with Tara Booth

By Krystal DiFronzo

Tara Booth’s work is an assertive clash of color that depicts the most humbling and sticky situations. Some relatable moments include trying to pee while wearing a romper, cutting bangs into near oblivion, and stoned Amazon shopping (with the resulting surprise package hangover). My first introduction to Booth’s comics were through her Tumblr back in the golden age of cartoonists using that platform. Since then she’s had her work published by kuš! and Colorama. She regularly posts comics and in progress work on her Instagram @tarabooth. 

Krystal DiFronzo: The first thing I noticed about your comics is the density of information, there’s so much color and pattern all piled on top of each other! Also you use gouache like a painter, not like a cartoonist coloring between lines. The ghost layers of paint create this constant atmospheric movement. The reader is made aware of the hand and medium, unlike traditional pen and ink comics. Do you have a background in painting prior to your comics? If so, why the transition to comics or are they all part of a single practice?

Tara Booth: I studied painting and graduated with a BFA at Tyler School of Art. I used to work on big 4×5 foot canvases that I built, stretched, gessoed, and sanded over and over. This time-consuming preparation, combined with the preciousness of the material gradually grated on me. I appreciate the importance of these processes and I’m happy to have access to this skill set, but it wasn’t something that I ever wanted to include in my everyday art practice (due to my extreme and often debilitating impulsivity). Producing work in art school wasn’t a problem for me, but I wasn’t a great student. It became increasingly difficult to connect to ideas being taught in my painting and art theory classes, which were focused more on abstraction and conceptualism than direct representation or narrative, which is where my interest had always been. The language and concepts we studied felt really inaccessible and detached from my experiences as a highly-dramatic, drunk 21-year-old. I started to focus more on folk art, Lowbrow, and self-taught artists. I began reading more comics, and decided I wanted to make paintings that were direct, accessible, and inexpensive to produce—so I transitioned to working on paper with gouache, with the ambition of eventually making my own comics.

KD: Your comics also have a lot of unusual formatting choices that affect how you read it. They don’t have any formal paneling or gutters, they flow across the page almost like an animation or a Muybridge study. You can read the comic either left to right or as a single-paged composition. They are also predominantly dialogue-less other than their titles. What made you come to these decisions? What’s your planning process like?

TB: The unusual formatting in my comics isn’t something that I had planned. For the longest time I felt really stunted by my background in traditional painting. I bought a bunch of comics, and attempted  to mirror the techniques I saw, but working in panels always felt totally awkward. I had little experience with Photoshop, storytelling, principles of design… teaching myself how to make a comic felt like an uphill battle. Five years after graduation, I still hadn’t produced anything solid. I had kind of given up, and finally decided that making a shitty comic was better than not making anything at all—that I should worry less about what I think a comic is supposed to look like, and more on painting within the realm of my own abilities. Once I threw all of my preconceived notions out the window and forced myself to get to work, I actually started to get recognition for what I was doing rather quickly. Embracing some of my naivety and focusing on the painterly qualities in my work has compensated for whatever technical obstacles stood in my way. I still struggle with using text in my work. Until I’m more comfortable with my writing, I’m relying symbols, visual cues, facial expressions, and body language to tell my stories.

I like that you mention Muybridge studies, I look at them all the time. They’re one of my main influences. I love them!

KD: It’s a common trope of comics or animation that characters wear the same outfit. Like opening up a closet to rows of one identical dress. Your stand-in wears such incredible outfits in every comic, they almost become characters themselves. Do you have an interest in design? (Please make Fantomah leggings a reality.)

TB: Ha! I would love to work in textile design. In a failed attempt to simplify my life, I’ve ended up with a pretty boring wardrobe. I like to use my little avatar as a paper doll, dressing her up in outfits that I wish I owned myself. (Does anyone want to offer me a job?) I also use the clothing as a way to explore difference ways of drawing. To find different ways to use line, play around with abstraction and incorporate more surreal subject matter. I spend so much time working on this one body of work, I haven’t been prioritizing stylistic experimentation. It’s nice to have tiny t-shirt shaped opportunities to paint in ways that might feel separate from my comics practice. 

KD: I’m emailing you while you’re at Printed Matter’s LA Book Fair, what was the show like for you? Could you talk about your new book with Colorama? 

TB: The Art Book Fair was great! Like plenty of other artists I have a lot of anxiety in social situations, so it was stressful for me, but wow—so much of that melted away as the fair went on. It felt amazing to be surrounded by so many talented people, beautiful books, and all of the supporters who make this stuff possible. I was able to spy on a lot of my instragam art crushes. I loved watching how excited people were to buy my work. I got to see them laugh as they flipped through my prints, and I had some fun conversations. A few people even brought me gifts! But the most important and exciting part of the Art Book Fair was finally meeting my publisher, Johanna! She runs Colorama, a publishing house in Berlin. We’ve been communicating through email for months now, and it felt like the best blind date ever. The book she published for me, “D.U.I.I”.  is the riso printed story of one of the most awful experiences I’ve had. It was also one of the most beneficial things that has ever happened to me. I got a DUII in February 2016. I’m an alcoholic, and this was the culmination of years of increasingly toxic behavior.  Court ordered sobriety seems to be the motivation that I needed to change. I’m incredibly thankful that I didn’t hurt anyone. It’s a humiliating story to tell, but I felt a compulsion to draw it all out. I feel so lucky that Colorama decided to work on this project with me. It’s very different from my more popular, colorful work. I’m still dealing with the stressful and expensive results of that experience. Making the book was a huge part of the process of working through it. I tried to lighten it up a bit and make it silly—but yeah, its all true. 

KD: Your work is true to life but veers into the surreal. It feels like it’s in the same vein as work by Julie Doucet, Gabrielle Bell, or Dori Seda. Artists who told confessional stories of humiliation and embarrassment but added fantastical elements for comedic or therapeutic effect. What about writing semi-autobiographical work interests you? Do you see yourself leaning more towards fiction or towards memoir?

TB: I’ve always been drawn to autobiographies, in comics and in literature. I really admire a lot of the artists you mention, and confessional work like theirs is part of what inspired me to make comics to begin with. For years I’ve kept a diary filled with drawings, but its tricky. Really putting yourself out there is scary. The paintings that I post publicly, while totally based on my daily life, are drastically different in tone and content than what you might find in my journals. My comics are embarrassing, funny, absurd, relatable… they can be sad, but I think it’s easy to see how I use humor and fantasy as a way of dodging some of the more raw and dangerous territory that can make autobiography so potent. I’m glad that my drawings make people laugh, I don’t want to take myself too seriously and I’ll always make silly drawings… I guess I just hope that as I continue to make comics, I’ll find a way to add more depth to my practice, whether it’s by working on developing more complex fictional stories, or by being brave enough to express some of the heavier, and maybe less palatable aspects of my life. 

KD: Outside of comics, what artists or media makers are inspiring you right now?

TB: Well, first I’d like to say how incredibly inspired I am by artists like Marie Jacotey and Aidan Koch, whose work transcends the world of comics. I want the space between the comics world and the art world to keep getting smaller and smaller. These two stand out in my mind as artists that are helping to bridge that gap. I’d love to be a part of that transition. I’m always discovering new painters. Some of my favorites are Misaki Kawai, Austin Lee, Mogu Takahashi, Katherine Bernhardt (I’m inspired both by her paintings, and by the gorgeous Morrocan rugs that she sells) and Danny Fox. These people remind me of how powerful one large stand alone image can be. I follow the work of so many illustrators, but my favorites are probably Aart-jan Venema and Monika Forsberg, I’m always trying to figure how they do what they do. Who else… there’s a lot of really interesting stuff happening with ceramics that makes me want to get my hands on some clay. Benjamin Phillips is making great pots, it looks like it could be really fun to work in that style. Clay reminds me of Janie Korn, who makes really fun claymation shorts. Having access to all of these creative minds through social media sheds light on the infinite avenues that I want to explore in the future.

To order D.U.I.I, head to the COLORAMA webstore.

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