Kate Winslet’s long-gestating Lee Miller biopic has found a director. Deadline reports that Ellen Kuras will step behind the camera for the portrait of the war photographer. Rocket Science is financing and producing the project.
After launching her career as a model in New York, Miller became an artist who collaborated with Picasso and eventually found her way to photography. Her work behind the camera included serving as a correspondent for Vogue, where she published photos documenting the events and effects of WWII, including the London Blitz and concentration camps.
Liz Hannah, who broke out with 2017 Pentagon Papers drama “The Post,” will pen the screenplay. “Longshot,” “All the Bright Places,” and episodes of “Mindhunter” are among her other credits
Winslet has been attached to play Miller since 2015 and is also producing the project.
Kuras’ 2008 doc “The Betrayal” received an Oscar nod. Her other directing credits include “Legion,” “Ozark,” and “Catch 22.” She also has dozens of credits as a cinematographer and is perhaps best known for her work on “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” in which Winslet starred.
“Like Lee, we are living in a time where the truth is up for debate, a time when the promise of political influence is what defines right and wrong,” said Kuras. “Lee Miller had a passion to expose the truth which led her to photographing the brutal realities of the second World War that was publicly down-played and hushed up. This is a film which takes us on a journey that encounters loyalty and betrayal, but ultimately reveals the enigma that Lee was – as someone who buried her own hidden truths within. I am ecstatic to be a part of bringing this story to a contemporary audience.”
Kuras continued, “Since our experience together on ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,’ Kate and I have talked often about collaborating on something of our own. Lee gives us an irresistible opportunity to do that with a script written by Liz Hannah, a brilliant writer whom we admire so much. This is a fortuitous collaboration that will bring forth the magic of Lee – in the power of this character, how she will be embodied, and in the singular perspective of this story, how it is told and who is telling it. Lee Miller was known for the way the world saw her, but now we can show that her greatest contribution came from how she saw the world.”
Winslet added, “Lee Miller was a magnificent explosion of extremes. A woman I admire tremendously and whom I am so thrilled to be playing in this film. An extreme lover, thinker, life liver, cook, Vogue cover girl, war correspondent, icon, mother. And yet history leaves her largely misunderstood. So often viewed through the eyes or lens of a man, she has been portrayed as a wayward, brazen beauty, whose courageous achievements were side lined as a result,” she emphasized. “She was a glorious, life embracing woman. But beneath the glossy surface there lurked deeper stories that she hid from the people she knew and loved. She gave the world an utterly unedited version of the atrocities of war, whilst searching for her own personal resolution.”
A seven-time Oscar nominee, Winslet took home the prize for “The Reader.” She most recently scored a nod in 2016 for “Steve Jobs.” Her upcoming projects include “Ammonite,” a period romance co-starring Saoirse Ronan, and “Mare of Easttown,” an HBO limited series about a detective investigating a local murder.
