This is an edited excerpt of my conversation with The Devil Wears Prada 2 director David Frankel and screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna for the Back Row podcast. You can watch or listen to the full episode on  YouTube,  Spotify, or Apple Podcasts. Follow the show so you don’t miss new episodes. If you like the pod, please leave a rating and a review, which takes ten seconds and really helps other people find this independent show.

After the interview, a special pre-Met Gala “Loose Threads.” My review of the event will run tomorrow in the newsletter, but you can follow Back Row and me on Instagram for live coverage.

NOTE: this interview contains spoilers for The Devil Wears Prada 2. If you want to avoid those, come back to this story after you’ve seen the movie.

The Devil Wears Prada 2 has been a resounding success, with mostly favorable critical reviews, a $234 million haul at the opening weekend box office (globally), and, most importantly, enthusiastic fan response. Remarkably, the movie has opened a real dialogue about journalism and media, and how technology and the people who have profited most from that technology have ruined journalism and media.

Speculation has run rampant that the dopey billionaire Benji, played by Justin Theroux, and Emily Blunt’s character Emily Charlton, are archetypes of tonight’s headlining Met Gala donors Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez. But the filmmakers insisted in an interview with Back Row in New York in mid-April that neither movie contains literal depictions of any individual. (One glaring difference between Sánchez and Charlton, I might point out, is that Charlton… works.)

Ahead, David and Aline talk about how the second movie really came together, Anna Wintour’s relationship to it, whether there will be a third, and more.

Aline, we talked years ago when I was researching Anna: The Biography, and you said you really pulled from Lauren Weisberger's book to write the first movie. Different situation this time, right? Because there's no book, no IP except for the first movie. What kind of research did you do?

Aline: You don't even have to try. We're being bombarded constantly with articles about the death of fashion, publishing, journalism, Hollywood, you name it. Fashion [used to be] much more of a cloistered environment and secretive and nobody wanted to talk to us. And now I think in part because of social media, there's so much more visibility into the fashion world and the designers and how it works. Same thing with publishing and journalism. It's stuff I've always been interested in. I've written about journalists multiple times. I'm always attracted to reading about that. And in those 20 years, not knowing I was ever going to write a sequel, I was always keeping up. 

So it required less research this time because last time it really felt like we were writing about Conclave. 

David: But we have the same pope.

When did you both know you'd be coming back to The Devil Wears Prada?

Aline: [In] 2024. I said [to David], I think it'd be really interesting if Miranda got in trouble and Andy had to help her — because so many business authority figures were getting pilloried for this, that, and the other. We were living in a world where you could get in trouble for wearing a tan suit. What happens when a powerful person has to go to someone they've maybe overlooked and actually needs them? Obviously in the movie, we twist that a little bit, because it's not Miranda's choice to have her there. But David would be like, “Don't think about [a sequel], don't worry about that.”

David: I just felt like, [the first movie was] lightning in a bottle. The characters ended up in the right place. Let's just leave it. Why risk [a sequel]? And I think even the actors felt that way for a long time, but the world changed. And there was a story to tell about how the world was changing and all the questions that we have about what we do, AI on the horizon. Also, we're older, Meryl's older. How long do you do it? What's your legacy? What matters in life and when do you stop? Those are interesting questions. 

So whose idea was it to do the sequel?

Aline: We had been talking about it a little bit and then Wendy Finerman, the original producer who had optioned the book, would check in with Meryl every once in a while and say, "Do you want to talk about it? Would you be interested in it?" And we finally got a green light to maybe go run some ideas past her. Then I presented to David a bunch of ideas that I had and we shaped them and we went to Meryl and Meryl thought it was a good idea. And my belief system is that if Meryl Streep thinks it's a good idea, it probably is a good idea.

It's definitely the fastest movie that I've ever been involved with, because we went from meeting with her in May to shooting the following June.

How did you come up with the backlash to Miranda stemming from a “Speed Fash” puff piece?

David: It was much more complex in an earlier draft.

Aline:  Yes, we simplified it. There's a combination of journalism and PR with these magazines. Some of these brands try to position themselves in a certain way and use the magazines to do that. And this is an instance where a company has used the magazine to further its goals.

David: There's a careless reporter and they got hoodwinked and toured a factory that wasn't the real factory. That was the whole backstory. 

David, I want to know what kind of conversations you had with Meryl Streep about evolving the character, because it was the same character, obviously, but chastened. 

David: Look, you look at Vogue 20 years ago, the September issue was a thousand pages. Now it's not even 200 pages.

“So thin you could floss with it.”

David: Things have changed and I think that Miranda has adapted, but it's not without taking some lumps along the way.

Aline: You see that right away in the first scene with Emily — that relationship has changed tremendously. The relationship between journalism and advertising has completely changed, not just for fashion magazines, but for everyone. You're reading articles, you're like, "Geez, this feels like spon con." And drawing those lines, which has always been tricky, I think is trickier now. You can tell in that scene, she's not happy about it. There's a bunch of lines in that scene where she's like, "Oh, we're all so thrilled." She wants to do her vision and she wants to cover stories [her way]. 

The Runway magazine event in Milan — was that inspired by Vogue World? 

David: A little bit, yeah.

Aline: They're all event businesses. The New York Times is a puzzle business and a recipe business. And a lot of magazines now [do] events, conferences. The New Yorker is a conference business. 

You had so many cameos — Donatella Versace, Marc Jacobs, Law Roach, Kara Swisher. 

David: That's the world that Miranda would swim in — a world of bold-faced names. We were lucky in the first movie that Heidi Klum joined us, and then Valentino and Gisele. But it was much harder in the first movie. People were afraid of Anna, for sure.

Aline: We had Heidi back. In her cameo she’s talking to Emily Blunt about someone working on a hot tub.

David: She was rewarded for her bravery 20 years ago.

You guys knew early in this process that Anna Wintour was going to kind of give the movie a bear hug because, as we learned in Vogue, she talked to Meryl Streep about it before it started filming and Meryl told her it was going to be alright.

David: Yeah. She was very curious. She wanted to know from the beginning. We wouldn't give her a script from the beginning. So she's not involved at all in the creation of the movie, but she's been very supportive of the idea of the movie. And Disney and Vogue have a collab of some kind. Vogue released behind-the-scenes photos early and that kind of thing. 

But what if Anna wasn't into it? Could she have shut it down? 

Aline: It's a satirical movie, but it's satirical of a business and a world. And the world is not just fashion, right? It's publishing, journalism. We're satirizing many types of characters. We have Justin's character [Benji], BJ [Novak’s character Jay], Irv Ravitz. It's never meant to be a satirical look at an individual. And so I think that she understood what the first movie was. I think she understood what this would be. And it never ever was intended to — nor would I ever be interested in doing — a take down of someone or even a direct portrait of someone.

David: I couldn't admire her more. So to me, both movies are a celebration of her ambition for excellence. To me, when Miranda says, “Surely, something will remain of the best in human achievement” — that's what Miranda stands for. And I believe that's what Anna has aimed for for 37 years. 

I've heard an argument that if the movie is too close to the fashion industry or too close to Anna, that it can't skewer the world in the way that the first movie did. What would your response be to that?

Aline: I would say in many ways [it’s] more pointed because these businesses have been turned upside down and shaking the change out of their pockets. And we are, too, in our business, trying to figure out how to make money. What do you do when advertising goes away or people stop reading magazines? In many ways, the world around these characters has become even more ridiculous. And so the lens on fashion, publishing, journalism — you don't want to be cynical, but there's such a cynicism now to how these things are, how they have to be monetized. And something I think about a lot is, I grew up watching Dan Rather with my dad, and the evening news was a loss leader. Even the term “loss leader” now is archaic because if you don't make money, you’ve got to go. I don't think it's any less of a skewering of any of those businesses. 

Anna and Meryl are both 76. I don't get any sense that Anna wants to retire. There have been been so many rumors over the years that she would. I thought it was really smart how you address this in a movie. There's a scene where Miranda asks her partner, “If I leave what happens, what will I have?” Which I think is the question. And then she just later says to Andy, "I love working." I think that's really all it is with Anna. 

Aline: There's a lot of authors and painters, women who became successful in their 60s, 70s, 80s. And I think about that a lot. I think that there's nothing more powerful than a postmenopausal woman. God knows the country's run by people who are — we live in a gerontocracy and if she can keep it going, all the better. 

Will there be a third movie?

Aline: We're lucky there's a second. For these four, I would write an action movie, a sitcom, an opera, and anything they're willing to do.

David: I mean look, there's more story to tell. We love the characters. And never say never.

Check out the full interview on YouTube,  Spotify, or Apple Podcasts to hear David and Aline talk about Lady Gaga’s role, their favorite zingers, Emily Blunt, and much more.

Partnership inquiries: [email protected]

Back Row may earn commission if you purchase through affiliate links in this newsletter, which helps support the operations of this publication.