Kate Winslet on why she fought to get the movie ‘Lee’ made

More often than not, a producer credit can be a vanity game for an actor — a shortcut to getting a project greenlit or to buff someone’s ego.

But then there is Kate Winslet.

She spent almost a decade struggling to bring her passion project, the compelling biography Leeto the screen. The film, which chronicles a decade in the life of model-turned-war correspondent Lee Miller, recently earned Winslet a Golden Globe nomination (she was also nominated for HBO’s regime) to add to her already impressive collection. “To be nominated for a Golden Globe for this particular film is huge because I know it keeps the conversation about the film alive and it means people will hopefully see it and learn about who Lee Miller was,” says Winslet to the Gold Derby in our exclusive video interview (see above).

“So many people don’t know who she is, have never heard of her, and yet they will probably have looked at pictures she took that will have informed them in some way about what happened during World War II,” she says. “And they don’t want to know that those photos were taken by a woman who wasn’t a young wannabe. She was a woman who went to war to document the truth and bear witness.”

Sparked by an exhibition of her work and a serendipitous purchase of a table that happened to be owned by her, Winslet began digging more into Miller’s life back in 2015. She was shocked to learn that despite all of Miller’s accomplishments, she almost always described in relation to the men around her as “ex-muse of Man Ray” or “former Vogue cover girl.”

Winslet’s task was set: “It just drove me so crazy, I have to change this,” she says.

“She was a woman of the most magnificent courage and resilience, and I had never come across anyone like that, that level of bravery. And I knew that if I didn’t tell her story, it might never be told, and that just suited me not.”

She reached out to Miller’s son, Antony Penrose, as custodian of his mother’s archive, and after carefully earning his trust, began what would prove to be a years-long process of developing the script, herself financing the movie when there was no money, negotiating with reluctant, blatantly sexist investors and financiers, working with all her connections from every project she’s ever done. As the film’s director, she handpicked, for example, Ellen Duras, who had been a cinematographer on The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

“It was a tough process, I’m not going to lie,” says Winslet. “And I can’t believe I’m not going to keep trying to make the movie because it was such a big part of my life. Oh my god, I actually did!”

Winslet also had her work cut out for her when the cameras started rolling – portraying a woman battling inner demons (she was abused as a child) while also coming face to face with some very real horrors. She learned to use the “very difficult” Rolleiflex camera so she could understand “the complete sense of emotional nakedness, vulnerability, exposure that she herself would have felt to stand and really see everything she was photographing,” she explains . .

“I had to be very careful how I played her because I wanted to honor who she really was. And it wasn’t just about the camera. It was about her life, the life she had lived, a hard-won life , a life that really should be upheld and remembered and honored in this way. I felt a duty not to be wrong, and to be like Lee, not to look away in the way she had not looked away, and to hold on in peace.”