Growing up in private

Rebecca Miller is sipping tea and lemon in the Clarence when the phone rings. It’s the babysitter trying to negotiate the burglar alarm back in Wicklow. She calls out the numbers, runs through the entire security network, then looks up at me.

“Now you can rob our house if you want to,” she laughs.
Just when you think you have the Day Lewis clan all figured out – stone fox Rebecca multi-tasks while Daniel wears genuine Edwardian clobber and builds a time machine in preparation for a role – they have to go and spoil it all by having a burglar alarm. How mundane. How common.
She returns the phone to her bag with apologies: “We don’t have a nanny at the minute. We don’t need one normally. But anytime we set off to do something like this, it’s total chaos.”
This isn’t the first time I’ve met Ms. Miller but once again I am weirded out by her lack of weirdness. The daughter of playwright Arthur Miller, the wife of Daniel Day Lewis – let’s get that bit out of the way – one feels she ought to be haughty or impossibly grand, instead she giggles like a schoolgirl and cheerfully offers directions when a gang of tourists wander into our suite by mistake.
Lifting the Oscar for his gargantuan performance in There Will Be Blood thanked her from the Academy Awards podium, Him Indoors addressed her as “the enchantingly optimistic, open-minded, beautiful, Rebecca Miller.” He wasn’t kidding. There is something inherently merry about her, a quality that is making itself heard in her latest work, The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee.
The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee is one of the summer’s most curious and unexpected delights. Adapted and directed by Ms. Miller from her own novel, the movie is lighter than most of her previous work. Our heroine Pippa Lee (Robin Wright Penn) is introduced as the perfect trophy wife for a much older publisher (Alan Arkin). While Pippa’s peers, notably Winona Ryder’s Sandra, are comically imploding, Pippa is the perky picture of togetherness.
Ah, but the title suggests, there’s something of a Matryoshka nest about our Stepford heroine. Pippa’s murky past – bondage with boho wildcat, Julianne Moore, dress-up with Dexedrine-addict mommy, Maria Bello, an unforgettable dinner with love rival Monica Bellucci – is already catching up with her when a brooding Keanu Reeves moves in across the way. A torrid, but fun affair beckons.
“The tone of the film is lighter than the book,” says Pippa Lee’s writer-director. “I just wanted for there to really be a sense of relief and release at the end of the film. Forgive yourself. Get on with it. There are scenes in the book that are so dark, that onscreen they just would’ve have been too much. Reading about a young woman crawling across the floor to eat a bowl of pasta like an animal is very different from seeing it. There’s a whole other dark parallel film I could have made but that wasn’t the attitude I wanted to project.”
I’m wondering how that process worked. The film was already in pre-production when The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee was published to laudatory reviews last year. Wasn’t it difficult pulling apart her freshly printed novel for the purposes of screen adaptation?
“I didn’t care,” she says. “A lot of film right now is like filmed theatre. So I enjoyed thinking about it in cinematic terms. Mostly, I just thought: The book exists so now I’m free. I can do whatever I want. When you write, you’re always trying to tell yourself you’re free to do what you want anyway. You wake up and think: no one can touch me. Part of me knows it’s a lie but that‘s okay.”
The film, though sure to pull in fans of Little Miss Sunshine of either gender, is unashamedly a woman’s picture, a neurotic modern addiction to a grand Hollywood canon that extends from Now, Voyager to Terms Of Endearment. Which, happily, is precisely what Ms. Miller was going for.
“The woman’s picture is a genre that needs to come back,” says Ms. Miller. “Now when we think of the term we think of Sex And The City or something very trivial like that. Okay. But these movies are candy floss. The woman’s picture, traditionally, offered the meaty roles. And very often they were funny roles. The screwball comedy, another genre that interests me a lot, another genre that was great for women, has also disappeared.”
Pippa Lee, for all this movie heritage, is a thoroughly contemporary creature. A multi-tasker known among friends as “the perfect artist’s wife”, it would be difficult to ignore the similarities between accommodating Pippa and, say, somebody who happened to be married to one of the world’s great actors. Somebody who has to run home to her children and her chicken after this?
“Ha,” says Ms. Miller. “Just the part about the ‘perfect artist’s wife’. That’s where the resemblance stops. Honestly, Pippa is as far away from me as I have ever written. There are things about her I really admire, precisely because they are nothing to do with me. She has no compulsion to make things outside herself. That’s exotic for me. I know what it’s like to feel compelled all the time to make something. And I don’t think of that as admirable. That’s something you do because you have to do it. If there’s something beautiful about Pippa, it‘s that she lacks that drive.”
The film’s old-school, performance-driven beats have certainly brought out the big-hitters. Last month Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York left us scrambling through the dictionary for the correct collective noun to describe a number of cinema’s grand dames. The Private Lives Of Pippa Lee ups the ante with Robin Wright Penn, Julianne Moore, Winona Ryder, Monica Bellucci, Maria Bello, Blake Lively, and Zoe Kazan. Hell, even the producer – Brad Pitt, anyone? – is a beautiful somebody.
“Ha. Art admires beautiful women,“ notes Ms. Miller. “You don’t see too many ugly Madonnas. I started with Robyn – just knowing that she was the right person – while still trying to get the money together. It was not a done deal. I was talking to a friend of mine – an older, very experienced male director – and he said to me if you have a male protagonist you have a 70 percent better chance of getting your film off the ground. So when you have a female lead and a respected female lead rather than a box office champion, it isn't easy.”
The 46-year-old filmmaker nonetheless remains optimistic about the film’s prospects at the box-office. True, nobody expects an offbeat indie gem to trouble Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen, but the feedback has been excellent and the will might just be there.
“We’ll see what happens,” she says. “If it sinks without trace, it sinks without trace. But I also wonder, having read feedback from some of the women’s magazines, if there isn’t an audience out there. If they can be alerted – and that’s a tough job, there’s so much information buzzing around – then, maybe, a woman’s film about women’s lives will be like – hey, here’s a present, come and open it.”
Feminine vibes have always dominated Rebecca Miller’s oeuvre – the triptych of suffering heroines in Personality Velocity, the daddy-daughter Garden Of Eden in The Ballad Of Jack And Rose, the bad seeds at work in Angela – but this happy ending business, that’s new, isn’t it?
“I know,” she says. “I remember thinking, this is the most upbeat ending I have ever had. Is this wrong of me? So I went through it and, no, everything in the script was a logical progression and I still ending up with my happy ending. So I had to learn to live with it.”

The Secret Lives Of Pippa Lee is released July 10