Kate Winslet has shared how she and director Ellen Kuras approached filming nude scenes in her upcoming film, a biopic about war photographer Lee Miller.
The Mare of Easttown star, who also stepped into the role of producer for Lee, has teamed up again with Kuras after working together on the 2004 romance flick Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind, where Kuras served as cinematographer.
Lee tells the story of Lee Miller, an American model-turned-photojournalist who documented World War II for Vogue, covering the London Blitz, the liberation of France and visiting the concentration camps of Buchenwald and Dachau.
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She also teamed up with Life photographer David E. Scherman, who famously took Miller's picture in Adolf Hitler's bathtub in his apartment in Munich in 1945.
For the film — an adaptation of 1985 book The Lives of Lee Miller penned by Miller's son, Antony Penrose — Winslet had to shed her clothes to recreate the bathtub shot, as well as other scenes speaking to Miller's positive attitude towards nudity and sex.
The Oscar-winning actress explained she and Kuras had a female gaze-y approach in mind when it came to show the female body, making sure that Lee was never sexualised from a male perspective.
"It was really different actually, largely because we automatically knew that whenever we do show Lee naked or partially clothed, it's always on her terms," Winslet told Metro earlier this month.
Kuras agreed: "Being a woman, obviously I'm very conscious of how women are shown on camera."
Winslet continued: "We never sexualised her, we never view her through a male gaze and it was very important to us that we shot it that way because Lee was somebody that had been viewed through the male gaze in the younger part of her life and if you Google 'Lee Miller' you'll often find 'the former muse', 'Man Ray', 'ex-model', 'ex-Vogue cover girl'."
"That was a small snippet of her life in her 20s and she didn't even like being a model, she only did it for a couple of years, and then she was asked not to do it again because she did an advertisement for sanitary napkins which apparently wasn't the done thing."
Kuras then explained she wanted Winslet to feel comfortable, and strived to "make it feel as though Kate was natural when she took off her top, that she felt natural to sit down and was part of the scene."
One of the ways Kuras managed to put Winslet at ease was to involve her co-star Noémie Merlant, who plays model and surrealist artist Nusch Éluard.
"One of those was asking Noémie to also be part of that," Kuras said. "We understand there's a sort of ambiance we're building for that scene where it's carefree in the 1930s.
"Here are all these surrealists who didn't believe in convention, who would define boundaries and always, not only in their work as painters and photographers, but in the actual way that they live so, they didn't wear their tops if it was hot or sex was free."
Alongside Winslet and Merlant, the star-studded cast of Lee also includes Inception's Marion Cotillard, Birdman's Andrea Riseborough, Brooklyn Nine-Nine's Andy Samberg, The Crown's Josh O'Connor, and Big Little Lies' Alexander Skarsgård.
Lee will release in UK cinemas on September 13.
Topics: Film, Kate Winslet
Stefania Sarrubba