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| Kate Winslet in Lee |
In Lee, cinematographer and director Ellen Kuras explores a short yet significant chapter in the life of American model, photographer and war correspondent Lee Miller. Beginning in the 1930s sunlit France, Kuras and screenwriters Liz Hannah, Marion Hume and John Collee, focus on Miller's (Kate Winslet) experiences as a correspondent in Europe during World War II. She would capture some of the strongest images of the conflict, including the horrors of the concentration camps, and she would even pose for a photo in Hitler's private bathtub.
As a cinematographer, Kuras has shot Michel Gondry's Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind and Be Kind Rewind, Alan Rickman's directorial feature A Little Chaos and Sam Mendes' Away We Go, as well as the Fran Lebowitz documentary Public Speaking for Martin Scorsese, and the miniseries Pretend It's A City, featuring Lebowitz and Scorsese. Her work as a director includes the documentary The Betrayal - Nerakhoon, about a secret air war by the US during the Vietnam War, that forces a family to flee Laos, and episodic dramas including Ozark, Legion and Inventing Anna.
In conversation with Eye For Film, Kuras discussed her interest in the image, looking at the past through the lens of the present, and the fragility of truth.
Paul Risker: When did you first become aware of Lee Miller, and how did you come to direct her biopic?
Ellen Kuras: I've known about Lee Miller since my university days when I took a photography class at the Rhode Island School of design. Having been heavily into academics at the time, it was an eye-opener. Looking through the viewfinder changed the world for me because it was different, and I'd never thought about it in that way. So, I immediately took to looking at the image and its meaning and I became interested in how that meaning is created in either a film or an image. And why do people receive images differently than others?
I knew about Lee Miller's work because she was very much involved in a surrealist point of view, and it was literally experimenting with meaning - photography or objects as metaphor. It was fun, and Lee obviously had a cheeky sense of humour. I guess it was the influence of being in the UK for quite a long time. She was a dedicated ex-patriot who lived in Paris and London.
[…] Winslet and I have been friends since we worked together on Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind. She was Clementine, and I was behind the camera as a cinematographer. When Kate bought a table that was owned by the Penrose family, suddenly, a whole other world was opened up because those surrealists I knew about had been sitting at that table: Pablo Picasso, Paul Éluard and Leonora Carrington, who is little known, but whose surrealist work is beautiful.
When Kate started working on the script, I didn't know she was doing it. She raised the question of why a film had never been made about Lee Miller. Anthony Penrose, Lee's son, knew that Kate was a person that could play his mother, and he said [to Kate], "I've always dreamed of you playing my mother." So, that's when the film started to get on its way, so to speak, and it wasn't until five years later that Kate came to me with the script.
She knew I had been directing a lot, I had already directed a feature documentary, and she said, "I would love to work with you on this film, what do you think about directing it?" That's what started the next phase of the project where we needed to coordinate or restructure the script, so it could fit within a film, and it wouldn't just be a biopic that tried to trace Lee's whole life. Actually, it was very specific and traced the emotional trajectory of her life.
PR: From my limited point of view, for each character Winslet plays, her face becomes a different, albeit familiar landscape. Having directed and photographed Winslet, what is it about her as an actress that makes her performances so authentically captivating?
EK: Yes, working with Kate in different ways behind the camera, one is able to see the depth of her range as an actor. She is someone who is able to incorporate the character, by taking on the attributes and the physicality of the character herself. And you see Kate shaping the character as she goes along. It's a discovery for her as well, and the gift she has within is that she's a very prepared actor, but when she comes to set, the world is in her mind's eye.
The thing I love about Kate as an actor is that we don't feel her watching herself. She's very much in the world of that character and in her mind's eye. There's not an awareness that we see on camera. However, Kate can go from being Lee Miller with an American accent, to, as soon as you call "Cut," being Kate Winslett, speaking in an English accent.
So, she has that ability to step from one to the other and that's a sign of her brilliance as an actor. She has this ability to make us believe and part of that is because she's very disciplined. She knows all of her lines, and she knows everyone else's lines. And the other thing about the physicality part of it that's remarkable is, when she was playing Lee Miller in her seventies, I'd already called "Cut," when she got up from the chair, and the way she walked over to her holding tent was as Lee Miller, not as Kate Winslet.
PR: The film explores the complacency and lack of understanding about what was happening in Germany before the start of World War II, and the horrific crimes against humanity perpetrated by the Nazis during the conflict. When France is liberated, Lee's editor talks about it being a big celebration, but we know the darkest revelations are still to come. The film effectively shows how the truth was slowly revealed. This is central to a question we still ask: how did people not know the extent of the horror?
EK: That's one of the most important aspects of the film, in terms of its historical perspective and seeing the past through the lens of the present. It is true, we come into the film in the late Thirties. The First World War is over, and people are unsuspecting of what is happening or what's around the corner, and that was intended. They're surrealist [characters] too, and it's like life is free and there's free sex all around.
Even though they are talking about Hitler, people are unsuspecting of what's about to come. At that point, he was Chancellor, and he was doing things we're very familiar with. He was saying he's for the people, and yet we see what happened in 1939 when he marched into Poland and killed most of the intelligentsia. At that point, people still didn't realise the rage and that he would devastate most of Europe.
Here we are on the cusp of true political upheaval in the world on all fronts, in Europe again and obviously in the US with the upcoming elections. Here we have an authoritarian person who says he's going to abolish elections and is going to make himself king, pretty much. We need to pay attention to that in the US, as well as in the rest of the world.
I thought it was particularly interesting that in Poland, when we showed the film, a lot of the questions had to do with exactly that. This film serves as a reminder to us of what could possibly happen, and that we have to pay attention to history. It points to the importance of journalism and how important journalists are as witnesses to what's happening - the empirical evidence of the truth.
Increasingly, Palestinian journalists as well as their families are being targeted. Many journalists around the world are being killed to silence them and Lee Miller understood that. It's the reason why it was so important for her to put all of her time and energy, even at the risk of her own marriage, to find out what happened to those people that were put on those trains.
PR: If I were to say why this film is important, it would be that it's a reminder of the importance of accumulating first-hand testimony for future generations, but also recognising the role women have played in our collective story, even if it's not fully acknowledged still.
EK: History is told by the people that can tell it. Lee Miller contributed significantly to telling us what happened around the fringes of the war, and that's history. Not only did she take photographs, but she wrote about it. That's the thing we forget, and you're right, the patriarchy being in power has determined which stories are told and which aren't. And that's why getting a film made about a woman is harder than a story about a man.
Kate has told stories about looking for the initial financing, where she was patronised: "Why would we want to tell this story about a woman?" We're very aware of the importance of witnesses to history and who is telling the story, and now, it's more important. We look back to World War II, and we have empirical evidence of the Holocaust - not only photographs, but there are also many films that have been made. So, for all the Holocaust deniers who would say that it didn't happen, there is empirical evidence.
However, now with AI, this is where the telling of the truth gets very cloudy and that's why we need many people out there who are witnesses and are able to say "That's not true," and "That's AI recreation." This is where, in our contemporary world, we need to ask questions, and we need to pay attention.
Lee was released theatrically in the US on 27 September, and in the UK on 13 September.
