Lee Miller lived many lives. She modeled in New York City in the '20s, pioneered photographic techniques with Man Ray and pushed boundaries with her surrealist artwork in Paris in the '30s, but it's her stint as a war photographer for Vogue in the '40s that's the subject of new biopic Lee.
"We've got an iteration of the script where those things were explored, and there was a version of the script where we started with a much younger Lee," Kate Winslet, who plays Lee, explains to the Inside Total Film podcast and GamesRadar+. "There was even a question of, like, 'Can I get away with playing her that young? Should we cast somebody else?' But it just wouldn't have been possible to reveal that many versions of her life. That's for someone else to do in a 12-part miniseries on HBO, probably somewhere further down the line… We needed to get her to war, because that was the defining time in her life, and ultimately the story that we wanted to tell."
On the frontline
Miller spent much of her time reporting from wartime France and Germany with Life magazine photographer David Scherman, played by Andy Samberg in the movie, and together the pair documented everything from the liberation of Paris to the concentration camps in Dachau and Buchenwald. Despite being denied military accreditation to enter active combat because she was a woman, Lee was also present for the siege of Saint-Malo, where she photographed the first recorded use of Napalm. "It was particularly challenging shooting Saint-Malo because we weren't in France, we were in Croatia. We had to build that street," Winslet explains, referring to the film's action-packed opening scene that sees Lee in the throes of bombardment.
"It was all real, it was all happening right there. The onset effects that you can have, that are safe enough to have, we had," she continues. "I injured myself quite badly shooting those sequences. I hurt my back, which then kind of plagued me for the whole of the rest of the shoot. Rather ridiculously, and ironically, because Lee went through the war with chronic back pain. I was like, 'Great. Here we go. Thanks. Another thing. Thanks.'"
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While Scherman was Miller's partner in a professional capacity, the film also explores her romantic partnership with artist and historian Roland Penrose, played by Alexander Skarsgård in the movie. Penrose stayed on English soil during the war, as both a volunteer air raid warden and to use his artistic skills to work on military camouflage techniques. "They had a beautiful relationship, but also heartbreaking, in a way, because he was struggling with the fact that she had to go off into the war and document it," Skarsgård explains.
"That was such a strong drive as something that she had to do, but he also knew that that would damage her forever, and it would damage their relationship. So, he's torn. He wants to support her but it's hard for him because he also knows that this will affect her and then the whole family in a very significant way. That was interesting to play and explore with Kate, that kind of push and pull."
A family affair
Miller and Penrose's son Antony spearheaded the archiving and exhibition of his late mother's work, and Winslet worked closely with him behind the scenes of the film. "[He] was the first person I approached when I wanted to figure out if I could turn this into a film," she says. "I went to see him at [archive and Miller's former home] Farley's, and I got out of my car, and he was standing waiting for me with a smile on his face. He said, 'I wanted you to play my mother since I saw you in Sense and Sensibility,' and I was like, The pressure! I've really got to do this, it's not just a flippant idea, it's a real thing."
Penrose collaborated particularly heavily with Winslet on the movie's more sensitive moments, including the scene recreating Scherman's iconic photo of Miller posing in Hitler's bathtub in his Munich apartment. Samberg found this scene "thrilling" to shoot. "It felt stressful doing it, not just because working that old-timey flash was almost impossible," he tells us. "But knowing that you're doing a scene about something that has resonated and has become iconic in its way felt really cool and urgent."
Winslet reveals that Penrose's advice was also vital during a later scene, which involves Lee unburdening a traumatic event from her past to her Vogue boss, Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough). "He was there for me the night before I had to shoot the scene when Lee reveals to Audrey what had happened to her when she was a child," she explains.
"That scene had gone through many different rewrites, it was a really hard scene to get right. But I always knew that the night before filming it, I would phone Anthony and say to him, 'Okay, just tell me again. How did you find this out? How was it told to you what happened?' In the end, he and I pretty much constructed that scene, and I wrote it down on a piece of paper, and I learned it, and I went to work and I did it the next day having not really told anybody what I was going to say. Sometimes that does happen as an actor, but it was particularly special and unique for me to have the son of the person I was playing available to talk to at any moment."
If it sounds like Winslet poured her heart and soul into this film, it's because she did: Lee is a passion project that's been in the works for several years, and she also produced the movie. Samberg says he found working with the "hands-on" Oscar-winning actor an "educational" experience. "Like, you know, you watch things and actors are incredible, and you wonder, How is it that they pull this off? And then you work with them, and you see it in person, and you go, Oh, it's because they're just that good.'"
Lee is out now in theaters. For more on what to watch, check out the rest of our Big Screen Spotlight series.
