A life more ordinary

Despite the creative bloodline flowing through her, novelist and director Rebecca Miller spends her downtime as a perfectly content Wicklow mum. As for turning her own best-selling novel into a star-studded film, Miller decided to lighten things up a little, she tells DONALD CLARKE

SMILING stoically, Rebecca Miller buries her head in a bouquet of tissues and generates an impressive honking noise. “Sorry. I have a bit of a cold,” she says.

We should not, I suppose, be surprised that Miller – actor, novelist, director, visual artist – remains positive and energetic. After all, during the production of her third film, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, she managed to continue shooting despite having pneumonia.

“I never missed a day of work,” she says perkily. “They had to keep waking me up. But I kept going. Anyway, nobody offered me a day off.”

There can, when referring to an artist, be no more patronising compliment than "refreshingly normal". But Rebecca Miller, whose The Private Lives of Pippa Leeopens today, does, despite her distinguished heritage and peculiar upbringing, seem pleasantly unaffected and unpretentious. She is undoubtedly sick to death of hearing that she is the daughter of Arthur Miller and the wife of Daniel Day Lewis. Yet she has allowed journalists another opportunity to point up that first attachment in her latest film.

Based on her own popular novel, The Private Lives of Pippa Leestars Robin Wright Penn as the younger wife of a publisher, played by Alan Arkin. For much of the film, Pippa Lee sits patiently at the dinner table surrounded by senior intellectuals. This is how I imagine Miller's own adolescence.

“I might have been more comfortable around people who weren’t ‘real people’,” she laughs. “I wasn’t really afraid of many people because of the people I met when I was little. But I did maybe think that people who weren’t artists were more ‘real’.”

Miller studied fine arts at college and then spent time as an actor, before having a crack at film directing. By 2008, when The Private Lives of Pippa Leebecame an unexpected best-seller, she had already established a respectable standing as an independent film-maker. Personal Velocity, an adaptation of her first book, and The Ballad of Jack and Rose, a strange, quasi-Oedipal fable, both have many fans.

It is easy to assume that, with her background, she was destined to become some sort of artist. Then again, plenty of playwrights have seen their children become perfectly happy firemen, quantity surveyors or station-masters.

“I think I wanted to be an air stewardess for a while,” she muses. “There were moments when I wanted to be a nurse, but that would have been a disaster. Really, I was only ever any good at making something out of nothing, which I guess is what an artist does.”

Was she nudged in that direction? Not only was her father a great playwright, but her mother, Inge Morath, was a very distinguished photographer. Those are some creative genes she has there.

“Maybe. But somebody once said to me: ‘You are like one of those people who are trained to be athletes from a young age.’ It’s really nothing to do with fame or being anybody’s daughter. It’s more that we were like a circus family, and if you are a from a circus family you end up on the trapeze.”

Still, the route to her current distinction took in some serious curves and bumpy byways. As far back as 1995, when she was in her early 30s, she directed a film called Angela. The picture got decent reviews but nobody went to see it, so Miller decided to concentrate on prose. Personal Velocity, a collection of stories each identified by a woman’s name, gathered a significant following and, to her surprise, she was persuaded to turn it into a low-budget film.

“That film did well at the Sundance Film Festival. Then suddenly the thing that I’d given up film-making to write had drawn me back in again.”

The Private Lives of Pippa Leehad been stewing in the back of her brain for years. Like Personal Velocity, the novel focuses on women's stories, but unlike the collection it has managed to pick up a significant mainstream readership. Miller admits without reservations that securing a recommendation from The Richard & Judy Showwas a huge boost.

"I was a bit of an American ignoramus about it," she admits. "I'd never heard of the Richard Judy Summer Read,but it proved to be a real boost. Whenever I go to readings, people will come up and tell me that the book strikes a chord with them."

Miller acknowledges that she has risked angering that readership by tweaking a few of the relationships and remodelling some of the characters for the film. Featuring a staggering range of supporting players, including Keanu Reeves, Julianne Moore, Winona Ryder and Monica Bellucci, the movie is, apart from anything else, a tad more comic than the novel.

“As I was finishing the book, I felt: I’m not done playing with these characters. But, because I wrote the book, I feel more able to make the film that bit different. I am aware that some readers will be saying: ‘Where’s this? Where’s that?’ But I am more concerned with getting the essence of the book.”

It's been barely a year since Pippa Lee was published. How on earth does Miller, who lives in Wicklow with Day Lewis and their two sons, find time to hang out with the family? After all, her husband, who won an Oscar for There Will Be Blood last year and has just finished shooting the musical Nine, has a fairly busy lifestyle himself.

“Well, I have always been with the kids actually. When we work, I have breakfast with them and come back and put them to bed. Or make sure I do one or the other. I only make films every few years, so that is okay.”

Of course, Day Lewis was recently made a free man of Wicklow. Does this mean they get carried around in sedan chairs? Are there vassals on hand to help with the chores?

“No. I’m afraid not,” Miller laughs. “Actually, I did think we might get free parking, but apparently not. Never mind.”

How refreshingly normal she seems.