From crafting matter-of-fact sex scenes with Kate Winslet, to bathing Alexander Skarsgård in good light, to giving Andy Samberg a serious role, Lee director Ellen Kuras shares lessons in life, war and art.
Additional reporting by Ella Kemp.
There was not a lot of joking around. It was like, ‘Let’s pretend we are experiencing one of the worst things that happened in human history’.
—Andy Samberg“Hers was a unique eye,” says Lee director Ellen Kuras of the groundbreaking WWII photojournalist, Vogue model and her surrealist muse Lee Miller. “One could argue it’s a female gaze, but I tend to think of it as a humanist gaze; someone who really looked at people and cared about people and believed in justice. That’s what drove her.”
Having first met Kuras while co-starring in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kate Winslet (with her producer hat on) tapped the cinematographer to direct Lee. Winslet stars as Miller, whose war work produced images that are deeply horrific and creatively startling. In one of her boldest photographs, Miller takes a bath in Hitler’s apartment, her Dachau-stained boots dirtying the dictator’s bath mat.
Lee had its world premiere at TIFF last September in the thick of the writers’ and actors’ strikes, meaning Kuras had to front the publicity without her star. The film went on ice for a year, finally arriving in cinemas globally this month against a backdrop of a world in deeper turmoil, ing several other pictures about women war correspondents already on the circuit (more on those soon). This could be awkward timing, but really it’s part and parcel of the way women’s lives weft and warp, unraveling and refashioning, always in conversation with one another.
Digging into friendship, truth and subversion, Kuras and her cast share lessons in life, war and art.
“Lee is one of the most underrated women in history, and this film truly shows how important her work is. Everyone needs to see this,” insists Crease in their Letterboxd review. In of great lives that deserve the biopic treatment, Miller’s has been long ripe for the telling. But, like many women’s stories, Lee spent ages in development—not only because of the belief required from investors but also because ordinary life doesn’t stop for a movie.
As producer Winslet tells Letterboxd at the recent London premiere, “It’s harder and it takes longer because we’re putting those things together in the middle of also raising a family and being at home. My youngest was one when I first started putting the story together and he’s turning eleven this year, which is insane. We just have to keep going and literally not give up.”
The extent of Miller’s own life wasn’t fully known until after her death in the late 1970s, when her family discovered extraordinary, extensive archives in her attic (she’d long claimed there was nothing left). These became the books Lee Miller’s War, which Kuras bought and gifted to Winslet two decades ago, and The Lives of Lee Miller, a biography lovingly authored by the artist’s only child, Antony Penrose.
-0-640-0-0.jpg?k=6d36c7d20e)
Miller’s many lives cannot fit into one film. Born in 1907, she left her Poughkeepsie birthplace for New York City, where she was saved from an oncoming car by publishing magnate Condé Nast, who clocked her stunning face and put her on the cover of Vogue. She went to Paris and invented solarization photography with her lover, Man Ray, then wedded an Egyptian businessman and spent the mid-1930s photographing life in his country.
Miller bailed from that marriage into the embrace of friends, including Vogue fashion editor Solange d’Ayen (Marion Cotillard), artist Pablo Picasso (Enrique Arce) and artist-model-muse Nusch Éluard (Noémie Merlant). It’s here that we catch up with them all in Lee, immersed in blissful, bright, topless summer days of pre-WWII . One thing the film concentrates satisfyingly on is the everlasting importance of friendships, and their full place in Miller’s life alongside her loves.
“Not only was she a great photographer, but she was an amazing writer and had this gift for being able to see and talk about the bigger picture in very concrete ,” Kuras agrees. “At a certain point, she says, ‘What is liberty? It’s the small things. It’s friends getting together.’ Those are very profound observations, because they’re universal. At the core of everything is love and people, and that’s how we understand why she’s driven to witness the truth— at a huge personal cost to her later on.”
“We had two extraordinary cinematographers on set, so we were lit beautifully, I can tell you that,” says Alexander Skarsgård, who plays the painter Roland Penrose, Miller’s second husband. Penrose’s artworks inform the hazy beauty in the prewar scenes, Kuras reveals. “He was playing with light and form and color and space in a way that the surrealists also initiated, ripping apart the conventions of the day and saying, ‘We are free. We can do whatever we want. We can see the world however we want.’ It’s very much about how they were very unsuspecting of what was going to happen.”
Soon, war consumes Europe and it’s as if color is draining out of life itself on the screen. “I had this idea in the film that we would start with a lot of color and joy and freedom, and then move more and more into a darker place,” Kuras explains. It’s not just a post-production color grade; she worked with her whole team to progressively bleaken the production’s design. “The default nowadays is to just make everything monochromatic and to give it a ‘look’, but we wanted the look to be the meaning as well.”
The “we” includes picking Mean Streets in her four favorites). More recently, Kuras has been directing shows including Inventing Anna. So, how does she select her own lensman?
“Everybody was asking me, ‘Who are you going to get to shoot this?’” Kuras laughs. “I knew from the very beginning, Paweł. He shot a film that a lot of people haven’t seen, Katyn, which was very, very intense and very dark. I knew he had a great depth of sensitivity, and I also knew he was a very kind person, because I asked all the people who had worked with him. I knew that he could bring it to a poetic level, at the same time, make it real.”
“To the casting agents who hired Andy Samberg—you deserve a Nobel Peace Prize and a hug,” writes Grace of the unusual, highly effective choice to put the comedic actor alongside Winslet. “When he cries, you cry,” agrees Lulu. Now deserving of a place on Letterboxd lists like Mr Northrip’s “Comedians blow my mind with their dramatic chops”, The Lonely Island member and Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping actor is a quiet surprise as Life magazine correspondent David E. “Davy” Scherman, with whom Miller teamed up on desperately dangerous assignments.
They were two of the first of the press to enter the Nazi concentration camps of Dachau and Buchenwald, moments after the surviving prisoners were liberated. The pair documented the horrors within, collaborated on Miller’s famous bathtub image, and remained friends for life, sharing the invisible scars of what they’d seen in the camps.
“There was not a lot of joking around,” Samberg confirms to Letterboxd. “We did a lot of scenes that are harrowing and awful, based on true events, so we would try to do them justice by reflecting how horrible they were. And it was horrible to be a part of that. I’m glad we did it, but it wasn’t like goofing around with a bunch of comedians. It was like, ‘Let’s pretend we are experiencing one of the worst things that happened in human history.’”
When I suggest to Kuras that she may well have paved Samberg’s path to awards season, she smiles. “Oh, he is brilliant. You see his range and his pathos and his humanity. I really feel like he embodied Davy Scherman in so many ways. And if you talk to Antony Penrose, he would agree.”
“This current wave of feminist reevaluation of art history is sorely needed,” writes Camilla in a five-star review of Lee. “Women have been hidden figures, their contributions have been greatly diminished or omitted from history books altogether. I’m so glad that women like Lee Miller are finally able to be properly recognised for the contributions they have made to history.”
Miller’s move behind the camera was a necessity. “She was the top model of her day. Not only was she beautiful, but you could see her verve come out,” says Kuras, detailing how Lee’s modeling career came to a crashing halt thanks to sexism: “There was a beautiful photograph of her in this long silky gown that was used without permission in a women’s sanitary napkins ad. No one wanted to use her, because she was d with women’s products.”
Miller, however, had fantastic in her Vogue editor Audrey Withers (played in Lee by Andrea Riseborough), who encouraged the photographer to “turn her camera away from the battle scenes, to go and shoot what’s behind the scenes: people who were affected by the war, people who were part of the war effort. The two of them were determined to let women know what was going on, and to show women what other women were doing.”
This perspective, along with her own cinematography background, informed the way Kuras positioned Winslet in the frame. “I talked to Kate about the idea of being able to be with Lee rather than looking at Lee. Lee’s been so objectified throughout her early life, and we both talked about that a lot. We thought, well, we want to bring the camera around—not only over her shoulder but on the side—so we can get into her mind’s eye.”
When Miller and Penrose first get together in the film, they close the door on the audience—in spite of the surrealists’ summer stripteases, there’s no voyeurism for us when things get intimate. But later, a scene of domestic hotness unfolds when Lee provides her body as a canvas for Roland’s mission to create a blend of camouflage paint for the army. A functional part of the military industrial complex becomes supremely sexy, in a subversion that feels utterly of the female gaze.
“Kate and I talked a lot about the fact that even when you have sex scenes, you don’t have to sexualize the scene, that we can see it as a matter-of-fact,” says Kuras. “We don’t have to objectify it or glorify it in a way. It just is.”
“I’ve never taken a literal approach in any of the films that I’ve done as a cinematographer. And so for me, in the scene where she’s being painted by Roland and he’s using her as an object of camouflage, she’s not objectified. It’s a very sexy scene, without it being sexualized.”
“Lee was a forward-thinker, and the kind of things that she would think and say have very much to do with what’s happening today,” says Kuras. As it happens, Miller’s name had already been introduced to new generations this year in Alex Garland’s Civil War, a violent, fictional imagining of America’s future as seen by a trio of press correspondents. We learn that the film’s hardened war photographer, played by Kirsten Dunst, was named after the Lee who came before her.
“Strange that two photography-based war films would come out in the same year,” Jen notes, but it’s more uncanny than strange; movies made years and countries apart often arrive in the same cinematic time and space, speaking collectively to a moment. There’s another: Never Look Away, a documentary by Xena: Warrior Princess actress Lucy Lawless, tells of the punky New Zealand camerawoman Margaret Moth, who covered many battles for CNN and took a bullet to the jaw in Sarajevo.
Alongside these films, the world watches in real time as visual journalists like Bisan Owda, Justyna Mielnikiewicz and Julia Kochetova document on social media the impact of war in Gaza, in Ukraine, with delicate attention to human detail. (Kochetova even replicated Miller’s famous bathtub photograph.)
A year on from Lee’s world premiere, Kuras reflects, “This story as we’ve told it is also very resonant for what’s happening today. I think people are really going to connect with the people in the film who are on the cusp of World War Two, and the feelings that they have of not knowing and not seeing what was around the corner.”
Indeed, what’s most notable in the two collaborations between Kuras and Winslet, released twenty years apart, is how the first (Eternal Sunshine) is desperate to erase happy memories, while the second (Lee) demands that we never, ever forget the horrific truth. May we also never forget those brave witnesses like Miller and Scherman, who help us see in order to help us to believe.
‘Lee’ is now in cinemas in North America, the UK and Ireland, and opening in more regions in the coming months.
