A tale of two Dianas
Muriel’s Wedding changed Toni Collette’s life for ever. Now she’s on her way to Kensington… Kensington Palace, that is
A woman steals away from a darkened path, hurries to her car and accelerates away. In seconds, another car is chasing her at high speed. In a hunt, with both cars taking bends at dangerous speeds, the young woman desperate to escape, the pursuer just as determined to draw level, to explode a flash In her face and become, for once in his life, the victor. This scene has echoed in the memory of many people since the death of the Princess of Wales. For decades the routine of the paparazzi has seemed an unpleasant, but inevitable, aspect of celebrity. The Princess’s death changed that – and created a peculiar problem for the makers of the Australian film Diana and Me. Director David Parker began shooting Diana and Me last year; and with just such a car chase, the film now appears eerily prophetic in its depiction of the Princess as prey. The film traces the triangle between Diana, her fans and the paparazzi. Toni Collette plays a woman from Wollongong, named, coincidentally, Diana Spencer, who wins a competition to meet the Princess, her heroine. With fiance in tow, she heads for London and a garden party with royalty. With hundreds waiting for the Princess, the paparazzi jostle for position. Events take a clumsy turn for our Di Spencer and she finds herself bundled out of the proceedings, with a photographer, Rob, played by British actor Dominic West. Nevertheless, Collette’s Diana has a marvellous time seeing the sights and hoping to glimpse the Princess – until she sees Rob in full flight, chasing Kylie Minogue with an aggressive pack of photographers that almost knocks over the slight singer. Diana’s disgust prompts Rob to reassess his job.
Collette also has had lenses trained on her, though to a lesser degree, after her enormously popular performance in Muriel’s Wedding and roles in Lillian’s Story, Cosi and Emma. Although she is much photographed, her physical stature still comes as a surprise. Visiting Melbourne for the release of Diana and Me, she cuts a striking figure with close-cropped hair and wearing a tight sheath dress. At 25, Collette defies definition. Audiences can’t always articulate where her appeal lies, but she appears to make them warm to her none the less. Gauche in Muriel’s Wedding, mild and innocent in Emma, she broke the mould in Cosi by playing a depressed drug addict. “Toni combines star quality with the audience totally identifying with her. Yet she doesnt conform to the conventional Australian screen heroine,” says Alan Finney, one of Diana’s executive producers. With her animated face and vivacity, she would probably be described as a character actor in the United States, a tag that would shortchange her, he says. Instead, she makes a role believable by projecting vulnerability. “People feel. ‘I know someone like that, but I’ve never met anyone like Michelle Pfeiffer’ Collette’s composure and intelligence are perhaps born out of growing up fast in the public eye. In conversation, she is more guarded than one would expect, weighing her words carefully and frowning slightly when a question appears to touch on her personal life.
The thoughtful, mature manner seems quite different from the skittish girl she plays in Muriel’s Wedding and, at times, in Diana and Me. While she sees Diana as intelligent, the character still has her daffy moments. “Diana has this exuberance and this quality that enables her to draw bizarre episodes to her,” says Collette. “Like the fact that she wins this competition out of the blue and actually gets this opportunity to meet the woman that she believes she has a cosmic link with? It is now almost impossible to see the film in isolation from the vigorous public debate about privacy that followed the Princess’s death. But even before the tragedy, the script posed quite a complex reading of the overzealous fan. Soon after Collette’s character befriends the “pap” Rob, she joins him in the chase. His quarry is also hers. and she is soon trespassing, shinnying up a tree in someone’s garden to catch a glimpse of the Princess. Rub, who hates heights, passes up his camera and asks her to snap away. The symbolism is obvious, but still powerful – fan and paparazzo are in it together, almost interchangeable. ‘She enters the world of the paparazzi, she discovers how ugly it can be and how celebrities can be intruded upon, how they can feel violated, how it can get very messy, and also how she’s actually contributing to the whole affair by buying the magazines and believing the crap that’s printed in them.” says Collette.
In Diana and Me, we glimpse a world where paparazzi trade their booty around the clock in a seedy cafe. “No Phil, you can’t see her nipples!” shouts an unlucky photographer down the phone, hawking his photos of Emma Thompson jogging. Says Collette: “It’s about Rob’s redemption, too – they mirror each other and learn through each other what’s morally right.” The script, by television writer Elizabeth Coleman, appealed to Parker, a cinematographer making his directorial debut, and a former press photographer who had snapped the Princess on a tour of Australia. He was determined to cast Collette as Diana, and old “pap” habits died hard. “I remember at the opening of Cosi I was stalking her and talking about this film!” he says. Parker regards her “openness” as a strength. “She has a spirit and a generosity that really shows on her face. Before events overtook Diana, it began as a cheerfully picaresque tale of two lovable Aussies in London, looking just slightly askance at the intrusions of the paparazzi. “It’s interesting, because this is a romantic comedy, its light and it’s fun, but itss underlying message has suddenly been magnified,” says Collette. Parker planned an August release for his story of two Dianas, but this was delayed because of his ill-health. Then Diana and Dodi al-Fayed entered a Paris tunnel at high speed. As the filmmakers heard news of the fatal car crash, they grappled with delaying the film’s release, changing it or scrapping it, fearing they would be accused of exploiting the Princess’s memory. They decided to shoot new scenes, and Collette was called back to work, a year after the original filming. “The film has not changed essentially.” she says. “It has just been top and tailed to make it a bit more reverent, and now it’s told in retrospect”. The film now opens with a changed, more subdued Diana Spencer paying her respects at the gates of Kensington Palace. Collette has largely avoided the relentless scrutiny others endure. “I’ve never been hounded, or stalked, or encroached upon, and I call only imagine how awful it must be. I actually berate myself for reading magazines like that. Not having been inside all that for a while I know to take it all with a grain of salt… but it’s really bizarre how prophetic the film is; so much of what’s raised and looked at in the story of the film is what eventually killed that woman.”
The international acclaim for Muriel’s Wedding changed the life of the girl most Australians remembered only as the sweet kid in Spootswood, straight out of NIDA. However, Collette appears to have a deeply rooted ability to cope to keep her head. “There was a point where I questioned whether I wanted to act any more, because it was quite overwhelming for a while. But my love for what I do is not going to be manipulated by this part of it that I don’t find too enjoyable.” This year she completed The Boys, in part inspired by the Anita Cabby murder; an American film, Clockuwwiters, with Friends’ Lisa Kudrow; and a British movie, The James Gang. She is particularly enthusiastic about Velvet Goidmine, set in the glom-rock period of the ’70s, and centred on a rock star called Maxwell Demon. Co-starring Ewan McGregor and Collette’s off-screen boyfriend Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, the film also has a thread of Oscar Wilde running through it, she says, “les about art and artifice and getting lost in your own creation, and what is the importance of art.”
Diana and Me is screening at city and suburban cinemas.