Pablo Larrain started his filmmaking career in his motherland, Chile, and has since made a mark on the industry for revising and supposedly deconstructing the biopic genre with his 2016 releases, Jackie and Neruda. 

The director, known for making thrillingly unorthodox pieces in cinema, will be trying his talents with the much-anticipated movie Spencer, where Kristen Stewart will be playing Princess Diana.

The narrative, this time around, is set to depict the 1991 Christmas holidays when the princess decided to leave Prince Charles. 

For those expecting the movie to be a biopic of the late princess, Larraín has a surprise in store. Unlike the cradle-to-grave approach many filmmakers resort to, the Chilean director will be presenting a refreshing fable to narrate the momentous week in English history. 

'Spencer' and Public Misconceptions  

Aptly, during an interview, Vulture questioned Larraín if he was aware of the public image that painted him out to be someone who was actively deconstructing the biopic genre. 

The director admitted that he had never put in a conscious effort to deconstruct anything. 

"I’m not trying to build my career so people can create any kind of logic or analyze it in any specific way," he added. 

Instead, he claimed that he had never done a biopic.

From his perspective, Neruda, Jackie, and Spencer were movies about people who had landed themselves in circumstances where everything around them had reached a certain threshold.

Everything in their lives was about to explode. 

Pablo Larraín's Movies Are not Biopics

Larraín further expounded that the movies he made were not biopics in the sense that they were not about the study of an entire lifetime. Still, he acknowledged that some people might misunderstand what he was going at. He added, 

Before they go to see a movie like Spencer, they might say, 'We’re going to really understand who this person was.' No! Wrong number! Wrong movie! We don’t do that!

In his words, he affirmed that he and his team were simply trying to work with whatever that person (his subject) was and create a fable out of it. At least, that was what he was looking for. The director was not a hundred percent certain about the whole thing himself. 

Pablo Larraín Imparted His Understanding of Cinema

In the same interaction, the director propounded that the key of cinema was to have an actor or a character in a crisis, and all dramatic theories revolved around that singular idea. 

He explained that movies like Jackie or Spencer inherently worked with the idea that the audience doesn't know what the character wants up until a certain point in the movie. 

This shroud of mystery was not exclusive to the audience, either. According to Larraín, some characters don't know what they want, but when a certain situation arises, they realize the urgency of the crisis. 

As the movie evolves, the characters need to understand their crisis, or so he said. He further imparted that a movie was really about the structure, but there had to be something to make the character explode.