Turns out that wasn’t actually all after all. It’s been 20 years since Andy Sachs (Anne Hathaway) quit her job at Runway, but that doesn’t mean she hasn’t forgotten those days fetching coffee for the exacting Miranda Priestley (Meryl Streep). And through machinations best left discovered onscreen, Andy finds herself once again working for the illustrious magazine editor — though circumstances have certainly changed for both.
The first film was a run(a)way hit — earning over $300 million globally, scoring two Oscar nominations and three Golden Globe nominations, including a Golden Globe win for the silver-tongued Streep, who spawned a million memes with those one-liners (“Florals? For spring? Groundbreaking.”).
Director David Frankel — along with screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna — resisted the pressure to go back to the cat(ty)walk for two decades, but finally gave in once they felt the right reason for the reunion. Here, Frankel explains what finally sparked the sequel, why Andie’s ex Nate (Adrien Grenier) didn’t make the cut, and which one-liner we’ll be quoting for decades to come.
Gold Derby: So it’s been 20 years. Does the devil still wear Prada?
David Frankel: She does once in a while. I think she wore it once on her world press tour; I don’t remember where she wears it in the movie, but I’m sure there’s some.
And she’s a little bit less of a devil this time out. Or has she softened?
No, I think she’s as devilish as ever. Times have changed. HR has given her a talking to a few times, probably, and even she has matured. It’s been a long time, and the business that she’s in has taken some body blows, and she’s weathered them, but it definitely changes you.
So why was now the right time to revisit this story?
We said no to revisiting it for 18 years. And it just never seemed like these characters should ever have to be in the same office again. At the same time it was such a unique experience. The audience responded so powerfully, and it seemed dangerous to tread in that water again. But I saw Meryl, Annie, and Emily on the SAG Awards a few years back, and they had such great chemistry, and I have so much fondness for them, and so much admiration for them. And so we started talking about, if we did it again, what would it be about? And Aline Brosh McKenna, the screenwriter, said, “Well, there’s a lot of things it would be about, because that business has changed so dramatically.” Twenty years ago, Vogue‘s September issue was almost 1,000 pages, and now it’s barely 200 pages. And that transformation has affected everything about the media business — how you deal with a contracting business, and how you reinvent the future, and what Miranda’s legacy is, how long you keep working when you’re a working woman in your 70s — all those things seem really interesting to us. We just had a curiosity about the characters that have built up over 20 years that it seemed worth diving in and risking making a terrible mistake.
Who was the first person to sign on?
Meryl was always the linchpin. We couldn’t do it without her, so we started with her. As it happened, we the day we met with her and pitched her, she was very intrigued. We went to a screening of the original movie up at this brilliant, huge movie palace in Washington Heights. Lin-Manuel Miranda and his dad have maintained it, and we screened the original movie for 3,000 people. For Meryl, it was like being John, Paul, and Ringo at Shea Stadium in 1964. It was such an enthusiastic response, and it kind of foreshadowed the response that they’ve gotten on their press tour now in Mexico and Korea and Japan and China. And the response we got on the streets of New York when we were shooting. There’s such warmth, so much affection for the first movie, and that, of course, only created greater anxiety in us, you know, in making the movie. Because, as Emily says at the end of the first movie, we have big shoes to fill.
What were some of those anxieties? What were your biggest concerns in making this film?
The first movie is just a magical blend of really memorable comedy, great wit, and great fashion but it’s a comedy that evolves into a drama the last half-hour. The movie is quite dramatic and quite moving. As a director, my biggest concern was, yes, I know we can write funny stuff and the actors are hilarious and so charismatic, but can we really build a story that is emotionally involving. The other challenge, just from a business perspective, is, in those days, you could do a book adaptation and if it did OK, that was fine. And now movies have to be events. The only way to make a hit movie is to somehow make it really important. And the first movie, I used to joke, it’s a movie about a girl gets coffee. So we couldn’t just make a movie about a girl gets a coffee again. And yet, it’s women working in an office putting out a magazine. So how do you raise the bar without jumping the shark, and say, “OK, this is really entertaining and propulsive and dramatic and emotional.” You want those for any movie, but you especially want it when you’re revisiting something that’s so dear to us.
There’s so much of the movie that’s a callback to the first. How did you strike that balance? How much you wanted to pay tribute to the first film without it being just fan service?
We didn’t want to get really meta about it. We were really cognizant in building the narrative that we do our best not to repeat ourselves. We’d find ourselves trying to solve story points and saying, that’s kind of what we did the first time. We can’t go there. Annie Hathaway has a great analogy. She says it’s like a band that got back together, went into the studio, did a new album. They’re going on tour. They want to play all their new stuff, but they also have to play all the hits. We want to reference all the hits, but really the movie is the new stuff.
So which characters did you want to bring back? Who was important, who was crucial to you beyond Meryl?
I mean, the minute Meryl said she was intrigued, I immediately called Annie, called Emily [Blunt], and Stanley [Tucci] the next day, and said, “Hey, save a block of time in the summer of ‘25 and hopefully we’ll get our act together.” And they were all wildly enthusiastic. I don’t think they ever believed that it would happen. We said we wouldn’t consider it for so long. But because of the experience of making the first one, they bonded. It was so important to all of our careers and all of our lives and we all have a real fondness for that time in our lives, I think we were all excited to revisit it.
No Nate this time out, though.
No Nate. We talked a lot about it, and I’m on the Team Nate side of things. I feel like he’s gotten a bad rap for 20 years. When you bring up his name in certain circles, the reaction is so violent. But that would have been a real nostalgic visit to bring Nate back. We wanted to show that Andy’s moving on, that you don’t stay connected to your early loves and early crushes, and she’s had relationships since then.
Which characters do you think changed the most and which have stayed the same?
I think as characters, they have all kind of stayed the same, but because it is 20 years later, they’re all in different parts of their lives. I would say the one who stayed the same the most is Nigel, right? He’s, he’s a loyal number two, and we don’t know much more about his personal life.
Does he have one?
We’ve talked about his personal life a lot. We just have never dramatized it, so yes, he does, but I think he’s the most consistent. Emily, of course, is still Emily, but her career has changed, the scope of her power has changed, or the world she swims in has changed. And in many ways Andy is a very different person. I think about the girl who threw her phone in the fountain at the end of the first movie, and was acting on her morals and striving for work/life balance and now she’s in midlife, and she’s just desperate to keep a job and somehow keep this magazine afloat so she can keep her apartment. That’s a very different character. And yet she’s also so similar. As Annie says, she’s a golden retriever, she bounds into the room and she wants to make things work, and she has this real curiosity, but also this need for approval. It’s exactly that level of change that was fascinating to us, and why it was so thrilling to revisit it.
She still very much wants Miranda’s approval.
Absolutely. She still wants the lollipop. We are who we are.
How did access to the fashion industry change for you versus 20 years ago, when maybe the world wasn’t so responsive to the film?
It was really hard the last time, just locations and fashion and cooperation and even doing research was challenging. We finally got people to talk to us, but completely off the record — “don’t mention my name.” And somehow, Patricia Field put together an amazing wardrobe for everybody without the cooperation of fashion brands. This time around, it was very different, you know, we were really had we’re lucky enough to be able to pick and choose. Molly Rogers, our costume designer, did amazing job, working with all the houses. The goal was always sort of a timelessness to the fashion stuff that was both striking and also that you could watch for years and years and not get tired of looking at.
What did you learn from the experience of making the first film that you wanted to bring to the second?
What I learned was something that Meryl taught me, which was she never does the same thing twice. It was such a wonderful lesson in acting. She also understands the movie is going to be edited. And so when you’re making a movie, you never have to be perfect. That’s the magic of the medium is you get a second take. You can say things different ways and pick one later. You can shoot this side of something, or wide, close, whatever, and you can decide later. And she completely understands that, that the movie’s edited, and you don’t need to be perfect each time. You just need to be perfect once. And that was kind of liberating, because, the first time around, I was younger, and when you get older, you realize you’re much more aware of all the things that can go wrong. And of course, we’re trying to meet expectations. And that’s a whole other game that I’ve never played before.
The first film spawned so many classic lines. Do you have any predictions for what’s going to be last to stand the test of time?
There were so many the first time around. I think there will be definitely some from this movie. There’s already one in the trailer, Emily’s line, “May the bridges I burn light my way.” There’s one near the end of the movie, where she says, “Shared carbs have no calories.” I even like simple lines, when Andy says, “We can do good work together.” And Meryl says, “We have no choice.” What I still love from the first movie is “That’s all.” We use that very judiciously in this movie — it only appears one time and that’s by design. If we were a band and we put out an album, knowing which one was going to be the hit, I have no idea.
