THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE
About The Production
“To be perfectly honest, I’ve had enough of being an enigma. I want to be known.”
-- Pippa Lee
FROM PAGE TO SCREEN: WRITING THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE
THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE is the story of one woman’s journey of self-discovery. For author and filmmaker, Rebecca Miller, that journey started nearly ten years ago.
“Pippa Lee began as a novel,” explains Miller, whose book was published to critical acclaim by Canongate in the UK last year. By turns humorous and emotionally exacting, it follows the inner-journey of an aging suburban housewife confronting the buried memories of her past while maintaining a tenuous grip on the seemingly idyllic world she has built for herself as an adult.
“It’s about a woman who you think you know when you meet her,” says Miller of her enigmatic protagonist. “Of course, you find out that she’s had a very different life than you’d ever expect, that she has a past. Gradually, you come to understand her, know her, and maybe even love her through understanding that past.”
The genesis of Miller’s novel came in 2000, following a reunion with a friend she hadn’t seen in twenty years, an irrepressible young woman who had since become a responsible wife and mother. “I started thinking about how that happens, how somebody’s identity mutates in that way, and whether or not you really ever change,” says Miller. “That was the fundamental seed of it.”
Miller, the daughter of playwright Arthur Miller, would first go on to adapt the Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winner PERSONAL VELOCITY (based on her short story collection of the same name) and write and direct THE BALLAD OF JACK AND ROSE starring her husband, Daniel Day-Lewis, before turning her attention back to her unconventional heroine, Pippa Lee, in 2005. While finishing the final rewrites on the novel, she began working on the film’s screenplay.
She describes the screenwriting process as a “reinvention” of her novel, rather than an adaptation in the purest sense. “There was so much in the well that I wanted to keep going,” says Miller, who continued working on the script through multiple drafts for just over a year. “I wanted to see it in a different dimension. I wanted to give it to actors and see what they could do with it.”
“For me, it’s just a deeper and deeper search into the same terrain,” she explains. “The form of it is not the same. In some small ways, the plot isn’t the same. Even the characters in ways are not the same because of the actors’ interpretations. From the beginning, I knew that I didn’t need to be enslaved to the book because I’d already written it. I had the freedom to explore. ”
