More often than not, a producer credit can be a vanity play for an actor — a shortcut to getting a project greenlit or burnishing someone’s ego.
But then there’s Kate Winslet.
She spent nearly a decade fighting to bring her passion project, the compelling biopic Lee, to the screen. The film, which chronicles a decade in the life of the model-turned-war correspondent Lee Miller, recently earned Winslet a Golden Globe nomination (she was also nominated for HBO’s The Regime) to add to her already impressive collection. “To be nominated for a Golden Globe for this particular film is huge because I know that it keeps the conversation about the film alive, and that means that hopefully people more people will see it and learn about who Lee Miller was,” Winslet tells Gold Derby in our exclusive video interview (watch above).
“So many people don’t know who she is, have never heard of her, and yet will probably have looked at images that she took that will have informed them in some way about what happened during World War II,” she says. “And they won’t know that those photographs were taken by a woman who was not some young wannabe. She was a woman who went to war in order to document the truth and to bear witness.”
Sparked by an exhibit of her work and a chance purchase of a table that happened to be owned by her, Winslet started digging more into Miller’s life back in 2015. She was shocked to learn that despite all of Miller’s accomplishments, she was mostly always described in relationship to the men around her as “ex-muse of Man Ray” or “former Vogue cover girl.”
Winslet’s task was set: “It just made me so crazy, I’ve got to change this,” she says.
“She was a woman of the most magnificent courage and resilience, and I had never come across anyone quite like that, that level of bravery. And I knew that if I didn’t tell her story, it may never be told, and that just didn’t sit right with me.”
She reached out to Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, as the keeper of his mother’s archive, and after painstakingly earning his trust, embarked on what would turn out to a years-long process of developing the script, bankrolling the film herself when there wasn’t any money, negotiating with reluctant, blatantly sexist investors and financiers, working all of her connections from every project she’s ever done. As the film’s director, for example, she hand-picked Ellen Duras, who’d been the cinematographer on Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
“It was a tough process, I’m not going to lie,” says Winslet. “And I can’t believe that I don’t have to keep trying to make the film because it was such a big part of my life. Oh my god, I’ve actually done it!”
Winslet also had her work cut out of her once the cameras started rolling — portraying a woman who was battling inner demons (she’s been abused as a child) while also coming face-to-face with some very real horrors. She learned how to use the “very difficult” Rolleiflex camera so that she could understand the “utter feeling of emotional nakedness, vulnerability, exposure that she would have felt herself in order to stand and really face everything that she was photographing,” she explains.
“I had to take great care with how I played her because I wanted to honor who she really was. And that wasn’t just about the camera. It was about her life, the life she had lived, a life hard won, a life truly one to be upheld and remembered and honored in this way. There was a duty I felt not to get it wrong, and to be like Lee, really. Not to look away in the way that she had not looked away, and to stay steady.”
