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“We Needed to Steer the Film to a Place Where It Wasn’t a Biopic”: Cinematographer Turned Director Ellen Kuras on Her Kate Winslet-Starring Lee
Kate Winslet in Lee For years filmmakers have tried to tell Lee Miller’s story. Famous first as a model for artists like Man Ray, then as a fashion photographer, Miller became a war correspondent during World War II. She captured some of the most iconic images of her time, from views of Hitler’s life to the horrors of concentration camps.
For her feature debut as a director, Ellen Kuras was determined not to fall into standard biopic conventions. Starting from a book of Miller’s photographs, she collaborated with star and producer Kate Winslet and writers Marian Hume, Liz Hannah, and John Collee to find a dramatic framework for Miller’s life, one that often ignores biographical details to concentrate on her day-to-day struggles as an artist and wife.
Kuras, an award-winning cinematographer, began her career in documentaries, which she continues to shoot. Her first fiction feature, Tom Kalin’s Swoon, led to work with directors like Rebecca Miller, Mary Harron, Spike Lee, and Martin Scorsese. Kuras received an Academy Award nomination for her directing debut, the documentary The Betrayal (Nerakhoon).
Lee is currently in release from Roadside Attractions and Vertical .
Filmmaker: How has your background as a cinematographer affected your directing?
Ellen Kuras: I think that background has been invaluable to directing, because as a cinematographer, I always approach a project visually with the question: what is the intention of the story? What does it mean? That’s so the cinematography is not arbitrary. It’s not just pretty pictures or interesting shots. It’s more about how the camera can help tell the story, how to create visual imagery that become metaphors of the story.
Filmmaker: What about the reverse. Did directing alter the way you shoot?
Kuras: My cinematography has remained pretty consistent. When I was shooting pretty exclusively, I would think about editing, about how the scene is being covered, about pacing and tone. Because I actually didn’t start out as a cinematographer — I started out as a filmmaker, someone who wanted to make films. I ended up on the camera because when people saw what I shot on my own project they wanted me to shoot for them. The first documentary I shot won 25 awards internationally, including the Student Academy Award. Swoon was my first feature as DP, back in 1990. I won the best cinematography award at Sundance. That was the beginning of a long career.
Filmmaker: So your strategy as a filmmaker is basically the same, whether you’re a cinematographer or a director?
Kuras: Yes. I mean, it depends on the project, obviously. But I approach the story with, what do we want to say? What’s the intention of the scene? How can we use the camera to best tell that story? How can we use the blocking of the actors to best tell the story? How can we use sound as metaphor? You know, all this is pretty self-evident. We start out Lee with her heartbeat, which gives us a sense of what the point of view is. We’re not watching her go through her actions, we’re with her going through the action.
Filmmaker: Lee isn’t a typical biopic, it doesn’t tell viewers the life she led, but it shows who she was as a person.
Kuras: Kate and I talked about that extensively with Marian Hume and Liz Hannah, two of the writers. We needed to steer the film to a place where it wasn’t a biopic, which is why we chose the World War II period. We didn’t want the cliched, biopic version of Lee Miller and Man Ray, or Lee Miller as a broken woman after the war. That wasn’t the story we wanted to tell. We wanted the emotional trajectory, the journey she took and the price she paid for searching for the truth.
Filmmaker: At the same time, you show scenes from life that you don’t find in most biopics, which tend to give one definition for a character. Here you’re showing how she tries to find work, how she struggles with day-to-day details. What real life is for most people.
Kuras: Finding that balance is really tricky. We were really fortunate to have a great script. Liz Hannah created a structure, a framing device, that really helps us to be present in a contemporary way, but at the same time be able to be present in the past.
Filmmaker: There’s a moment in Lee when she’s in a hotel in Germany talking on the phone to her editor Audrey Withers (Andrea Riseborough) back in London. The point is they can’t connect, Lee can’t find a way to communicate the enormity of the tragedy she is experiencing.
Kuras: Visually the question becomes how do you show that they’re in different worlds. So one looks in one screen direction, the other in the opposite direction. One is shot with a much wider lens, so we’re in the room with her. The other we’re much closer, more intimate, so we can see what she’s going through emotionally.
Filmmaker: So as a director, how do you get Kate Winslet to that emotional point?
Kuras: I create a space in which she can feel safe. Create an atmosphere so that when she is on set she can be in character. Then we can make adjustments from there. I mean, she’s a brilliant actress. She spent a lot of time working on becoming Lee Miller, long hours at Farley Farm with Tony Penrose talking about his mother. When Tony saw the film for the first time, he said it like he was living with his mother again.
Filmmaker: Larry Sher said that one thing he didn’t anticipate about directing was that shooting was maybe 5% of the project, and directing is like the 95% that comes before.
Kuras: There’s so much prep involved. Finding the locations, casting, putting together the team. Developing the script. As a cinematographer you come in for the prep, you shoot the film, and then you come in for the post at the very end. Directing is a step-by-step process all the way through from the very beginning to the very end.
Filmmaker: Phedon Papamichael said directing helped him design shots in a simpler style. He knows what’s going to happen in the editing, he understands what the director’s going through on the set. He doesn’t want to design something that gets you trapped in a shot that doesn’t help the movie.
Kuras: Sometimes I would say to Paweł [Edelman, Lee’s cinematographer], “I don’t think we’ll ever use that part, so let’s not take the time to set up the track and everything.” He and I were very much on the same page about taking it simply. Looking at how we can create an approach to shooting that’s not just master shot / shot /reaction shot. Which I hate, and which I never do anyway. Phedon is absolutely right in that as a director you’re constantly thinking about all of the elements that come together. It’s a different perspective. It’s like you have to step to a different place.
Filmmaker: Since you are a DP, when you’re directing it’s probably easier for you to communicate with your DP.
Kuras: Very much so. Because of the language. I think it’s harder as a director who used to be a cinematographer to know the language of how to talk to the actors. As DPs, we were never privy to that conversation. You’re usually trying to get the set ready and lit and get the cameras set for actors to come on. But you’re not part of those conversations that happen off set. I never went to film school, really. I took classes here and there, but I didn’t receive a classical film school education. So I didn’t learn the language of speaking with the actors about performance, about how to get something that I’m looking for and that kind of thing.
Filmmaker: Maybe that’s what I was trying to get to in my earlier question. Now that you understand more about dealing with actors, does that make you shoot in a different way?
Kuras: No, I don’t think it’s changed the way I shoot. When I was a DP, I was very much involved with blocking. I was never the type to say, “Okay, let’s see the blocking after they figure it out.” I was always involved in the blocking from the very start with the director. Making suggestions early on about where people could stand to help tell the story. A question that a lot of people never ask themselves is, “What is the point of view of the camera?” Right? What’s the point of view of the film and how does the camera embody that? I know a lot of DPs never ask that question. It’s crazy because that’s the central question of how you approach the story.
That was definitely something that came up in Lee. I said, “I don’t want to look at her. I want to be with her. I want to hear her breathe. I want to hear her heartbeat. I want to be next to her. I want to feel it visually. That’s something that we kept in mind all the way through.
Filmmaker: So the viewer is with Lee? That’s the point of view?
Kuras: I’m not looking at her and objectifying her. I’m not long lensing it, just looking at her go through the motions. I feel like we’re really engaged with her. We are listening with her. You know, we’re Audrey listening to that story on the steps. We’re there.
Filmmaker: This is something you worked out with Kate Winslet?
Kuras: Very much so. There were times where I would take Kate onto the set early on, and I would say, “This is where I think this should happen. What do you think you might want to do?” It’s a conversation. That’s what filmmaking is, a collaboration. Yesterday in the Q&A for Paweł’s screening of The Pianist, a young woman asked us both a question about how we resolved our fights. I said, “It’s not a fight, we are having a conversation.”
Filmmaker: Did Paweł agree with you?
Kuras: He laughed. He said, “No, not a fight, it was like we were listening to gypsy music together.”
I’m sure every director is different. We were talking about that last night, a circle of the best cinematographers in the world. Larry and Phedon were there, Paweł, Erik Messerschmidt, Rodrigo Prieto. I will say this—it took me a long time to stop obsessing about blocking. To take myself out of it. This is while the shot is occurring. It took me two days on the first episodic thing I did. I had to tell myself to just stop obsessing. You need to think with a different mind, you have to retrain yourself.
When you look at The Pianist, there are so many details. It’s so complex. Allan Starski, who was the production designer, did a brilliant job. But I know Alan was there on the set obsessing about all those details. That’s how they get crossed off.
As a director, you’re looking at everything, not only the performance, but everything. That’s where it’s challenging. It’s a learning process. Every single film is a process, even for filmmakers who have been doing it for years.
