Naomi Watts' right royal challenge in Diana Diana- Trailer Celebrated and adored by millions, she was the Queen of people's hearts, yet the bittersweet story of the last man to truly capture hers has never been told. PT2M14S http://www.smh.com.au/action/externalEmbeddedPlayer?id=d-2spfz 620 349 August 28, 2013 By the time Diana opened in London last month, all the talk was about the weird moment when Naomi Watts inexplicably bailed on an interview with BBC radio. Watts plays the title role in Diana, Oliver Hirschbiegel's film about the Princess of Wales's love affair with Hasnat Khan, a Pakistani heart surgeon, which ended not long before she died in 1997. After eight of the allotted 10 minutes, Watts can be heard on their recording saying suddenly that she had been given the wind-up, sorry; she had to go "to the next thing." A couple of seconds later, there are the resounding footfalls of her retreat. She is able to become what she plays: she is like an athlete. It was baffling because, as the sound engineer who was sitting by her side in Claridge's Hotel is reported to have said later, there was no wind-up signal from anybody. Film journalist Simon Mayo's questions were perfectly amiable. Above all, Naomi Watts is the very soul of niceness. Some years ago a profile piece by the critic David Thomson began: "Who ever heard a bad word about Naomi Watts?" The answer remains "nobody." Because she didn't "storm out," as the tabloids immediately started to say she had. She made her excuses and left. Naomi as Diana in the Panorama interview. The interview, destined for the BBC's best film show, was all regular puff stuff. To play Diana was daunting, but Watts says "the idea of doing a transformation was a good one and she was a fascinating character." On repeated listenings, however, you hear the tightness in Watts's voice, then an audible catch suggesting the possibility of tears. The interview was recorded almost two weeks before the film's release, but perhaps she already realised that, for the first time since her career took flight with Mulholland Drive in 2001, she was sitting on a stinker. A little over a year ago, I visited the set of Diana. The atmosphere was cheerfully optimistic; director Oliver Hirschbiegel, who was then best known for his extraordinary film about Hitler's final days in his Berlin bunker, Downfall, said he was the happiest he had ever been while filming. Langleybury Mansion, the stately home standing in for Kensington Palace, seemed to have awoken from a slide into dereliction; there was much talk of the hundred costumes, the false nose that took an hour a day to attach and the €6 million ($8.6 million) worth of jewellery lent by Chopard. Both Hirschbiegel and Watts said they had dreams about Diana. Hirschbiegel dreamed she tried to give him a sports car as a present. "I just felt I was spending time with her," Watts said diffidently. And one particular time I felt permission was granted - but that doesn't sound right on paper, so I won't go there. [This is] as close as I've ever wanted to come to a character. Naomi as Diana with a landmine victim. Ebullient as the mood was, Watts was nervous about the role. It took her a long time to decide to do it. "Obviously she is one of the most famous, if not the most famous woman of my time and an awful lot of pressure comes with that," she said. You want to get it right, of course ... but you are just dreading people saying 'she looks nothing like Diana!', you know. Why her and not somebody else? Everybody is going to say that, or has already. Having made the decision to do it, however, she was giving it her all. I'm trying not to think about it and to concentrate on the work. I'm sure I'll go back to the fear part when the film is ready to be shown. I think anyone with a creative mind fears judgment. But Watts has always been drawn to scary choices, apparently thriving on the difficult and demanding. She is at her remarkable best in extremis, whether emotionally or physically. In 21 Grams, she was sensational as a woman who lost her family in a hit-and-run accident and has descended into despair and alcohol. In her recent Oscar-nominated performance in The Impossible, she spends most of the film struggling through churning debris after the tsunami in Thailand. Alejandro Inarritu, who directed her in 21 Grams, was astounded by her emotional reserves. "She has the beautiful face of an innocent angel one moment, and the next moment she will have the face of the devil," he told The Observer. It's like she has all these layers that she peels away. She's like a wild orchid. It is also true that she is nervous before every role. Hesitating before taking a role, she says, "is part of my process." Perhaps this is because she knows, better than most, how easily you can simply be passed over. The story of Watts' painfully slow road to success is well known: how she came to Hollywood from Australia in 1992 after being noticed in John Duigan's teen drama Flirting, how she languished in bit parts and terrible telemovies for over a decade, packing her bags to go home several times but always deciding to stay. She was already 32 when David Lynch cast her - on the basis of her photograph - in the mysterious Mulholland Drive, in which she played the dual role of a bubbly aspiring actress and a washed-up version of the same character obsessing over another woman. It was a fearless, complex performance and she has been showered with praise ever since, but that doesn't stop her worrying. When David O. Russell cast her in a comic role as a pin-up in I Heart Huckabees, she kept calling him to ask if he wouldn't rather have someone else. "I was absolutely terrified," she remembered later. " Can I do this? What if people have enjoyed what I've done and now they see this and hate me and I've ruined it all?' Perhaps she feels she really has ruined it all now. Reviews of Diana began to come out about a week after that curtailed BBC interview. Critics and the Twitterverse alike panned it mercilessly. It was "slow and terribly, terribly dull" (Daily Mail), "atrocious and intrusive" (The Times), "excruciatingly well-intentioned, reverential and sentimental" (The Guardian) and looked "like a TV mid-week matinee" (The Mirror). Many of those critics tempered their view of this "car crash" by saying that Watts had given it her all, that nobody could have delivered awful lines like "is it true a heart can break in two?" any better than she had, that she had mastered the late Princess of Wales's tilting head, breathiness and intense gaze with uncanny exactitude, that she was - to quote the Telegraph - "a swan in a turkey." That would have been cold comfort; all any actor would hear in that sentence is the turkey's gobble. Indeed, the one Mayo question Watts answered with more asperity than nervousness was his observation that while the film was very much on Diana's side, it did show her ringing around the paparazzi to set up a "candid" shot with Hasnat Khan. "Right, well, I think if I was living with that level of scrutiny on a constant and daily basis I would want to find a way to control it," she responded. It's heartbreaking to watch that; it would make for a very isolating existence. This is the cri-de-coeur of anyone who discovers the dark side of stardom. Watts laughed incredulously on the set when it was suggested that, as an actress, she shared something with the woman described by her brother at her funeral as "the most hunted person of the modern age." A few days after the BBC glitch put her in the news, however, she was snapped out shopping with actor Liev Schreiber - her partner since they starred together in John Curran's The Painted Veil - and their two children, Watts's beautiful face half-hidden behind huge sunglasses. It was, for that moment, as if she really were Diana. Hirschbiegel says that from the very first moment he started thinking about Diana - and he admits freely that he wasn't at all interested in her before he decided to take on the film - he saw her as an actress. She was the most complex character I've had to deal with. When I started looking at the footage, I quickly came to the solution to understanding the character was an an old-fashioned movie star. When you watch that Panorama program you are watching a very accomplished performer who is, at the same time, totally honest. I very much like Diana. I feel very close to her. Naomi Watts is "the most powerfully gifted actress alive" in his opinion. Sometimes on set, despite the fact that she is so much shorter than the real Diana, her mastery of the princess's determined walk and that gaze from below the fringe made him feel as if he were watching a ghost. She is also, he says with a chuckle, "a member of the tribe! I won't say more. That almost certainly means that, in the face of a critical storm, Watts really will worry that things are ruined, even if she does have another clutch of films - including one with Inarritu - coming out over the next few months. And nothing will be ruined because, as Thomson said, nobody says anything unpleasant about Naomi Watts. Diana is now screening. So how accurate is the romance between Princess Diana and heart surgeon Hasnat Khan in Diana? Before its release in Britain, Dr Khan said he would not see the film because it was based on "hypotheses and gossip." He later called parts of it a betrayal of the couple's relationship. Still stinging from a backlash against the film in Britain, producer Robert Bernstein has defended the portrayal of the 18-month relationship, which was largely kept private and ended only weeks before Princess Diana's death in 1997. "The film was thoroughly researched," Bernstein insists from Britain. The notion that it was based on fabrication and gossip is inaccurate. As well as doing their own research and reading all the Princess Diana biographies, the filmmakers drew on Kate Snell's 2001 book Diana: Her Last Love, itself based on 18 months of research. Snell only met Khan once or twice, but came to know his family in Pakistan. "What we were looking to do in the film was actually look at the hard facts," says Bernstein, who has also producedNowhere Boy, Becoming Jane and Wuthering Heights. But clearly the nature of the relationship and the scenes we depict in the film are based on artistic interpretation - of course they are, because we weren't there. He says the goal of the film - to show how the relationship transformed an aimless Diana after her separation from Charles into a humanitarian crusading against landmines on the world stage - was lost in extreme tabloid negativity in Britain. It clearly was a relationship between two people who wanted to heal people and had very good intentions. The actual facts within the story - such as how they met via [self-described healer] Oonagh Toffolo, whose husband was being treated by Dr Khan, to Diana going to Pakistan ostensibly to visit the Imran Khan cancer hospital then going off to meet the family incognito - all that's absolutely true. She did want to marry him, she did meet his family on numerous occasions. They came to have tea at Kensington Palace and she was in constant contact with the family even literally in the last two weeks of her life. Bernstein says Diana's 1996 visit to Sydney's Victor Chang Cardiac Research Institute, which is shown in the film, was part of her relationship with the Chang-trained Khan. So did Diana really try to make him jealous by seeing Dodi Al Fayed, as the film suggests? "That's open to interpretation," says Bernstein. If you look at some of what her close friends said at the inquest, it appears there was some form of consensus that there was an element of that. But, on the other hand, I'm sure there were many other things going on in her mind at the same time. Garry Maddox