The Story Behind 'The Devil Wears Prada' Script

An interview with Aline Brosh McKenna, the screenwriter for the movie that may finally be getting a sequel.

Four screenwriters had been hired to write The Devil Wears Prada before Aline Brosh McKenna came aboard around Thanksgiving of 2004. David Frankel had been hired to direct, and he was told to select a screenwriter he thought would do a good job. He didn’t know Brosh McKenna but they hit it off in a meeting where they realized they had a lot of the same ideas about what this movie should be. The book by Lauren Weisberger on which the movie would be based was selling really well, and the producers wanted to capitalize on that momentum, so Brosh McKenna had to work fast. Post-production lasted into 2006, and Brosh McKenna, then 38 years old, worked on it every day from the moment she was hired until completion.

I got the chance to interview Brosh McKenna at length as part of the research I did for ANNA: The Biography. This week, Puck’s Lauren Sherman reported that a Devil Wears Prada sequel is in the works, with Brosh McKenna in talks to return as screenwriter. So many perfectly executed elements, from the casting to the costumes to the music, made the movie the iconic film we know it as today. But I realized doing my research to write ANNA that so many of those memorable moments really started from Brosh McKenna’s incredible script.

I originally interviewed Brosh McKenna in July of 2020, and am pleased to share an edited, condensed version of our conversation. Of course, if you want to learn more about Anna’s reaction to the movie, you can pick up ANNA: The Biography.

How did you approach writing the Miranda Priestly character, specifically?

I didn't do any research on Anna. I didn’t know very much about her. It seemed like the book had already taken stuff from her. I was really focused on creating a Miranda that was really specific. Then when Meryl came on, I knew that she wasn't interested in doing anything resembling mimicry.

What kind of research did you do on the fashion industry?

I did more work on the script than I did on research, because the book was really dense and specific about the world — it had all the [stories] about the closets and the gifts. When we got closer to making it, we had an enormous amount of trouble finding people in the fashion world who wanted to talk to us.

So when you did go out into the fashion world to try to talk to people about it, what was that like?

I couldn't get anybody. I talked to one person I would consider an insider, but I swore I would never say who it was. It wasn’t somebody at Vogue.

It seemed like people didn't want to talk to us because they felt like it would make Vogue look bad, and I think it actually makes it look fun and aspirational. Even though there is a critique embedded in that, there is also a celebration of the creative artistic achievements of that world.

What kinds of things did this person tell you?

I had written Nigel's character to be a little bit more sympathetic in some ways. And this person said to me, "No one is that nice. They don't have to be, and they don't have time to be."

But people in the fashion industry did come around — you had some amazing cameos in the film, from Valentino and Gisele, among others.

I got on a plane one day coming home from, I think, a table read. And Gisele Bündchen was a few rows over from me, and our plane got delayed on the ground for two hours. So I called David [the director], and said, "What do I do?" And he said, "Go and ask her if she'll be in the movie. And tell her you'll take your computer and write something for her right in the moment."

So I went over to her, and I just started saying, "Meryl Streep. Meryl Streep. Meryl Streep." Because I knew that people in the fashion business had a certain hesitancy about it. I said, "Would you want to be in it? What would you like to play?" And she said, "I don't want to play myself, and I want to play a bitch." So I wrote that little cameo for Gisele.

She did ask Vogue [before agreeing to be in the movie]. Probably she gets sent a lot of things where she has to play herself.

How did you work around the fear that fashion people had about Anna?

I would say, it's not Anna, it's Miranda Priestly. I wanted the movie to be for people who didn't know any inside baseball. When you write about a workplace, you want it to feel really resonant and true to people who are in that workplace. But you also want it to feel really accessible, and make sense to people who've never been there. This story was very much about how everyone has had a difficult boss.

It's partly about having a difficult boss, and it's also partly about being obsessed with your boss. One of the things I think is really funny about the movie is that Andy spends a ton of time thinking about Miranda, and Miranda spends almost no time thinking about Andy.

What was your connection to the fashion world, personally?

I grew up in New Jersey, reading and loving fashion magazines as an escape. Nigel’s speech about how it's a beacon of hope that he read under the covers with a flashlight — I wrote that as an homage to all of us for whom those fashion magazines were a peek into this world. There was no internet, so it was really hard to access that sense of what it meant to trot around the globe. Fashion magazines were very important for widening your horizons.

What other attributes of Miranda’s character did you think were important to get across?

The character is not vain. She wears what she wears as armor — it's what you have to wear to be part of that world. It's sort of like a uniform, a military garb. But it's not about her wanting to look hot, it's really about her wanting to spread the artistry and the magic of fashion. There's a scene at the end where she's in a limousine, and she says to Andy, "Everyone wants to be us." And I had originally written, "Everybody wants to be me." And Meryl changed it at the last table read and that was absolutely right — because that character is a very strict devotee of the art.

I feel like right after the film came out in the summer of 2006, it had the effect of almost lionizing Anna. It made her a household name and a celebrity outside the fashion world in a way she wasn’t before. I’m wondering if you agree.

I don't know that the movie does. Because the movie is a critique of the values of how that character makes decisions. It's less about Andy's judgment of fashion, or her judgment about Miranda for being a boss who throws her steak in the sink. It's more about the fact that Miranda, to get what she wants — which is to protect fashion and the magazine — she dispenses with Nigel. And when Andy objects to that, Miranda says, "Well, you did the same thing with Emily."

And that's why she throws the phone in the fountain. David and I spent a tremendous amount of time talking about how she's throwing her phone in the fountain not because Miranda's a stinky boss, but because those are not the values of how she wants to live her life. She wants to value her relationships in a different way.

But I think the movie has tremendous respect for Miranda as a practitioner of her work.

That was an incredible balancing act that you pulled off so well — I never felt, watching the movie, like the fashion world wasn’t respected.

Very much, and that was one of the things that David and I came together on. There is the silliness of the way you're talking about belts and hats and hemlines. In one of my first meetings [about writing the movie], I said, "We don't need to exaggerate it to make it funny."

The script you wrote took the book and made it more layered and emotionally resonant. I thought the film did a great job of examining Andy’s pitfalls as a worker.

I think one of the reasons that it works was because she's a bit pompous. She goes in with an attitude, in that way that you really can only when you're that age, and you really think you're better than a lot of things that you don't understand. She thinks this is silly, her friends think it's silly. But when she gets into it, she comes to realize how hard these people work and the level of dedication that it takes to make something as beautiful as an issue of Vogue magazine.

At what point did you meet Lauren Weisberger?

I think I met Lauren after I had written the first two drafts. I didn't want to have her in mind. I wanted to create Andy on her own, from what I could glean from the book.

It’s funny because when I met her, she's very tall and lovely, slender. And I thought, My god, if that's a person who felt physically out of place in that building, that's pretty astonishing. I think most of us have not been in a world that is that aesthetically demanding. Most of us go to the office and are like, Oh, these are not my best pants.

It sounds like Meryl Strep got to have a fair amount of input in the script.

We had one long meeting about the script when she signed on, for about four or five hours. I will surprise no one by saying she's incredibly smart, and her notes and thoughts were incredibly helpful. During the shooting, she and I would have exchanges through David, where she would give feedback, and he would pass it along to me. We did that with the blue speech — she wanted me to expand it. I spent a weekend at the Starbucks up the street, expanding and doing different versions of it. I would send it to her, and then she would give David her thoughts, and he would pass them along. I remember sending her an email — because we knew the sweater was going to be blue — I said, "Lapis, azure, cerulean." She chose cerulean.

Let’s talk more about the cerulean speech because that has to be — and I really don’t think I’m exaggerating — one of the most famous monologues in all of film by this point.

I was the fifth writer — when I got the script, there were a few lines about, "People in this room are involved with you wearing that sweater." It hung around in the script for a long time, kind of unmolested. Over time, I would add a few lines, then it got to be seven or eight lines. But I was always concerned about it because it's sort of a story stopper. She could just walk in and yell at her, and you could do it much more concisely.

The impulse behind it was to give the idea of what animates people who work in a field like that. Why does this matter to them? And what do they think they understand that other people don't understand? I think Meryl especially felt like it was really important to understand that these folks had a mission, and a rationale, and almost a sense of calling.

It was very long by the time I finished several drafts of it. I sent it to David, and I said, "Well, you'll use some of this. I'm sure you won't use all of this." And then every sentence that was in that script is on the screen.

How did you feel about the reception of the movie? It’s taken on such a life of its own since it came out.

We were stunned. One of the interesting things about it, that I think about frequently, is we didn't have a comp for it. We didn't really have a movie that we could point to and say, "It's a little like this one."

Working Girl was one that came up in a bunch of the reviews.

Working Girl is a good one. Maybe Jerry Maguire, a favorite movie of mine. In some respects, I thought of it as a princess movie, like Cinderella. She's sort of in the ashes, then there's sort of a queen figure and she has to combat that, and she rises from the ashes. David would sometimes say to me, "It's The Devil Wears Prada, not The Not-So-Nice-Lady. It's The Devil." Because it's important that it not just be a person that's rude — she embodies something that is a contagion to change your values.

You’re right that there’s something so universally relatable about challenging authority figures, which probably explains the movie’s lasting appeal.

But also, it does appeal to men. And it plays for a younger audience. I thought, “If you're 12, how is this relevant for you?" But people have teachers and coaches and moms and peers who are challenging. I think the most satisfying scenes in the movie are the ones at the end, where [Miranda] acknowledges [Andy] for two seconds.

You just want to feel like that boss who was terrible to you when you were making sandwiches at Subway, that if you saw them later, they were like, "You know what? You did a great job with that. Those BLTs were never the same after you left." You want to feel that you've made an impact on that person. And what I love is that she only feels it for two seconds. And then she gets in the car and says, "Go."

The stage directions said, "Miranda looks at him." Then in the stage directions it said, "Go." And Meryl said the word, "Go." That's my favorite moment in the movie.

The movie was also perfectly timed, coming out in ‘06. Magazines were riding high, yet internet media was up and coming which created buzz for the movie.

I thought, "Well, we figured out how to make a movie people like. This is great, we'll just make a ton of those back to back. It'll be so easy." David’s older than I am and he'd been in the business longer. And he had much more of a sense that it was lightning in a bottle. There's absolutely no way to game it in advance.

Would you call this movie your big break?

Yes. In Hollywood, you have your big break where you start working, and you start making an income. And then you have a big break where people know who you are. I was 38, and I had been working since I was 23. So I had 15 years, and I'd had two movies get made, and I'd shot three pilots. And I was making a comfortable living.

But it was the one that changed everything. And I really attribute that so much to my collaboration with David. He is a writer. And he was the most supportive, helpful, least interfering director that I've ever dealt with. When you write, you're just so happy when someone else is writing and you don't have to do it. And he just was so grateful, and supportive, and truly understood when something was working, and when it wasn't, and how to give me feedback that was helpful, that was in a language a writer would understand.

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Loose Threads

• WSJ took a closer look at luxury fashion pricing, in light of the story about Italian supplier to Christian Dior that was making $2,816 handbags for a $57 assembly cost in sweatshop-like conditions. (That price doesn’t include raw materials would add an additional roughly $163.) While stories like this are important — we should know how these things are made and what we’re really paying for (marketing, expensive real estate, Dior’s 50 percent margin) — they often miss the big picture: fashion is mostly made by suppliers that use subcontractors who use subcontractors, and brands do not make the effort to know what goes on in all of these factories.

• Is it just me or did Jack Schlossberg launch FAST? JFK’s only grandson is Vogue’s new political correspondent. Vogue explained, “The new role will see him combine his background in law and business with the self-described ‘silly goose’ tendencies he displays online.” Jack’s precise quote: “I’m a fun, wacky guy. I’m a silly goose — a silly goose who’s trying, just trying, to get the truth out there.”

• NYT has a look at Team USA’s gymnastics uniforms.

• Giorgio Armani turns 90 today. Also, instead of showing during the next Milan Fashion Week, he’ll have a fashion show in New York in October to promote a new Armani building, including residences, a store, and restaurant, per WWD. The last time Armani came here for a big event in 2013, then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg declared it “Giorgio Armani Day.”