PAST MEETS PRESENT: CREATING THE WORLDS OF PIPPA LEE
THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE represented a homecoming for Rebecca Miller, filming in the Connecticut towns of New Milford and Danbury, near where she was raised. "There was something amazing about rediscovering this landscape that I knew so well that I almost took it for granted," she says.  "At the same time, knowing it proved a tremendous advantage. I set the book there and then I set the film there because I knew it so intimately."
Rehearsals were kept to a minimum with Miller having worked out most of the logistics with her cast and crew well in advance of filming. "We rehearsed for a few days before shooting with Alan and Robin, but really very little," says Miller. "I'm not a huge fan of rehearsal," she adds. "I find if you overdo it you can lose that thing you're after;  that organic moment the first time something happens in front of the camera."
Still, the production team had their work ahead of them. Principal photography on THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE began on April 14, 2008. Working with a limited budget, the seven-week shoot would cover some thirty-odd locations, including purpose-built sets on makeshift soundstages created at a former factory site.  "We had an enormous set, but not a real stage," laughs the producer, Lemore Syvan.  "We were basically on top of each other. Between the dressing and the props and the lights and the camera equipment, it was more like a refugee camp."
Given these parameters, Miller and her team were simultaneously presented with a unique artistic challenge - blending past and present on film to create a unified whole. In bringing the worlds of Pippa Lee (and their points of intersection) to life,  the production team needed to create an original, integrated aesthetic for the film itself, with a central character portrayed by two different actors.
"It was a real challenge to keep track of the totality of the movie, which of course is my job," explains Miller. "But in this film it was particularly tricky because you have all these different worlds. The movie has three different time periods in it, representing layers of experience which have to feel that they belong together."
While Robin Wright Penn and Blake Lively never appear together on screen, the two performers, nevertheless, worked together to create a single character. "They're both amazingly subtle, smart actresses in that they both studied each other," Miller explains. "Robin studied Blake, mostly looking at her screen tests for certain mannerisms and expressions. And then Blake studied what Robin was doing. In a sense, they inspired each other."
Equally, production designer Michael Shaw, and director of photography Declan Quinn, forged a partnership behind the camera to visually integrate past and present on screen.
"You attack it from every front," says Shaw, whose numerous design credits include BOYS DON'T CRY and A HOME AT THE END OF THE WORLD. "In this case it was an even greater challenge because the actors in each period were different. We had to be really careful to make it all feel seamless."
In the film, transitions between past and present would be accomplished 'in-camera,' as opposed to relying on post-production effects. Effectively, this meant careful pre-visualization and planning, using scale models to work out the camera's movements between sets which would be built side by side. To move from past to present, the camera would 'simply' drift from one set, representing the present day, to one built right next to it, representing the past.
  "We created three or four transitions like that," says Declan Quinn. "Some of them, a straightforward camera move. Others, where two or three camera moves are cut together. To create that and make it feel not too arty, not too pretentious - that was the goal. We tried to have it look 'matter of fact,' that the audience almost doesn't really know what's going on until suddenly you're in another time zone, another scene, another part of her life."
Nor did Quinn and Shaw simply restrict these intricate transitions to their makeshift soundstage. More often than not, the cinematographer and the designer would bring their set elements with them on location to achieve similar results. "We have one transition in a present-day restaurant, for example, where they're having dinner," explains Shaw. "Pippa looks off, the camera follows her gaze through a curtain, where we brought in half the set for the next scene into that restaurant."
"I have to say that was one of the great joys of this movie," Shaw continues.  "Rebecca really wanted to push the envelope and try new things. All of these effects could have been done in post-production.  But she insisted on doing it this way, so that we would feel something different, something that we don't get to see very often. Of course, it's much harder. It's harder for the actors. It was harder for Declan.  We didn't have a lot of money and we didn't have a lot of time. In that sense, it's really miraculous that it all works as beautifully as it does."
For Quinn, the approach may have been atypical. But it also presented the best way to proceed. "Every film finds its own language," he explains. "In this film, we're taking a look at this person's life where things freely pop back and forth in time. A cliché choice would have been to do it with a visual effect, the 'dissolve back' or 'cut back'. But we wanted to have this sense that it comes out of the blue - suddenly you're back there, a kind of jarring-seamlessness that appealed to us. That seemed the right way to do it."
Miller is quick to credit both Shaw and Quinn for their contributions, giving THE PRIVATE LIVES OF PIPPA LEE not only a sense of unity, but its distinctive look.
  "Michael Shaw was a real lynchpin. There was no limit to his imagination" says the director. "And Declan was a real wizard with light. He painted with colors and gels in a very subtle way, almost like a wash of color throughout the film."
Miller, who herself has a fine arts background, worked closely with Quinn to shape the film's color palette.  Prior to production, she screened several films for Quinn, including HIGH SOCIETY and the English Technicolor movie, BLACK NARCISSUS. "Between some of the color details of HIGH SOCIETY and the more stark color of BLACK NARCISSUS, we found our palette for the lighting, wardrobe and set design," explains Quinn. It also inspired their shooting style to a degree: the sense of the camera always moving very precisely within composed frames.  Says Quinn: "In this film, it made sense to step back to let the story unfold." 
"It's shot quite differently from my other films," agrees Miller, whose previous movies tended to favor hand-held camera techniques. "I really felt that this film was so complex in terms of its structure that if I shot it with a hand-held camera, it would be too difficult to follow. It had to have a classical feel to it."
  "To me, this film is remarkable," says Robin Wright Penn. "Rebecca Miller has a certain faith in her work, in her collaborators, and most importantly in her audience, quietly telling them, 'It's Ok… You're going to get the answer… It will be resolved… It's coming.' As an audience, we get used to having all of our questions answered right away or things revealed in a certain time period. Rebecca has the utmost faith in us, the audience.  The result, I think, is a great film from a great filmmaker."

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