STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
In an early scene of the movie, "Lee," Kate Winslet's character shows up in the office of a fashion magazine.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LEE")
KATE WINSLET: (As Lee Miller) I hear you're the woman to see about a job.
ANDREA RISEBOROUGH: (As Audrey Withers) Audrey Withers. And yes, I am.
INSKEEP: The magazine is British Vogue in the 1930s, and one of its editors is unimpressed.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LEE")
SAMUEL BARNETT: (As Cecil Beaton) We don't hire older models.
WINSLET: (As Lee Miller) I'm not a model anymore. I'd rather take a picture than be one.
INSKEEP: Having aged out of modeling, she now works a camera. The star of "Titanic" and many movies since did some work behind the camera herself for this one. Winslet produced as well as starred in this film, immersing herself in facts about the real-life photographer Lee Miller.
WINSLET: I had my hands in and on everything to do with her life.
INSKEEP: An exceptional life in a time when women's roles were more constrained. The onetime New York fashion model transitioned to photography a little before World War II. She then turned her lens from fashion to the conflict. She followed Allied troops into France and Germany and was barred from many combat zones, which she turned to her advantage.
WINSLET: What set her apart as a female photographer was that she wasn't photographing the soldiers and the gunfire and the bloodshed. She was able to peek into the corners and see into the cracks and look at the women and the children and the voiceless victims who were left behind.
INSKEEP: Miller captured the wounded in hospitals and people in ruined neighborhoods and even trains full of bodies from the Holocaust. Discovering one of Hitler's residences at the end of the war, she even posed for a photo in Hitler's bathtub. After the war, she didn't talk much about it, and even her son came to know her mainly as an excessive drinker until she died in 1977.
WINSLET: And he went into the attic, and he opened up the cardboard boxes, and he found 60,000 negatives and prints of all of his mother's work and what she had done and what she had written about during the war. And it was only then that he was able to begin piecing together not only who she truly was but how he had had such a fractured relationship with her.
INSKEEP: He helped to establish an archive for her negatives, her camera, her writings and even her clothes, all of which eventually became reference material for Kate Winslet in studying the character. On-screen, Kate Winslet, again and again, looks down at the camera, which hangs from her neck.
WINSLET: Her camera, the Rolleiflex, does not sit in front of the face. The viewfinder does not come up to the eye. It's a camera that sits somewhere between the heart and the stomach. And actually, you look down into the image. And what that enabled Lee to do that was utterly unique and very specific to the way in which she worked - she could look up and meet someone's gaze and really see into them and truly be in the situation with that person.
INSKEEP: The film audience, of course, gazes at Winslet, sometimes dodging bullets, sometimes spattered with mud, often holding a cigarette, taking some uppers and washing them down with a drink.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LEE")
WINSLET: (As Lee Miller) I was good at drinking, having sex and taking pictures, and I did all three as much as I could.
INSKEEP: How did you go about constructing that particular voice, that accent and just that way of speaking?
WINSLET: It's such an interesting question because, of course, I'm no stranger to doing American dialects.
INSKEEP: Yeah.
WINSLET: I did my first American dialect when I was 21 on "Titanic," but I had two voice samples of Lee. One of them was a public radio recording. But public radio in those days, it was all rehearsed. Everything was scripted. (Impersonating Lee Miller) And so there's a way in which she talks, which is really quite like that, and it sounds almost arch and slightly unbelievable.
I thought, well, I can't speak like that. She's faking it.
INSKEEP: (Laughter).
WINSLET: She's definitely faking it. And so I had to find her voice. I was very fortunate that there is a private family recording of Lee making a recording, a wireless recording to send to her father, who was in America at the time. And it is a much gruffer, more rumbly, (impersonating Lee Miller) well, hello, Daddy. It's me, Lee. Can you hear the sound of that whiskey pouring into my glass?
And I could immediately hear the life in her voice, the cigarettes and the alcohol and the strain and the experience.
INSKEEP: This is the thing that I wanted to tell you about the voice. She sounded like a smoker to me, even short of breath from time to time, struggling to get out the last syllable.
WINSLET: Well, it's good that you noticed that because that's what I was going for.
(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "LEE")
WINSLET: (As Lee Miller) Even when I wanted to look away, I knew I couldn't. There are different kinds of wounds, not just the ones you can see.
INSKEEP: How many years have you been producing?
WINSLET: So I've been executive producing since just before "Mare Of Easttown." And executive producing is a completely different role to actual producing. So an executive producer is typically somebody who sits behind the main producer and gives meaningful collaborative consultation. However, a producer is the person typically who will find the idea, nurture the idea, find the writers, start developing the script with that person. When the script is in a good enough state, start going out for financing. Oh, wow, maybe you get the financing, and at that point, you then reach out to cast members, start putting together the crew, actually building the film and holding it together. And you never ever step away. And this was the first time I have been a producer.
INSKEEP: OK. So first, I have to tell you that as you're talking, you're telling me that the producer is the person who does the real work, and the producer of this radio segment is near me in the studio and has been nodding so forth. So I think he agrees with you.
WINSLET: OK, that's good (laughter). Fantastic.
INSKEEP: But second, given that you're Kate Winslet and you could have people for that, what made you want to do that?
WINSLET: Sometimes as a woman, it's just better if you do things yourself. And I will tell you something else. I do feel a sense of responsibility to the sisterhood within the filmmaking community. You know, we are seeing a huge upswell in female producers, writers, directors. I couldn't have done this 20 years ago. And when I first started out in my 20s, people would often say to me, oh, wow, so you're going to form your own production company and start doing your own stuff. And I would think, well, no, that sounds like a terrible idea. I wouldn't know how to begin to do that job. It's not something you can just automatically do, and it certainly isn't something that I would ever do by half. I'm just not that person. I'm rather like Lee Miller in that way, I have to tell you.
INSKEEP: You needed to be ready. And I wonder also if you needed to be ready for this particular story, 'cause it's a story of someone who's been through a few chapters in her life, has seen a few things.
WINSLET: That's right. I certainly couldn't have faked it and played her any younger.
INSKEEP: Kate Winslet, it's a pleasure talking with you. Thank you so much.
WINSLET: Thank you so much.
INSKEEP: Her new movie is called "Lee." It's in theaters tomorrow.
(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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