David Frankel AB ’81 got his first Hollywood job at the end of his junior year summer, a rare and incredibly lucky occurrence. “A Harvard alum named Michael Garin came to the Harvard Crimson, and he was looking to hire interns.” David recalls. “We met for half an hour, and he offered me the job.” The day after graduation, David went to work at the then-growing company Telepictures. While there, David remembers learning about business, television distribution, production, and editing. He cites this as a very important experience developmentally. “I probably didn't realize it at the time, but that was the best training to one day be a director–to understand how the pieces of film work together to create narrative, or story, or entertainment.” 

David spent his nights and weekends writing screenplays. After four years at Telepictures, David got what he calls “another lucky break.” Director/producer/writer Norman Steinberg of BLAZING SADDLES fame read one of his scripts. “He hired me to create a TV series with him for an actress named Ellen Burstyn. So, we created a sitcom called THE ELLEN BURSTYN SHOW, inventively enough,” David laughs, “and that launched me into a career in television.” After co-creating two other shows with Steinberg, David created his own series called GRAPEVINE. He then wrote the film MIAMI RHAPSODY, which got made by Disney. 

After that film, David took a break to travel the world, which inspired him to create the show DEAR DIARY, made as a half-hour at ABC. “But it was a little too unusual for network TV at the time,” David explains. “So, instead, we submitted it for Oscar consideration, and ultimately, I won an Academy Award for Best Short Film.” That caught Tom Hanks’ attention, and David spent the next few years working mainly with HBO. “I directed BAND OF BROTHERS, SEX AND THE CITY, and that led to directing the pilot for ENTOURAGE,” David recounts. “That pilot gave me enough street cred to be considered to direct THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA.”

Twenty years later, THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2 has just been released in theaters. David says that until very recently, he and writer Aline Brosh McKenna AB ’89 had actively discouraged a sequel, but after seeing Meryl Streep, Anne Hathaway, and Emily Blunt reunite at the 30th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards in 2024 to present an award, David and Aline started thinking about what a sequel would look like. All three actresses had previously mentioned they were interested in participating if a sequel were to happen, and everything fell into place from there. “Aline wrote a great script right off the bat,” David states, noting that Disney Live Action Studios President David Greenbaum said it best: “He said, ‘I would make this movie whether it was a sequel or not.’” A pretty strong endorsement!

Getting the original actors on board was easy; the production team was willing to work around scheduling challenges to ensure that everyone could be involved. “They all just connected so well. The friendships that were formed… Annie and Emily, just because of their experience on the first movie, are always… linked by that experience. They were 22 when we made the first movie. And Meryl's been pursued by the ghost of Miranda Priestly… I don't think she ever imagined that in her long, illustrious career, this would become maybe one of her most iconic characters,” David smiles. “Aline’s script really gave everybody the platform to [explore these characters], and it also created these great new characters, and that was really fun, to cast a younger generation of employees at Runway.”

Though the fashion hasn’t changed much since the first film was made, because the goal is always timelessness, what has changed is the film industry itself. Specifically, David calls out the distribution process. The original THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA ran in theaters for six months before anyone even contemplated sending it to home video. “Now, that doesn't happen,” David laments. “If you're lucky, and you've had an incredibly successful run, you're going to be in theaters for six or seven weeks. So, that's really different, where you have to just burst onto the scene.” It becomes more challenging for projects to get greenlit when studios are thinking about their bottom line. “There was this period in Hollywood where if you made a movie for a reasonable price, you could not lose money,” David explains. “That emboldened [studios] to make all kinds of movies. Because if you could make it for a reasonable budget and market it reasonably well, you at least would break even, because the home video sales would fill in the gaps of any losses at the box office… There was this real freedom.” What has particularly dampened that, David says, is streaming. Streaming has made it far harder to get audiences in theaters, because they can just wait a few weeks and watch the movie at home when it goes to streaming. Says David of THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA 2, “I like to think we made something that's worth leaving the house for.”

Having worked both as a writer and a director, David says the reason he favors directing more these days is that, “Writing for me is very lonely and very hard. And directing is also very hard, but not lonely at all. You're attending a party every day when you're on the set, and you're in this wonderful creative cocoon… I really enjoy the experience, and I really have a great respect for the writers that I've worked with, and it's fun to sort of find a shared vision and bring that to life.” He also muses, “Writers are just so vulnerable, and I felt like if I can avoid that, I'm going to try. I've worked very closely with the writers of the movies that I've made. But they've done all the heavy lifting, and I'm really in awe of the work they do. It’s just really fun to collaborate.”

In terms of the differences between directing film and TV, David says the primary difference is how much time you have for each project. “The budget and the schedule are usually the biggest differences… Some of the most creative work in filmmaking is done for television, as much as it is for film. [Modern shows] are as cinematic and powerful as almost anything in features, and now all the creative people go back and forth, and it's so fluid… [But] at the end of the day, you're taking the words on a page and trying to get the best performance you can from the actors. The work is the same.” 

When asked what advice has stayed with him throughout his career, David's answer was fairly straightforward: “It starts with drive, it starts with hard work, and then you have to get lucky. It's all those things combined, but it only happens if you go home and write,” David says. This is based on advice he once got from a coffee chat with Robert Evans, producer and former head of Paramount Pictures, responsible for THE GODFATHER and LOVE STORY. “He was a legendary movie executive and producer,” David recalls. “I went into this giant office, and he had a big desk set on a platform… And it was dark, and he was wearing sunglasses.” He asked what David wanted to do. David responded that he was hoping to work as a gofer on a movie. Mr. Evans responded with, “What do you really want to do?” To that, David responded that he wanted to be a writer. And Mr. Evans told him to just go home and write. There wasn’t anything to learn getting coffee for people. “That's the best advice, and it's still the only advice, I think, that makes any sense,” David says. You have to do the work. 

Looking ahead, David jokes that he’s out of work for now. “I have no plans, and I'm looking forward to reading stuff that might be sent my way,” he grins. “That's part of the excitement of being unemployed: not knowing which way the wind is going to blow you next, which world I'm going to get to dive into next. And I'm very often surprised… projects come along, and the right people are involved, and there's enthusiasm, and it's a chance to either work with people I admire, or work on a story that feels quite personal to me. I try to invest as much of myself in the work as possible.”