The Crown's sixth and final season will examine one of the most devastating events in royal history – the death of Diana, Princess of Wales. With the latest instalment slated for a November release, the show has already clarified that the 1997 car crash which took Diana's life, will not be seen. However, The Crown will dramatise the days before and after the collision.
In a new interview with Deadline, Christian Schwochow – the filmmaker responsible for directing the heartbreaking episodes – has revealed that rarely-seen footage was used to recreate Diana's final days.
Speaking to Baz Bamigboye, Christian explained that The Crown was granted access to CCTV footage gathered from the Ritz hotel in Paris, where Diana and her partner, Dodi Fayed, had dined on their final evening.
"We could make our own observations about the physicality between Dodi and Diana," he said. "We couldn't hear anything, but we could see how they touched, how they laughed. And even though we knew she had been crying in the restaurant, we could really observe and see how much they felt at ease and how comfortable she was."
Opening up about the upcoming season, Christian added that there are "so many moments of sadness and grief," in series six.
"I don't know how many times I had to cry behind my monitors because it's so incredibly intense to recreate these moments," he said. "Not only to recreate them, but to create our truth, which is hopefully as truthful as you can get in fiction."
Ahead of The Crown's final season, executive producer Suzanne Mackie has also weighed in on Princess Diana's storyline. During a TV panel at the Edinburgh Festival this year, she promised that the royal's passing had been handled sensitively.
"The show might be big and noisy, but we're not. We're thoughtful people and we're sensitive people," she said. "And so there was a very, very careful, long, long, long conversation about how we do it – and I hope, you know, the audience will judge it in the end, but I think it's been delicately, thoughtfully recreated."
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Previously, Elizabeth Debicki, who portrays Diana, said: "I think it's a really unique challenge as an actor, to portray those days. I really just trusted in Peter's [creator Peter Morgan] emotional blueprint that he created for us to follow. It's his interpretation and I think it made emotional sense to me, so I clung to that. Because, obviously, it's devastating and it's fraught and we can never know."
Khalid Abdalla, who plays Dodi Fayed, added: "It's been the honour of my life to be part of this project, to be part of The Crown, and to play Dodi."