Meryl Streep

Interview By: Andrea Tuccillo
AndreaTuccillo@TheCinemaSource.com

*Click Here For Another Interview with Meryl Streep

*Click Here For Another Interview with Meryl Streep

With her performance as the wickedly stylish boss from hell in this month's The Devil Wears Prada, the multi-Academy Award winning actress Meryl Streep shows she still has bite.

She sinks her teeth into the role of the fiercely demanding fashion magazine editor Miranda Priestly and is able to make the audience despise her character yet want to be her all at once. And that's precisely the effect she was going for.

'I just was interested in making a human being as contradictory and messy as we all are,' says Streep. 'And I think that's she's an exacting, highly disciplined, demanding, ambitious person who doesn't necessarily take the time for all the nice social lubricants that help make the workplace graceful and fun.'

While her character makes her career her life and does not care who she steps on along the way, Streep could not be more different.

'Show business has been very, very good to me because I can take a lot of time off,' she says. 'I'm an extremely undisciplined person and in many ways the polar opposite of [Miranda] but I really understand her, admire some things about her, and see the bind that's she's in as a woman.'

In the movie, Streep's character hires aspiring journalist and fashion disaster Andrea Sachs (Anne Hathaway) to be her assistant. Unlike Miranda Priestly whose job has become her life, Streep has found a balance with her own life and career.

'I've made all sorts of compromises every single day,' she says. 'Sometimes whether to shower or not because you don't have time! Miranda would not make that choice. But if you have a very thickly populated home life and then a career that's demanding, something always comes up short. And I've always felt kind of stretched to the max but also very lucky and nourished by both things'my family and my career. But it's a struggle and you always feel like you're letting somebody down.'

So where did Streep get the idea for this very, shall we say, difficult kind of boss' The novel by Lauren Weisberger upon which the film is based was rumored to have been written about Vogue editor Anna Wintour. Streep, however, admits that she has only met Wintour once at a screening for Prada and did not model Miranda after her. Streep's inspiration came instead from various people of power whom she has met along the way.

'Most of my models were of the male species and compared to the people that I know Miranda's so well behaved,' says Streep. 'She's almost like a diplomat compared to some people who are very, very powerful in our business.'

'It's much more fun for me to make the uber boss out of my own pastiche of experience so that's what I did.'

A swoop of silvery grey hair and heaps of designer clothing completed Streep's Miranda Priestly transformation. The costumes being an integral part of the characterization process for Streep.

'I'm sort of a notorious pain in the butt for any costume designer because I have so many opinions about how my people should present,' Streep says. 'I feel very strongly that we make decisions about what we're giving to the world what we're withholding from the world by virtue of what we put on our bodies and what we choose to say and not say. So for me clothes are kind of the character.'

Working together with costume designer Pat Fields, as well as her hair and makeup artists, Streep was able to come up with a fashionable character that was altogether unique and intimidating'completely in vogue yet also able to exist above any trends.

'We knew we wanted to make sort of a very definite kind of a look,' Streep says. 'A woman that doesn't look like anyone else in New York and that at the fashion shows it would be easy for everyone to spot her and look at her.'

Miranda Priestly seems like the type of villainous character that would be devilishly fun to play. But for Streep, it was a little more complicated than that.

'Everyone asks 'Oh was it so much fun',' Streep says. 'No, it was not fun to be this person. I didn't stay in character when they yelled cut but I also found that I couldn't enter into this fun on the set because I felt it wouldn't help the dynamic if I immediately went over and was joking with Emily [Blunt] and Anne and Stanley [Tucci]. They all were always having a party in the corner and I just couldn't join in and it was sort of a lonely position that I staked out for myself but I suppose it paid off ultimately.'

The Devil Wears Prada is filled with strong female characters, although not all of them are perfect. So would Streep call this film a feminist film'

'There's a way to kill the box office!' she laughs. 'No this is a guy flick, man. A lot of eye candy here. A lot of lingerie shots!

Unlike Miranda, Streep knows a good sense of humor is always in style.