After Meryl Streep signed on to star in The Devil Wears Prada, the Oscar-winning actress invited director David Frankel, producer Wendy Finerman, and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna to her New York home to discuss the script, which was based on the bestselling novel from Lauren Weisberger.
“We sat with her for a long time, maybe four or five hours, and went through it,” McKenna told V.F. Hollywood on the phone earlier this month. “I don’t think I’ll be surprising anyone when I say she was incredibly smart about the script and incredibly smart about the character. She really stressed the lack of vanity about Miranda—that Miranda was really focused on her work and was under certain pressures, as a woman in that position of power . . . I do think a lot of female bosses struggle with people thinking they’re a bitch, or they’re cold, or they’re difficult.”
In the weeks afterward, Streep transformed herself into the fictional editrix of Runway magazine—carefully choosing character traits for Miranda that the actress had encountered over the years: Clint Eastwood’s soft manner of speaking; Helen Mirren’s haircut; and Mike Nichols’s delivery. By the time McKenna showed up on set for the first time, while the crew was filming a scene inside Priestly’s townhouse, Streep had done a 180 and become the icy villainess whose insults still send shivers down audience’s spines. And even though McKenna had spent hundreds of hours with the character during the writing phase, the screenwriter found herself frightened by the extent of Streep’s conversion.
“She was terrifying,” McKenna recalls of the first time she saw Miranda Priestly in the flesh. “The first scene I saw was when she turns around to glare at Andy from the top of the stairs. I was so terrified by her look alone that I threw my arm out in front of the director like we were in a car wreck. I was so scared.”
During the course of our conversation with McKenna, the screenwriter (27 Dresses, We Bought a Zoo) shared some other fascinating behind-the-scenes details about the beloved comedy. Among them:
The Famous Cerulean Monologue About the Importance of Fashion: Entirely Made Up
Miranda Priestly schools Andy on the importance of fashion during one designer-filled diatribe about historical moments in the industry. But McKenna admits that this particular monologue was not fact-based: “All of the stuff is made up,” she laughed. “It was funny because somebody wrote an article saying, ‘They didn’t show this color on this day.’ It really made me giggly because I couldn’t use real examples because, first of all, we had to pick a color [for Andy’s “lumpy sweater”] that would work onscreen and blue was going to be the best color to use, so we kind of worked from there. I mean, I’m sure there were cerulean collections, but the way we talk about it in the movie, all those references are made up.”
Stanley Tucci’s Character Was Going to Be Nicer Until a Fashion Insider Said that Wasn’t Realistic
