Kate Winslet Directorial Debut ‘Goodbye June’ Interview

EXCLUSIVE: Kate Winslet has made it. Her directorial debut feature, the heart-warming, and heart-breaking, Goodbye June, which the Oscar-, Emmy- and BAFTA Award-winning star shot from a screenplay by her son, Joe Anders, is to be released in select theaters for a limited run Friday and streams on Netflix beginning December 24. Getting the film finished has been like “climbing a mountain, but my God, it feels really good when you do claw your way to the top,” she says, exhaling.

It arrives almost on top of James Cameron’s Avatar: Fire and Ash, in which Winslet returns as Ronal.

Avatar could swallow Goodbye June in one gulp. If Cameron’s picture is the huge industrial-franchise side of Hollywood, then Winslet’s Goodbye June is its intimate, tightly budgeted little British sibling full of warmth. 

The film’s a family drama starring Helen Mirren as the titular character, a stoic matriarch who finds herself surrounded by close family: husband played by Timothy Spall; an adult brood played by Winslet, Andrea Riseborough, Toni Collette and Johnny Flynn; plus assorted grandchildren — all of whom are ordered around by June from her hospital bed.

June’s the type of woman one could describe as the backbone of Britain: nothing fases them, and you certainly don’t bloody well mess with them. I know them well: see ‘em on the bus; they refuse the offer of a seat on the underground tube network. They’d rather stand, thanks very much, and they’re the first ones to tell transgressors that none of the other passengers want to listen to their flipping conversations on their loud phones.

June will tell one of her daughters (Collette) that yellow doesn’t suit her, and she’ll not shy away from telling Winslet and Riseborough’s characters that they’re behaving like “little shits.”

Winslet has a film project that’ll she’ll star in next year; details are under wraps for now. I wonder if having made Goodbye June will affect how she takes direction because she now knows what a juggle it is to do so.

She laughs and says that she’ll be just fine, but notes: “I’m always very supportive of directors I work with, and that relationship has always meant a great deal to me. And I’m very respectful of it as well. But I think it will just make me, probably, just much more supportive really…”

I ask whether filmmakers she’s worked with in the past have seen it, such as Stephen Daldry (who directed her Best Actress Oscar-winning performance in The Reader) or Sam Mendes (Joe’s father and her second husband, who directed her and Leonardo DiCaprio in Revolutionary Road), for instance?

“Stephen has not. Sam has, yes,” she answers.

Winslet also reveals that Francis Lee, who directed her in Ammonite, in which she gives a mind-blowing performance, has seen it as well. “A couple of other directors, and Todd Field saw it actually, which really meant a lot to me,” she adds of the director who filmed her in Little Children two decades ago. “And those people, they’re just very, very supportive, great people who I always had strong collaborations with, but that feeling of being … part of a gang or something, that feeling of approval from people I care about who have done this job before me many, many times, and brilliantly — it just really means a great deal. It does make me think, ‘Oh, maybe I can do it then.’”

I assure her that she’s done well; however, she’s not fully convinced.

“But you never know,” Winslet reasons. “It’s the same thing with any acting. You can go to work and leave your blood on the floor as an actor and leave no stone unturned, but you still don’t know whether the performance is going to work or not or fit with the finished film. There’s always that element of the unknown, which is terrifying. But I think that’s why we do it, because we’d be absolutely nothing if we didn’t feel fear, because fear makes you want to push yourself further and try new things.”

But it’s clear during our conversations — spread out over several days, where I trailed her around town as she screened the film for crew, friends and family out and about in London — Winslet’s been a whirlwind of activity on this movie, promoting it as if her life depends on it. But it’s a mother’s love for her child that seems to propel her. 

One minute I’m taking tea with her at the Soho Hotel. The next I’m watching her read personal observations about love and how it doesn’t always arrive “wrapped in ribbons,” during the annual carol concert hosted by Catherine, the Princess of Wales, at Westminster Abbey. (The event, Royal Carols: Together at Christmas, will be shown on the UK’s ITV Christmas Eve, with a repeat broadcast on Christmas morning, featuring traditional carols, music and poems.)

At the Abbey, Winslet suggests that love is “in the laughter shared across a table, a hand held in comfort.”

It’s the same kind of feeling Winslet conjures in Goodbye June, with little, almost unheralded, moments of affection. 

Keeping order in Goodbye June is Fisayo Akinade (Foundation, Heartstopper) as Nurse Angel, the palliative carer on June’s ward. Squabbles and disagreements are not important, he tells the family. Giving a good goodbye is all that matters.

In a sense, Nurse Angel is a stand-in for Anders the writer, a character who sees all and keeps calm. 

Winslet reveals that Anders is “in the early stages of trying to figure out a new idea for a second film but very much just sort of still dreaming. He can’t believe any of this. He can’t believe this film got made. He just can’t believe it. It’s so sweet.”

Could Goodbye June have been made without her involvement, I ask?

“Yes, I do [think so]. Yes, I do,” Winslet responds without hesitation. ”Because with a script that good, you’re never going to not attract great actors. With dialogue that strong and that natural, I absolutely know it would’ve been made without me.”

I saw an early cut that ran for around 2 hours and 18 minutes. The finished version without credits is a good 30 minutes shorter. “So I got a whole load more out and the grade and the mix and the music and all of that,” Winslet says of completing post-production. She’s proud of it and keen to stress that “I never wanted it to finish. I just never wanted it to end. I can’t tell you how much I loved it.”

Everything Winslet has worked on has led to Goodbye June.

“The thing is, because of the number of times I have been fortunate enough to be No. 1 on that call sheet, I take that very seriously,” Winslet tells me. “So pulling a cast together, keeping everyone afloat, bringing the energy, I’m no stranger to that stuff. And actually that really kicks in when you do long television. So like, Mare of Easttown, for example, The Regime — these huge long jobs, you have to keep everyone going because when the chips are down and you’re like, ‘We’re going to run over and now it’s raining outside.’ You all have to just rally. So with something like this where I had all those brilliant adult actors and children, 35 days, Helen Mirren for only 16 of those 35 days, you’ve got to be good humored and you’ve got to be f*cking ready and you’ve got to have nice people.”

Having also produced the biopic Lee, she knows what producing involves too. 

“Actually, when an actor has a producing credit, they can’t just have that credit. There’s a whole load of …they’re going to meet certain criteria. They really do. And it’s a proper different job. I mean, I’ve seen more cost reports than I ever care to admit that I have. When you learn how to do each line of a budget and you know how to hand-pick a really lovely crew on something like this, that had to feel small and had to have the understanding of an empathetic team who knew that when I would say to them, ‘I think if we can block off the cameras and just walk away,’ and then they’re like, ‘Yep.’ And they’d set positions literally press record and would leave the room.”

Winslet explains that she “did that because when you’ve got veterans like Helen and Tim,there’s nothing I can say to them that I haven’t heard before …And when directors try stuff, you sniff it out and you think, ‘Ah, OK.’ And it makes you not trust. So I knew that I wasn’t going to try any clever, tricks-y shit. But I did also feel, intuitively, what the dream working and environment is and that’s with as few crew as possible, all working together to establish a way of working that affords that, we weren’t able to do it all the time, but where we could, we did.”

Winslet cites a  moment that exemplifies her point. There’s a scene with Mirren and Collette sitting on the side of a tub in a bathroom. That was shot in 20 minutes because Winslet had the cameras set and ready remotely. “I was like, ‘We’re totally alone in a closed bathroom with the cameras on.’ And it’s brilliant because they just do it and feel it out and then they can really be quiet and small and with each other.”

Over the years Winslet has watched and learned enough to know she had to be ready on Day 1.

“I think I’d seen enough. I learned enough, but also considering how many small films … with the exception of Titanic in the early period of my life, everything else I did was of the kind where you run at it, be ready for any eventuality.”

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For example, Winslet cites Michel Gondry and Charlie Kaufman’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, released in 2004.

“Massive long shoot, actually 16 weeks, very long for a film of that size,” says the star. “But everything changed all the time. It changed all the time because of the weather, because of locations, because it was just an ever-evolving thing. So knowing to be ready and knowing how to support other people who are having meltdowns because the schedules just changed. I just grew up doing that. But I’ll tell you where I’m very lucky, I’ve worked with some incredible directors, but I’ve also worked with some directors who are less comfortable with the language of directors. So they might be brilliant visual directors … but sometimes you do have to really buddy up with your actors and lean on each other much more. So I’ve done a fair share of that. Not to say I haven’t had incredible time because I really, really have. But you learn quite quickly what simply isn’t helpful,” Winslet states.

“For sure I just learned by osmosis what not to say. And also the other thing too, I really have learned there is nothing more frustrating to a group of actors than when a director doesn’t really know what they want because then they just go, ‘Oh, just try something else. Just go again.’ You think … ‘Well what do you want?’ And you can tell very quickly when a director really isn’t quite sure of what a scene is supposed to be or what it actually means, sometimes they aren’t even sure where they’re going to put that scene into a film. And I’ve worked with many directors when working with children who have just said to me, ‘You can do the kids, can’t you?’”

But she adds that “the number of times I’ve worked alongside children, and the director has said to me, ‘I’ll just let you do that.’ I’m like, ‘Great, no problem.’ I love working with children. Easy peasy. I know how to get them to be kids because you can’t teach children unless they’re exceptionally gifted. You can’t really teach children, very little ones, how to act. But you can give them every opportunity to just be. So there was a lot that went into making them feel like they were on a 35-day playdate. They were just delighted to be there. … And they just sort of fell into this make-believe world that we were creating for them all the time and establishing situations for them to just go in and be kids.”

Working with editor Lucia Zucchetti  (The Queen, One Life) on Goodbye June was fascinating to Winslet because she felt that the “film really started to reveal itself and push back against things that I might have been trying to do.”

One thing, she says, “that was really clear to me as you just described is that June, she is the backbone of England, that wonderful frankness that women have throughout their lives but that they only feel brave enough to truly express once they get into their sort of last or later chapters of their life and the strength with which she had to somehow from her hospital bed carry her family through and continue to love them individually based on what each sibling needed from her.”

As their mother, June knows her children, especially the girls, inside and out.

“Yeah, she knows them, “ Winslet agrees.  “And also they’re still her little girls. At whatever age I think you grow to be you’re still someone’s child. And I think the other thing that’s lovely as well, that feels very apparent to me in the story is that when the chips are down, the one thing that binds them all together, in particular those two sisters was their shared childhood. And that’s something that you always have as a benchmark no matter what happens to you in life or which direction you end up going in and where you end up living.

“That childhood, whether it was a good childhood or not, those memories are always something that binds you and bonds you. And that feels to me very palpable and important about this story too,” she pronounces.

As this column noted back in August, watching an early print of Goodbye June, there’s a sense of watching life unfolding.

Winslet nods and says: “And that was something that mattered to me enormously because I think it’s not a film about cancer, that’s not the central narrative and neither is it even a film about a woman dying. It’s a film about a family. … And I think if we are making that choice and able to sit in a movie theater and watch something, I want to be able to offer people an experience where they see a version of themselves in a story that’s unfolding. And whether it’s just that they can relate to one of the characters or the situation. And I think given the theme of the story that it is about loss and it is about how difficult those conversations are to have.

“But with this film, I do hope that it offers people an opportunity to be brave enough to have those challenging conversations with the people that they love because we do only have one life and we do have to live for today. We don’t know what’s coming tomorrow. And somehow I feel it was important to put that into the story too and to keep it feeling really British,” she says.

Somehow the film sort of gives us permission to linger and consider our own personal circumstances.

“It’s true,” Winslet agrees. “I sometimes think if someone’s seen a film that I have been a part of and all it makes them do is want to walk home and think as opposed to jump in a cab or get on the tube or makes them want to just go to the pub and decompress with a pint with a friend, that’s enough. Even being able to offer that opportunity to people where they feel a little bit more seen and heard. I know it maybe sounds a little bit glib to say it, but actually when you’re making a film like this, there is a responsibility to make it feel really real and not to be making the film version of a story about loss.”

She adds: “And so all of the things that were part of the finished film from the sound mix to every single word that the children says to the timing of the music, each cue, every single thing had to land in a way that was never pushing a narrative or slipping into false sentiment because that is just something that I myself really don’t like. … And I don’t want to be tricking or forcing an audience. I want them to be able experience it in their own way as tenderly and sensitively as possible. And always making sure that there was that punctuation of humor here and there. If something ever felt in the edit. … ’Now we’ve been feeling too sad for too long here, OK, we just have to go to Toni Collette or we have to look at what Tim [Spall] is doing over there in the corner. They’d always be doing something that provided that little bit of brevity.”

Creating the right kind of environment was also a vital element, and Winslet asserts that she made damn sure “I was giving the actors a space in which they could discover things and unravel and hold back. … My focus was entirely them and creating an environment specifically for them.“

For Winslet, that required putting up a strong front. “And that meant for me as the director, I had to often hide quite a lot of, not so much stress … but I had to hide a lot of the pressure I felt to complete our days. I had all the seven children every day. I had to make sure that my energy was consistently good. And when I’ve got the first AD saying to me, ‘We really have only got an hour and a half to get this scene and you might have to compromise your shots.’ And me saying to her, ‘It’s OK. It’s OK,’ trying to get those conversations to remain private so that the actors never felt any pressure from me to get on with it or produce something. They had to always feel as though there was all the time in the world and there never ever was. And yet somehow, somehow I made all of my days and even got extra things…” 

Recently, I’ve rewatched several of Winslet’s past movies, including Nancy Meyers’ merry romance movie The Holiday. The segment she shot with Eli Wallach where they chatted about classic movies got me wondering about when Winslet first understood the power of cinema and storytelling.

“I’ve always been captivated by films,” she responds. “But I also grew up in a household that there was certainly never any money to go to the cinema. Although I do remember the first film I ever saw on a big screen was E.T., and strangely, I was taken alone with my dad, and I don’t know why — whether it was just they decided that that was going to be my treat as opposed to all the others or whether my dad wanted to just have that experience with me. … But I’ve never ever forgotten it,” she adds wistfully.

“And the memory of being utterly transported by a filmic experience has really stayed with me.“

Continuing the theme, Winslet remembers getting “the shock of my life being at the 1994 Venice Film Festival [with Peter Jackson’s Heavenly Creatures] never imagining that the cinema would be full, never imagining that people would clap or stand up. And they did both. And it wasn’t about being or feeling celebrated or acknowledged. It was about knowing what it meant to be in one room with a group of strangers who were all sharing a similar emotional response to what they had just seen. And the power of that is something that I think is … very unusual and is incredibly unique to cinema.”

Outside of major sport, Winslet was hard-pressed to think of any other pastime “you could perhaps compare … that sense of a shared moment in time.”

Subconsciously, Winslet reckons that experience in Venice is part of how she ended up behind the camera directing a film. “Not because I was trying to please an audience or pull an audience together, but in how I wanted to make the film. Pulling our tribe together, our crew and our cast, and making that a shared experience. It does all translate to what ends up on camera. It all comes through. It really does. I think sometimes film shoots can be really very difficult. And God knows I’ve experienced a number of them that have gone over and have been challenging for variety of different reasons. And that becomes a burdensome experience at times for everybody involved. And I knew that I was in a position to just not allow for that to happen. And that does mean that leadership and leading with integrity and grace and joy and kindness matter to me probably more than anything because that energy impacts the day more than I can possibly explain. It really does. If you’ve got a lead actor or a director who’s in a mood or they’ve had a row with somebody at home, or they’re worried about how the week’s going to go, you just can’t carry that into a creative space because it means that you are giving off a vibe that is not conducive to anyone doing good work at all. And certainly with all those children, I mean, I just had to keep them excited and feeling like they were on a 35-day playdate, which they did. They never wanted it to finish,” Winslet says.

Thinking back, Winslet announces that she’s “very lucky to have worked with not just amazing actors but on the whole, really great people. And there are some actors who might be a tiny bit late sometimes, and there are some actors who aren’t as emotionally available, but that’s just who they are. But one thing I really learned early on is you can absolutely never know someone else’s story. And you have to just all get along with each other and muck in because it’s not worth judging people or trying to change whatever they bring into the room. And actually, often what they bring into the room is precisely the thing that makes them brilliant anyway. And so also how to adapt was something that I was exposed to very, very early on. And it was for sure something I felt with Emma Thompson [on Sense and Sensibility.] I also felt that very significantly working on Hamlet at the age of 20 with all those extraordinary actors and Julie Christie and Derek Jacobi all behaving immaculately and really setting the bar high in terms of not just the work they were doing but how they would treat people. And it is just so important. … You can’t have stuff and baggage. It’s just a waste of time and it just doesn’t help.“

One thing Winslet found difficult on the Goodbye June shoot  “was not being able to physically be with the actors all the time between takes or when we’re changing setups. They’d all be sharing stories and having these great conversations. And sometimes I would just make sure that the camera team knew what they were doing, and then I’d be like, ‘What are we talking about? What have I missed out on?’ While these sort of shrieks and giggles that would come from various corners that were always the actors chatting away. It is great having those conversations because we’ve all got stories, and they’re all really juicy.“

Winslet knew she wanted to direct Goodbye June after reading her son’s screenplay. Had that been his intention all along, for her to direct it?

“Well, he wanted me to like it, of course, because I’m his mum and children want their parents’ approval, don’t they? Whatever it is that they’re trying to do in life. But he really wasn’t thinking about me directing it because I’m not a director. So he knows me as he knows me as a producer, and he knows me as an actress, and he’s been testing me on my line readings since he could read words off a page. And so it was a real moment for me to turn to my son and say, ‘My God, we can’t let this go. I really think I could direct it. I think I could do that now. I really think I’m ready. And I just don’t want to regret that we gave it to somebody else.’ And also that I wanted him to learn and be part of it, and to see these characters come to life that he had created.

“Because you know what it’s like, writers aren’t on set. They’re off writing something else, or they’re not included. But Joe, he’s a very wise, observant young man, and I couldn’t imagine anything better than having him there to run ideas by. And sometimes it was very helpful for me if I was directing the scene that I was also acting in. There was no time for me to go and check takes ever because I just had to keep going. So I had to rely on the brutal honesty of a family member who was right there, and I could go to him and say, ‘Tell me anything. Did I do the thing that we talked about?…’ And he would be able to say, ‘Try this, try that.’ But that is filmmaking. That’s what it should be like, being open to hearing what anyone frankly has to suggest. Because often people will give you an idea that you may not necessarily have had yourself.”