EXCLUSIVE: When I sit down with Kate Winslet, she reveals that the very thought of the Goodbye June screenplay written by her son Joe Anders, 21, being shot by another filmmaker made her feel “like I’d been stabbed in the gut.”
The Oscar-winning star wanted a stab at directing the film herself.
Winslet has worked with giants of cinema such as James Cameron on Titanic and Avatar movies; Stephen Daldry on The Reader; Sam Mendes, her ex husband – and father of Anders – on Revolutionary Road; and the superb work she achieved through collaborations with Francis Lee on Ammonite and Todd Haynes with Mildred Pierce.
Winslet was already set to produce and play a role in Goodbye June, a film that her son had begun writing aged 19 while on a screen-writing course, but the idea that she helm it hadn’t been broached until they were in the thick of the development process together.
“Christ knows,” the Oscar-winning star cries, “I’ve been on enough film sets to know what works and what doesn’t… I think that’s something that I know that I can say, and I’ve been around enough actors to, I think have some degree of instinct about what’s helpful and what’s not.”
She allows herself to boast that, “Yeah, I have had some really great experiences. And I think of wonderful people like Francis Lee, who I learned so much from, and Todd Haynes, who I learned so much from. It’s just a big, vast community of creatives who all chat and share things. And I’ve been part of that community for a very, very long time. And I think it just feels great to have directed my first film in the 50th year of my life as a woman. It feels good, it feels good.”
Kate Winslet directing a scene in ‘Goodbye June’. Kimberley French/Netflix
Winslet acknowledges how helpful it was to reunite with Lee producer Kate Solomon for Goodbye June.
She and Anders worked closely throughout the whole development process. “And we felt good about thinking about going to either studios or networks, so we weren’t sure what we were going to do with it,” she adds.
As the two of them started talking about directors, Winslet disclosed that “I suddenly felt like I’d been stabbed in the gut. And I said to him, ‘Oh, I don’t think I can let it go.’ I said, ’I don’t think I can give it away, Joe.’ And he said, ‘What do you mean?’.”
Winslet told him that “as soon as we give this to another director, it becomes theirs.” “That’s what happens. So I said that I want for us to really feel like we’ve done this. I want to direct it,” she explains.
They looked at each other “and then that was it… As I say, you just run at it with massive energy and bring everyone with you. And that’s what I did,” she shrugs.
An assured touch
Goodbye June is Winslet’s directorial debut and she brings an assured touch to a film that’s about a beloved matriarch, played by Helen Mirren, the June of the title, and her dysfunctional family, who all just need to step up and sort themselves out over Christmas.
It’s about one particular family but I found it to be a universal piece that sublimely echoes a sense of life as it’s being lived. There are several moments in Goodbye June that, after seeing an unfinished version, I will forever hold as keepsakes. The film will be released in select UK and U.S. theaters December 12 and on Netflix December 24, so I’m unwilling to give away key spoilers at this early juncture.
Timothy Spall is June’s husband and their four children are played by Andrea Riseborough, Toni Collette, Johnny Flynn, and Winslet as Julia, ostensively the most successful of the four, who’s forever banging heads with Riseborough’s fussy and tricky sister, Molly.
(L/R) Andrea Riseborough, Johnny Flynn, Kate Winslet and Timothy Spall in a scene from ‘Goodbye June’. Kimberley French/Netflix
Stephen Merchant, Fisayo Akinade, Jeremy Swift, and Raza Jaffrey also star along with an array of children, some as young as six months.
Winslet says she and Joe put together a wish-list of actors as a sort of “encouragement” therapy for her son “because of course Joe never actually believed any of it was going to happen.” “He was like, ’Mum, it’s not supposed to be a real thing.’ And I was like, ‘Well, it’s going to be a real thing, and this is what we’re going to do, so let’s literally write down who are our dream people to play these parts’.”
And it was all of those aforementioned actors. “And fucking amazingly, they all said ‘yes’,” says Winslet.
It was completely insane, Winslet recalls.
Riseborough was the first person outside of the family to read the Goodbye June script because she and Winslet worked together on Lee and The Regime and had become friends, and she’d known Anders was writing it.
Winslet and Mirren were both in David Frankel’s Collateral Beauty, although they did not share any scenes in the 2016 production. But Mirren was only available for 16 days out of a 35 day shooting schedule on Goodbye June.
It was of course a smart move to get Mirren because she’s the film’s anchor; she’s level-headed while family mayhem ensues around her.
And one feels as if one is watching a family, which is because the actors actually inhabit their roles. But also because Winslet, before sending them the script, had conversations with the ensemble where she explained that it’s “one of those things where I want us to all be in it together,” and that “we’ll all share ideas about how this needs to feel and needs to be, and we’ll try things out, and we’ll just look out for each other in that way that families do.”
Goodbye June is fictional but in part there are tiny tender threads inspired in part by the big boisterous family Anders was born into.
Cast sorted, Winslet knew that she had to be prepared if she was to score all bases during the 35-day shoot. “But it’s hardcore, and you have to be really prepared. That’s why that sort of rehearsal and prep time is so important because you have to at least feel confident in the choices that you’re making and supported by the director with those choices. So with that short length of shoot time, you just kind of run at it and all hold hands. And that is honestly what we did. And one of the great joys about directing this film was that after having been in this industry for such a long time, you do learn who the great people are when it comes to putting a crew together,” she explains.
Winslet was able to hire several first time department heads. “We had wonderful people. And something that I’ve always felt if I ever did direct, is that I’m a huge believer in [the idea that] everyone has to start somewhere. So we had a lot of first time department heads, a first time costume designer and a first time production designer. We’ve got a first time composer, first time writer. I mean, all of these things, it’s so important to keep evolving and keep being open and keep giving, not just giving people opportunities, but letting them know that they absolutely deserve to be in that position and that you’re excited to see everything they do, and that you are there to support them to do their job to the best of their ability… And so,” she notes, “that side of being a director, I absolutely adored.”
Another aspect is Winslet’s support of her son. “So Joe’s always been a really good writer in life. He’s always written really interesting things. And he was forever with a notebook in his back pocket, wherever we would be in any part of the world. At Sunday lunch, at someone’s house, or on holiday, he always had a notebook. And he got a place on a screenwriting course in London, and he was very private about what he was working on and what he was learning. And at the end of the course, he said, ‘Oh, I’ve written something and would you read it?’,” adding that ‘if it’s crap’ his mother should just lie about it.”
“And I said, ‘Well, I won’t lie, but I’m also sure that it’s not going to be crap’,” Winslet remembers.
“As a mother, I’ve spent his whole life reading everything he’s done from things at school to plays he’d written to monologues he’d written to poems. I know his work, and this is what he wrote. And immediately I read it and I said to him, I really think that we should make this into a film,” she adds proudly.
Joe Anders
Courtesy
Winslet’s film, I feel, will unlock some of the painful stuff from our past. We chat about it some more. “Well, that’s the thing,” she observes, “is that you bury stuff, the things that are hard to remember because they were painful at the time. You bury and you put into a special box of either memories or things that just caused anguish in those moments. And this was really a film about making sure that we were able to just gently turn over every single one of those stones that you so often just put in your pocket and think he’s going to just stay there for a while.”