Kate Winslet faced 'terrible' pressure filming Lee's most heartbreaking scene
The Titanic star plays war photographer Lee Miller in the new biopic about the woman who revealed the true extent of the holocaust in the Second World War.
Watch: Kate Winslet opens up about the toughest day on Lee
Kate Winslet may have been getting ready to play model-turned-war photographer Lee Miller for almost eight years, yet nothing could prepare her for filming one of the biopic’s most heartbreaking scenes.
"It was terrible," she tells Yahoo UK. "I've been with this project, developing it, for so long that I almost couldn't believe we were really shooting the cutting of the negative scene. I just couldn't believe it was happening."
The scene in question sees Winslet’s Miller enter the offices of British Vogue to destroy the photographs she took during the Second World War of the atrocities inflicted upon the Jewish people by the Nazis.
British Vogue editor Audrey Withers, played by Oscar-nominee Andrea Riseborough, had been pressured by the British government not to run the images in print as it would affect the mood of the nation, and instead, they were published in US Vogue.
"That day [filming] was particularly intense because we only had that location for two or three days," says Winslet.
"There was a huge responsibility that we felt to get it right. And you know, sometimes, as an actor, we're not saving lives, but when you really immerse yourself in the situation that those characters were in, especially when you're playing real people who had existed, you cross over into this slightly dangerous territory where you almost feel possessed."
Read more: Kate Winslet
Also speaking to Yahoo UK, Riseborough describes the day filming the scene as "singularly the hardest day of work for me ever."
"There aren't words for how horrific…" she says, seemingly almost in tears. "If you're looking at something over and over again, and it’s that difficult to look at it, what was it to live it? What was it to survive it? What was it to not survive it? Horror.
"Audrey was heartbroken by it, and she took it to a grave that the British government decided it was not the right thing to publish all of those images. It broke her in a way. And they were eventually published in American Vogue, and that was a huge, huge win."
Ellen Kuras, making her feature-length directorial debut with Lee, agrees that filming was "very emotional", though has a practical outlook, instead focussing primarily on making sure the set was comfortable enough for both the actors to be emotionally vulnerable.
"That was an important thing to set for these two people," she says. "And much like in a film like Eternal Sunshine [of the Spotless Mind, which Kuras was cinematographer on], which I worked on with Kate, there was a lot of flexibility for the actors to be able to have the freedom to do what drove them forward."
Lee is in cinemas Friday, 13 September, 2024.
