How To Watch "The Princess," HBO Documentary About Princess Diana
“The Princess,” a new HBO documentary, shows how the media covered, and contributed to, the rise of Princess Diana.
Starting in the fall of 1980, 19-year-old Lady Diana Spencer was trailed by photographers, hovering around her flat in London and her nanny job. At the time, she had just started seeing Prince Charles.
From that point on, her played out in footage and headlines. Diana and Charles got married on July 29, 1981, in a ceremony witnessed by 750 million, per the BBC. Her life was the subject of fascination and remains that way, 25 years after her death.
Speaking to TODAY while premiering an exclusive preview from the film, director Ed Perkins and filmmaker Simon Chinn hope the archive-only format leads to conversations not only about Diana, but about viewers' relationships to celebrity royalty and the media.
“Our hope is that this approach allows us to hopefully turn the camera back onto all of ourselves and ask us some difficult questions about our relationship to Diana,” Perkins explained in an exclusive for TODAY. “But also more broadly, our relationship to the monarchy, our celebrity relationship.”
Here's where to watch or stream 'The Princess'
"The Princess" will air on HBO and be available to stream on HBO Max.
The movie will premiere near the 25th anniversary of her death
The documentary will be available on Saturday, Aug. 13, 2022, just weeks before the 25th anniversary of Diana's tragic death. She died of injuries sustained after a car accident in Paris on Aug. 31, 1997.
Filmmakers say the documentary will show Diana's life in a 'different way'
The the story of Diana has been told many times before — in movie and documentary form, in Netflix show form, in book form, in musical form and beyond.
With "The Princess," Perkins and Chinn wanted to take a new approach to a familiar story — using footage that has been available all along.
“The challenge for us was to do something that formerly was just entirely different, that kind of enabled you, audiences, to come at the story in a different way,” Chinn said.
The use of newsreels from the 1980s and ’90s shows, in an immediate way, how the late royal interacted with the media and her supporters until her death in 1997.
“(It’s) not only to kind of create a sort of time machine where we take audiences back into all of our past, but it really is to allow the film to kind of act as a bit of a mirror,” Perkins added. “This film is about all of us. It’s about what Diana meant to us. It’s about the way we reacted, as we did in the aftermath of her death.
