The Crown Season 6, Part 1 whisks us away from rainy England and drops us into the sun-drenched South of France, where Princess Diana (Elizabeth Debicki) and Dodi Fayed (Khalid Abdalla) are on holiday on his father’s 140-foot yacht, the Jonikal. 

The first few episodes of the groundbreaking series’ final season follow Diana and Dodi’s travels as the couple try to enjoy a serene escape from reality but find themselves relentlessly hounded and photographed by the omnipresent paparazzi. Because those weeks were so thoroughly documented by the tabloids at the time, most people are familiar with certain aspects of the trip, like the stolen kisses and Diana’s bathing suits.

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So how did the show’s creative team accurately and sensitively reimagine Princess Diana’s final weeks in France? Tudum talked to the people involved to find out what went into perfecting those scenes — from Diana kicking her feet on a diving board above the Mediterranean to her final hours in Paris on Aug. 31, 1997.

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Did The Crown really shoot in Saint-Tropez? 

Lush aqua seas and winding, cobbled alleys get a lot of screen time in Season 6’s opening episodes. To create these postcard-worthy moments, the team had to go slightly farther afield than just France and ended up also shooting in Spain. 

“These three episodes included a lot of travelling — it felt like we were shooting a James Bond movie,” Christian Schwochow, who directs Episodes 2, 3, and 4 of Season 6, tells Tudum. “We shot in Barcelona, the mountains outside Barcelona, in Mallorca — in various locations.” Despite the different localities, Schwochow says the crew made it all believable as France in the end. “I really believe once you watch the episodes you can’t tell that it was Spain or that we were filming in so many other places,” he says.

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So, did they really film on a yacht?

When it came to scenes of Diana and Dodi on the yacht, they did indeed film those moments on a boat on the Mediterranean. “It was a very big, fancy boat. It was enormous and kind of outrageous and exactly what the story needed,” says Debicki. “That was pretty extraordinary, to be on a big boat like that with bedrooms the size of people’s apartments. We never really took that for granted.” Production designer, Martin Childs adds that the yacht was almost a character in itself. “The whole schedule was based around the availability of the biggest yacht,” he tells Tudum. 

Like many things in this season of The Crown, the team had to ’90s-ify a lot of interiors — and that included the yacht. Think bulky lamps, varnished teak wood, and particular shades of turquoise and cream. “The yacht obviously exists as a contemporary yacht,” says Alison Harvey, The Crown’s head set decorator. “We just had to bring in more ’90s fabric and more ’90s-flavor pictures and paintings and make it a little less on point in terms of proper super-yacht decor today.”

With the yacht doing most of the heavy lifting, Harvey says the most difficult element of shooting on open water came down to time. “We’d only have a half a day to get in it, dress it, shoot it,” she says. “You’ve got limited access. You’ve got to get everything on, then it sets sail, then you’re done for the day.”

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Who designed Diana’s swimsuits? 

As The Crown has caught up with modern times, there are more and more reference pictures for the team’s costume department to pull from. This is especially true in the case of Princess Diana, as she was the most prolifically snapped of the bunch.

Photos from her summer with Dodi were splashed across the front pages of newspapers for months, which means iconic looks — like her array of ’90s swimwear — needed to be sourced.

“In these episodes, her bathing suits become her evening gowns,” says associate costume designer and head buyer Sidonie Roberts. “We got a lot of those swimsuits made, but some of the very iconic ones that we all remember, the original company [who made them] is called Gottex, and they said that they’d make them for us. The exact people that made them for Diana made them for us.”

Diana’s swimsuits during these episodes do more than just look pretty, though. Over the course of Episodes 1 to 3, Diana is seen in a leopard-print suit, a green and purple set with a sarong, and the fluorescent pink number she’s wearing when the infamous kiss with Dodi is snapped. “There was a real story with a narrative with where we placed the swimming costumes,” says Roberts, noting that Diana’s swimsuits go from demure to more playful as her confidence with Dodi grows.

While some of Diana’s looks at the time were etched in pixels, a lot of her time in France was shrouded in secrecy, meaning Roberts was able to get creative in crafting a version of the off-duty princess. “The moments that I love the most are the imagined Diana moments,” she says. “Like, I might not have seen her in this, but do I believe that it would be in her wardrobe? Yeah.” One of those intrinsic Diana looks came in a scene where Debicki wears classic ’90s striped trousers and a Guy Laroche top in navy and white. “They look like a suit, it looks like some kind of duo, but it’s not,” says Roberts. “I bought them completely separately — and it is so Diana.”

Daniel Escale/Netflix

Daniel Escale/Netflix

How did they create the iconic Diana diving board moment?

The photo of a tanned Diana sitting on the end of a diving board, clad in a blue bathing suit and dangling her feet over the Mediterranean Sea, is probably one of the most well-known images of the princess, after her moment in the “revenge dress.”

“I really love the blue swimsuit that Diana wears when she walks out to the end of the diving board and sits down,” says Debicki. “There was just something about that swimsuit and re-creating that moment that felt very sacred and important, and it was very important we got it right. In a way, it reminded me a little bit of when we shot the revenge dress.”

In terms of creating the set for that famed shot, the crew was delighted to discover the yacht they were using had a diving board built in and ready to go. “We were just lucky that it had that element that we could use,” says Harvey. 

As for Diana’s appearance, head of hair and makeup Cate Hall agrees it “wasn’t a particularly difficult moment to realize — although I think my colleague Debbie [Ormrod], who did Elizabeth’s hair and makeup, would disagree because she obviously worked her guts out and probably nearly fell into the sea doing it!”

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Did The Crown film in Paris? 

Princess Diana’s death in Paris was profoundly awful, so to sensitively reimagine her movements leading up to the crash, the production tried to shoot in the city as much as possible. 

“Filming parts of the episode in Paris added a very special atmosphere to the shooting crew, to us, to the actors,” says Schwochow. “When you go to Paris and then you film those final hours of Dodi and Diana, you feel more responsible and try to be as truthful as possible, to be as dignified and sensitive as possible.” 

However, the fact these scenes were set in 1997 presented some challenges, and the team had to get creative. “We are filming a period piece, so sometimes you go to the actual place, but then it looks very different [from] the period that you’re making a film about,” says Schwochow. “Of course, the magic of filmmaking is that you can turn Barcelona into Paris.”

Despite filming parts in the Catalonian city, Childs says the “thrill” of watching Episode 3 was trying to identify where each scene was filmed. “I couldn't!” he says. “I was just pleased with us for having done it seamlessly.”

Keith Bernstein/Netflix

Did they really film at the Ritz Hotel?

Shortly before Diana’s final car journey with Dodi, the pair had been dining at the Ritz hotel in Paris. In order to re-create those last moments, the production team built a replica of the imperial hotel suite. “We weren’t allowed to film in the real Ritz,” says Harvey. “So it was about seven different locations or built sets on stages that were amalgamated to create that sequence of the Paris Ritz.”

Walking onto the soundstage to shoot those scenes, Debicki was blown away. “It’s just this gray brick building,” she says. “Then you open a door and you just are completely transported. I found the Ritz set extraordinary and very moving.”

When it came to kitting out their suite, Harvey says they stumbled onto some serendipitous thrifting. “We were thinking, ‘How are we going to find this weird white-painted Louis XVI faux furniture?’ And then one of the prop guys walked past a junk shop in South London, and the London Ritz had just had a clear-out!” 

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How did The Crown decide what to include in Diana’s final hours?

While most people know that Diana was in Paris when she died, less is known about her movements leading up to the crash, so the challenge for the creative team lay in building an imagined narrative for those scenes. “The death of Diana, the tragedy of Diana, has been so well documented in so many different forms. It’s part of our mythology and it’s part of that story,” executive producer Stephen Daldry (who also directed episodes in Seasons 1 and 2 and returned to direct the Season 6 finale) tells Tudum. “What’s really interesting for me is that the details of that story are still on the whole unknown. If you ask people what she was doing in Paris or why she was in Paris or details of exactly what was going on in her relationship with Dodi… [no one knows] — and all of that is just fascinating to look at.”

Princess Diana and Paris will always be intrinsically linked because of the tragedy, and when the time came to shoot The Crown’s scenes in the French capital, the city showed up to honor the occasion. “Paris seemed to give itself over entirely to the shoot,” says Olivia Williams, who plays Camilla Parker Bowles in the series. “They had incredible access to buildings and roads, and the lighting department had to light the Eiffel Tower for that part of the shoot. It was a combination of the event being tragic and monumental, but the reality of shooting it is also monumental.”

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