Building Private Lives: Pippa Lee From The Page to The Screen

Rebecca Miller is one of the few that was able to latch onto their original written work and help creatively translate it successfully onto the big screen. With her upcoming film The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, the opportunity came to talk to Mller and some of the cast on the creation and experience of this project. Through the beauty and intrigue of the film, one of the most curious pieces is how everything got put together for the final product.

With the story revolving around a woman who has a happy and humble life and questions if it’s the right path she ended up taking, you wonder how this idea came into fruition. You would expect that this spawned from some sort of life changing experience the writer and director experienced herself, but not quite. She states,” It was a combination of meeting somebody that I hadn’t seen in years who had changed a great deal. She was a really wild girl when I first knew her. Then twenty years later she was a mother with a couple of kids, married and really cleaned up her act in a big way. So then I thought how does that happen?…Then I began to realize that there’s actually quite a lot of those kinds of people.” The simplest experience or get together with any sort of person can have an effect on you. In Miller’s happy circumstance it blossomed into an idea for a novel and then some.

Casting tends to be one of the more difficult points when it comes to the film process. Who you put into the project could make or break it in some ways for your audience, depending on who it is. Miler knows how to pick them, bringing in a stellar cast on board. One of the hardest decisions came in finding the right woman to play the older Pippa Lee who ended up being played by Robin Wright-Penn. Different things attracts a person to any sort of project, which in this case for Robin was,” I didn’t have to play, demonstrate, the exposition of the story. I had all those great actors living the vignettes of the Pippa experience. Why she became who she is, I didn’t have to say it in dialogue.”

The Pippa experience includes a background of her life that at times centers into her twenties. The younger version of Pippa, played by Blake Lively, is different from her present day self as she runs around wild looking for her own form of identity. Once she gets wrapped up in a relationship with writer Herb Lee, played by Alan Arkin, she finds that,”…The relationship is very paternal and that’s what she finds in him.” There is a vast age difference between the two, but as the story plays out it does not come off in the slightest bit as strange. “Even when I’m laying half naked on top of him, she’s being held, she’s being protected, she’s being comforted for the first time. You don’t have to see them, you know they don’t kiss once in the movie and you don’t have to see them in the heat of passion cause it’s not about that, it’s about the protection.”

Writing is not always the thing that saves the film. It takes a certain kind of style, a keen eye for a particular vision that will illustrate through the camera the story even when a shot passes and not a word is said. Then again, it also takes a certain kind of strength and stamina to direct, keeping everything together on a set and making a fine end product. Alan Arkin shares the same viewpoint, saying,”…a good leader in any area…having a very clear vision and be able to communicate it, be able to change it when something more interesting comes along.” Miller created the entire universe and with her writing background you would believe that her strong suit is writing, but there again is where we are proved wrong. “She’s just terrific. She knew exactly what she wanted, she knew how to communicate it and she was also flexible enough to change it when something looked like possibly a better idea than hers.”

Once these pieces are put together and everything starts to become complete, what ends up happening is another cinematic and written victory for Rebecca Miller. Not only for her, but for every person who was in the cast and devoted themselves to become each character she created in her novel to be brought to life gracefully on the big screen.