Intersections with reality

Rebecca Miller's latest film, 'The Private Lives of Pippa Lee', is a story of an escape that also bears stark resemblances to events she has encountered.

Rebecca Miller is so clever, and privileged, and talkative and engaging and clear-skinned and glossy-eyed and vaguely expensive looking, not in a designer sense but in a lucky-enough-to-have-inherited-exquisite-bone-structure sort of way, that she is precisely the kind of character you would expect to see popping up in a Woody Allen film. One of the classics, a sister to Hannah, perhaps, or a minor player in Manhattan, over-enthusing about art and identity and worrying about her immortal soul or what to have for dinner.

Or maybe I just think this because the first scene of her latest film, The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, a starry ensemble piece featuring Keanu Reaves, Robin Wright Penn, Winona Ryder, Monica Bellucci, Julianne Moore and Blake Lively, looks and feels like a classic Woody Allen moment: well-educated people making portentous comments about art in an upscale corner of Connecticut.

"Oh good!" she says. "That's exactly what it's supposed to feel like. The idea is that you think that and then it becomes something else entirely and it's like whoah!"

It is an escape narrative, the tale of a middle-aged woman on the run from her life. Pippa (Robin Wright Penn), married to the much older Herb (Alan Arkin), discovers that her husband is having an affair with her best friend (Winona Ryder) and takes off with the next-door neighbour's son, a charismatic midlife failure played by Keanu Reaves. Pippa has a sudden, overwhelming desire to flee not just her present, but also her past, and even herself. What's pertinent, though, is that for the rest of us a Woody Allen film is just a film, whereas for Miller it is more like a slice-of-life, kitchen-sink drama. Her childhood really did feature clever, well-educated people making portentous comments about art in an upscale corner of Connecticut.

She is the daughter of the great American playwright Arthur Miller and the Magnum photographer Inge Morath. Therefore it is no surprise that so much of her work is informed by questions of identity, or the desire to escape the past, and other people's definitions of you - and the impossibility of ever managing to.

"That's right," she says. "I think we all want to believe, especially Americans, that we are free to redefine ourselves, usually by moving to California. Changing it all. But I think, really, all the past is with us. Our parents are with us. Who we are. You can only escape so far. Pippa succeeds to a degree, she moves on to the next stage but it's only to a degree."

Miller is incredibly articulate on the thorny subjects of parent-child relations, and how the self can be subsumed within marriage, but only with regard to her characters. Because when it comes to Rebecca Miller's parent-child relations or her marriage, you get only answers like the above. Because from being Arthur Miller's daughter, she became Daniel Day-Lewis's wife, and her books and her films and her interviews sometimes feel like an almost Darwinian struggle for survival; an attempt not to be suffocated by the people around her.

It is precisely the sort of struggle in which Pippa Lee, her eponymous heroine, is engaged. She is the ultimate artist's wife, one of the characters says in the opening scene; the last of a dying breed, somebody who has given her whole self over to others and who decides that she has to escape.

"I think I've always been an escape artiste. But here I am, deep in family life and totally committed to it. Escape for me is writing. That's where all the negativity and everything goes. I think it would be easy to go mad if you don't have some sort of release. When you have children and live a family life, the demands on you - to subsume what you want or what you are thinking or who you are - are huge. There is this thing that Pippa says about how she has ceased to be the protagonist of her own life. And it is the same with me. When I had a family, I stepped aside and let other people be the centre. I think that's part of being a woman: You can't remember how to be the centre any more."

Miller wrote The Private Lives of Pippa Lee as a novel before deciding to turn it into a film but she says it is not an adaptation. The film is engaging, highbrow and at times dreamlike independent. Its flaws are novelistic: a heavy use of flashback and a voiceover narration. As such it has had mixed reviews.

This is a bit unfair, although there is no doubt that being well connected helped with casting. Reaves said the actors were drawn not just to the material but also "to her, Rebecca Miller ... as a person and as an artiste". And you can see why. I had casually assumed that anyone married to Daniel Day-Lewis might be a bit, well, humourless. But she can really giggle and has a good sense of timing and the first word she uses to describe her parents is "funny".

"My father was a very funny man. There was a sense that sometimes life was a sad joke, sometimes a happy joke. Although I think it was probably quite lonely living alone in the country with these two parents. I think I was quite alone."

She was "virtually" an only child but not quite. Besides two half-siblings from her father's first marriage, Jane and Robert, she also had a brother born four years after her, Daniel. He had Down's syndrome, was placed in an institution at birth, and his existence only came to public attention two years ago with a story in Vanity Fair.

Guilt cuts a great swath through Miller's work, and although she quite rightly resists any autobiographical reading from it, there are persistent themes that bubble up. In The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, we learn that it is Pippa's affair with a much older man which prompts his first wife, Gigi, to kill herself.

A month before Miller was born, her father's previous wife, Marilyn Monroe, took her own life. She laughs out loud when I point this out. "Oh no, no, no, no, no, no."

Was there a legacy of any sense of guilt?

"Oh no. I don't think so. I don't think so. Their marriage was over way before my parents got together."

Morath was sent to photograph Arthur Miller and Marilyn on the set of The Misfits and she is responsible for some of the most defining images of the actress. And when Arthur Miller's marriage to Monroe disintegrated, Morath became his third wife.

It is intriguing how Miller uses her work both to expose and hide herself. She was a secretive child, she says, and as an adult her fiction draws upon the same impulse, that she secretes herself into the unlikeliest of characters. "I think all fiction writers do that. If fiction writers were interested in exposing themselves they'd be memoir writers. But I do enjoy embedding little bits of myself in places you'd never suspect. It's not deliberate, it's just something that happens. But I take great glee in it."

Before The Private Lives of Pippa Lee, there was a short story collection, Personal Velocity, which she also adapted into a film, and which won the Grand Jury prize at Sundance, and The Ballad of Jack and Rose. And before she was a writer and a director, she was, in turn, an artiste, and then an actor (she starred in Regarding Henry with Harrison Ford and Consenting Adults with Kevin Spacey). It wasn't her, though, she says. And she feels enormous relief now that she wasn't more successful. "I was just a bit lost. ... Hopefully now I've figured that out."

It is a measure of Miller's definition of success that her idea of "lost" is landing major roles in two Hollywood films. But then her father wasn't just a famous writer, but a great one, just as her husband isn't merely well known, he's venerated. The couple now live a deeply rural, isolated existence in County Wicklow, Ireland, with summer forays back to New York, where they keep an apartment. In Ireland, at least, it's a properly rural life - there are no Woody Allenesque dinner parties in County Wicklow. "I don't think either of us is so into the art of conversation in that way," she says. And she's stricter with her own children than her parents were with her. "My children do chores," she says. "I think it's good for them."

Perhaps the most engaging thing about Miller is the way that, although she now has all the trappings of bourgeois middle age, she hasn't stopped grappling with any of the big questions. Pippa Lee is still searching and so too is Rebecca Miller, although her answers have popped up in the most unlikely of places. The film tells the story of a woman, Pippa, married to a much older man, Herb. And after Rebecca's mother died, Arthur Miller, at the age of 86, took up with a woman 55 years his junior. Only, Miller wrote her version first. It is a blurring of the divisions between life and art, just not in the way that most people expect.