Kate Winslet on Shooting Her Directing Debut ‘Goodbye June’ with Her Dream Cast — and from Her Son’s Script
Seven-time Oscar nominee and Oscar-winner Kate Winslet (“The Reader”) takes over the Screen Talk podcast this week to talk about her directorial debut “Goodbye June,” starring Helen Mirren, Andrea Riseborough, Johnny Flynn, Timothy Spall, Toni Collette, and herself as a fractious family who come together ahead of Christmas to sit vigil for the family matriarch (Mirren).
She also talks about some of her favorite films that got less attention than her big hits, like “Titanic,” where she forged her lifelong friendship with Leonardo DiCaprio, who is like an uncle to her children. She is also proud of beating Tom Cruise twice on underwater breath holds. She returned to work with James Cameron in “Avatar: The Way of Water” and returns in his upcoming holiday movie, “Avatar: Fire and Ash.” After producing five projects — including TV series “Mare of Easttown” and “The Regime,” and the movie “Lee” — Winslet gained the courage to direct.
“Thirty-three years of my career has taught me so much,” she said, “because as an actor, you’re never just showing up and doing the job. You are also learning an awareness of how to be on a film set, how to conduct yourself, how to collaborate and behave with other people, so that everyone feels respected and included…being an active producer and putting the financing together and sometimes paying for screenwriters fees out of my own pocket just to keep something alive was the best possible way I could ever have learned the nuts and bolts of that job. And so my relationship with Ellen [Kuras] and being able to elevate her — the director of ‘Lee,’ the cinematographer of ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,’ and I’d known her for all of that time — to have her direct her first feature film after so many years and an incredible career was also part of being the kind of producer that I want to be.”
Winslet’s son with ex-husband Sam Mendes, Joe Anders, wrote the script for “Goodbye June,” based on the 2017 death of his grandmother, Winslet’s mother. He studied screenwriting at the National Film and Television School. “He’s about to turn 22 years old,” said Winslet. “He has read many a script. He has practiced lines with me time and time again… He invented this fictional story and this fictional family that you see in ‘Goodbye June.’ So when I first read the script, it was incredibly funny, touching, moving. It had all the hallmarks of a great screenplay.”
She said, “He spent the next year after that, until he was 20, working on various drafts of the script, and it was ready to go. And I said, ‘Do you think that I could maybe direct it?’ Because I felt so close to the material at that point, and I also did feel ready, and I’m just not someone who does anything by half. I knew that I couldn’t step into that role unless I felt emotionally brave enough, strong enough, prepared enough, technically aware, enough of what it was going to take. And I did it in the 50th year of my life, and I could not be prouder. Having spent so many years advocating for women getting into male-dominated spaces in this industry, I thought, ‘You know what? If I don’t do this now, maybe I never will, and if I don’t do it, how am I actively contributing to changing the culture?’ For that reason alone, if I never direct again, I did it.”
Winslet went after her dream cast and got them, but had to talk Mirren into breaking her rule to never play anyone with cancer. “When it came to directing those actors, I did have a moment where I thought to myself, ‘I mustn’t try and do anything clever,'” Winslet said. “The most important thing was the trust. We all worked together closely for an intense week of rehearsal, during which time I cooked meals at my kitchen table, and we shared stories. When you establish a space that is entirely bound up on trust and discretion, there’s a code of silence that you wrap around one another that becomes a security blanket.”
As a new director, Winslet felt strongly about creating the kind of working environment she’d always wanted as an actor. She miked her actors so that every nuance would be picked up by the sound department: no distracting boom mics.
“Spontaneity is so important,” she said. “And with this film, it was absolutely critical that actors felt free to change things and to listen to one another. So we didn’t have any overhead booms. Every single actor, including the children, was radio-miked, and I also hid little mics everywhere around the set… I also was able to lock off cameras and have our entire crew leave the space… We genuinely set our cameras and our positions and our focus. [The camera operators] would press a button, roll the cameras and actively walk away, so those actors were in those spaces, sometimes alone, to feel unobserved, to feel small and quiet and intimate, having conversations that were sometimes hard to have… I wanted to give them a space that felt disarmingly real, so that the sense of realism that was apparent in the screenplay was never diminished.”
Setting the film at Christmas was a significant choice for a movie about death. “Christmas is such a heightened, emotional time for anybody,” said Winslet. “It’s a time when we all get together, or not. We all have our different rituals and rhythms or not, but it is a time when there’s a pressure-cooker of emotion, and that sense of a clock ticking as you creep closer to that big day… I actually saw the center of the film as being the family. For me, it’s a film about a family who are facing impending loss.”
She added, “You really feel that family starting to creep closer together as she is inching further away from them, and they’re only able to do that because of the person who is moving and passing away… Life is so short and so precious, and we don’t talk about loss, we don’t talk about death and grief in Western culture, we’re not typically very good at it at all. And I think it’s just a reminder to have those tough conversations, because, because life is very short.”
Winslet had a 35-day shoot with seven adult actors and seven children, and she only had her title actress, Mirren, for 16 days. “You just get ready, you run at it, and you are just as prepared as possible,” she said. She and her assistant director figured out exactly how much time they had for each Mirren scene. On a low-budget movie, there was no overtime.
“So I had to make my days. I’m proud to say I did. If I had not made my days, I simply would not have gotten the scenes done, because we just always had too much to do. Helen was incredible. She’s the definition of a mensch… This is a matriarch who knows exactly what’s happening to her. She knows that it’s coming, and her children think that she’s in denial. So strangely, all family members are protecting one another from the truth… She’s only going to be OK with letting go as long as she knows that everyone is going to be OK when that moment comes.” Thanks to her relationship with Working Title’s Tim Bevan, Winslet was able to reach out to Netflix early on. “We felt so supported,” she said. “We had so little time, and we just had to hold hands and run at it, and that’s what we did, and that was the spirit with which this film came together and got made.”
Like many actors-turned-directors, Winslet can’t wait to get back in the directing chair. “I honestly didn’t want it to finish,” she said. “I loved everything. I loved all of it. I loved the development. I loved working with my son. I loved our crazy pre-pre-production period, and our pre-production, and actual production, and the edit, and the mix, and the grade, and all of it. I loved everything. I just hope I do get to do it again.”
Listen to Winslet’s “Screen Talk” episode below.
“Goodbye June” opens in select theaters December 12 before streaming on Netflix December 24.
