Strike a pose.
As much as “The Devil Wears Prada” is associated with Vogue magazine (Meryl Streep’s Miranda Priestly is based on longtime editor-in-chief Anna Wintour), the 2006 movie is equally remembered for its deft deployment of Madonna’s anthem, “Vogue,” as the soundtrack to Runway newcomer Andy’s (Anne Hathaway) style transformation.
In the now-iconic montage, the once hideous-skirt-wearing second assistant dons one chic designer look after another as she treks across Manhattan to the high-fashion magazine’s offices each morning.
The sequence is so famous that Emily Blunt, who plays the fashion-forward Emily, recently mentioned that when she and future-husband John Krasinski started dating, he was a total “megafan” of the film, and played her the montage to point out his favorite of Andy’s half-dozen outfits.
With that type of enthusiasm, you’d think the filmmakers — including director David Frankel, screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna and producer Wendy Finerman — would’ve written a mega-fashion montage into “The Devil Wears Prada 2.”
But, they didn’t. At least, not at first.
“We specifically didn’t do a montage in the first iterations of the script, to not repeat ourselves,” Frankel tells Variety. But as filming got underway, he began to get cold feet. “We got very deep into the production — we were shooting and on our way to Milan — and I was feeling like there’s such an expectation … I felt like maybe we should try.”
Fortunately for fans, Hathaway agreed and pushed for the montage to make a comeback.
“There’s just this expectation of more fashion,” Hathaway reminded the team, Frankel says. So it was up to them to figure out how to pull it off. “We had to actually go back to the studio and say, ‘Hey, can we have one more day? Because we have this idea.’”
The plan was to shoot a super-sized sequence that tracked not only Andy (now the features editor at Runway), but also Miranda, her new assistant Amari (Simone Ashley) and Nigel, the magazine’s long-suffering creative director (Stanley Tucci) as they arrive at various fashion week events in Milan, dripping in the finest couture.
But four times the talent means four times the finery, which was costume designer Molly Rogers’ challenge. “Molly had to panic, and the A.D.s had to find another million extras, and we had to find three new locations in Milan, so it was a big, big deal, but really fun,” Frankel says.
Rogers admits it was a “bit of a scramble” to get all the looks together, but it was also a hurry-up-and-wait scenario. “I would like to say [the montage] was mapped out within an inch of its life, but it wasn’t,” she says, explaining that the montage was filmed in pieces, with each arrival shot separately over the course of the on-location shoot.
“It would always come up on the call sheet whenever they could fit it in, so we had to constantly ride around with all these options,” Rogers recalls. “We never knew when it was going to come up on the schedule. It was always time permitting, so it kind of lingered over our heads for a long time. I was trying to be super, super conscious of how they looked art-directed, color-wise.”
For Ashley, who was a fan of the original movie, filming the montage alongside Streep, Hathaway and Tucci was surreal. “It was one of the best memories of my career, being part of this whole movie, let alone filming that montage,” she told Variety at the film’s New York premiere.
Once the footage was in the can, there was still one question to answer: what song could top “Vogue”?
“We thought, ‘We’ll find a new song,’” Frankel says, recounting the postproduction process. “We put in ‘Vogue’ as a placeholder, and it just seemed like ‘We can never take this out again. It works so well.’”
As Madonna would sing: “let your body — or, in this case, your montage — go with the flow.”
Antonio Ferme contributed to this report.
Leave a Reply