How many times have you watched a film about a photographer where the actor clearly has no idea how to use a camera? It's an unforgivable mistake, and one Kate Winslet was sure not to make in her new film, Lee, about the photojournalist Lee Miller.
Kate Winslet, who produced the film in addition to starring in it, hired a historian to create a functioning replica of Lee Miller’s own Rolleiflex, one that Winslet used to actually take photos on set while filming scenes. Winslet tells Ayesha Siddiqi on 60 Minutes Overtime, “It couldn't just be a prop, it needed to feel like an extension of my arms. I had to be confident and comfortable with it, and in order to do that I had to know what I was doing."
But her prep work went well beyond learning how to meter, cock the shutter, and take a photo. She learned how to breathe and hold a camera as any wartime photographer shooting with a Rolleiflex at her chest would. “The body becomes a tripod,” Winslet says, “so Lee would hold her breath and then she’d wind on.” But in post-production, sound designers added a breathing sound to give a more “lifelike” soundscape, causing Winslet to fiercely object to their choice. “I said, ‘No guys, I’m deliberately not breathing, I’m holding my breath to keep the camera still,’” explaining how, as a photographer, if you move, the camera moves, and then the focus could change or motion blur could occur. “Anyone who's worked with a Rolleiflex camera might watch that film and they would know if I’m [heavily breathing], that's not a photograph that is ever going to work... It was my job to be as authentically like Lee as I could,” Winslet says.
Lee Miller once posed for Life Magazine’s David E. Scherman while bathing in Hitler’s bathtub on the eve of Hitler’s death. That is the kind of personality Lee Miller was. It’s hard to think of a better choice for Miller’s honest bravery and pioneering spirit than Kate Winslet. But it’s doubly encouraging to see that in the quest to highlight the life of such an extraordinary woman, who shunned the world of fashion for that of photojournalism, she chose authenticity over glamour.
