Special guest Kate Winslet discusses her directorial debut 'Goodbye June'

0:00Ryan Lattanzio:You have one new message. Translating. Disney and Pixar's Hoppers is now available on Disney+. You could say that again. Critics are calling it Pixar's funniest movie ever and a wildly entertaining ride. Blizzard Potato. It's certified fresh and verified hot. Now we party. This is incredible! Wow, I am clear in the rest of the day. Disney and Pixar's Hoppers now available on Disney+. Plus, rated PG.

0:40Anne Thompson:Welcome to Screen Talk, IndieWire's weekly podcast, bringing you up to speed on the goings-on in Hollywood. I'm Anne Thompson in Los Angeles.

0:47Ryan Lattanzio:And I'm Ryan Latonzio in New York. And we have a special Thanksgiving-timed episode on this Black Friday, if you will. and our special guest this week is Kate Winslet who's here to talk about her direct toil debut Goodbye June which is going to be in theaters December 12th and then streaming on Netflix December 24th.

1:07Anne Thompson:So welcome to Screen Talk. Kate Winslet is our special guest. Please, we are so delighted to have you and then you and I know each other. We've talked a lot but please let me introduce you to our co-host Ryan Latanzio. Hello Kate, pleasure to have you. Thank you for having me. It's very lovely to be here. Thank you so much. So I go back a long, long way with Kate, all the way back to Heavenly Creatures and Titanic and all that crazy stuff from the beginning. But we don't need to remind everybody that you've been nominated for seven Oscars, that you won for the reader of all things. Oh, my gosh.

1:51Anne Thompson:An extraordinary performance. And you are visiting this businessy podcast because you've been producing and you have directed your first movie, Goodbye June, which we both watched. And it's an extraordinary group of actors that you put together. But you producing Mare of Easttown and these other projects, you know, must have really brought you up to speed, you know, in terms of becoming a director. Yeah, I mean, I think also what you just said earlier in that very, very lovely introduction, which I thank you for. But you talked about how, you know, we go way back. And I have to say that I think this 33 years of my career has taught me so much because as an actor, you know, you're never just showing up and doing the job.

2:46You 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. And I definitely would never have stepped into producing if I didn't know what that job was. and it's very very different to the job of an actor it's very different to the job of a director and the things I learned on Mayor of Easttown were fantastic and I did feel ready to step into that role and going from there on to also executive producing the regime was a brilliant stepping stone because all the while I was developing Lee right through both of those projects and had been doing so for eight years up to that point and so being an active producer and putting the financing together and sometimes paying for screenwriter's 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 and being able to elevate her or yeah with Ellen Curis yes the director of Lee, cinematographer of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and I'd known her for all of that time, being able to elevate her and 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, elevating people, seeing people shine and creating a space in which everyone can excel at what they do, the actors and the crew included.

4:18So when it came to Goodbye June, my son wrote this screenplay. His name is Joe Anders. His name is Joe Anders. His name is Joe Anders. He is now 21. He's about to turn 22 years old. I need to start making my birthday present list for him. But he had always been a very beautiful writer from a really very young age. And I mean that when I say it, you know, his poetry that he would write at the age of seven and eight years old still adorns the door of our refrigerator with magnets holding his things in place. And so it didn't surprise me when he declared that he wanted to consider being a screenwriter.

5:01And although he had never written a screenplay before, whether you like it or not, this is a young man who has been raised amongst screenplays in his life. He has read many a script, he has practiced lines with me time and time again. And he was very familiar with what it took. However, being able to actually apply himself and go to screenwriting school, he got a place at the National Film and Television School, having written a short film and was accepted. He went there and he was tutored by a wonderful woman who said to him, Joe, write what you know, start there. And the most significant thing that had happened in his life, his young life, was the loss of his grandmother as a teenager, my own mother, who passed away in 2017.

5:49And this seismic event happened not just to her, but to all of us, this vast family of people, lots of children, lots of siblings, many of whom don't see each other very often anymore because of logistics of life and where you go and you travel and etc. etc and somehow we were able to really be there for her and we gave her a passing that was beautiful and he took that as an emotional backdrop and from there he invented this fictional story and this fictional family that you see in Goodbye June. So when I first read the script and he rather sheepishly almost embarrassed said to me look I don't think it's any good but I just would love you to tell me what you think and whether I can even do it or not and of course I read it and it It was incredibly funny, touching, moving.

6:36It had all the hallmarks of a great screenplay. Having read hundreds, as you would imagine, in my life, you do know when something is going to be a movie or not, or at least has a chance to be. And so I said to him, I'm going to produce this and we are going to make this into a film. And his little face, he was like, what? No, Mum, no. Mum, no, Mum, that's not a thing. Just don't do that thing. Don't do that thing you do. of trying to big me up because it's like a school assignment. It's not that this is not. And I said, no, you're going to go away and finish it. He still had 20 pages to go. I said, and then we'll talk again.

7:14So we talked again. I convinced him a little bit more. And he spent the last 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, Anne, who does anything by half. And so 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.

7:57And And 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? And so for that reason alone, if I never direct again, Anne, I did it.

8:23Ryan Lattanzio:well Kate obviously they're yeah I mean we're seeing more of a pipeline from um actors to becoming filmmakers like just Kristen Stewart is soon releasing her first feature there is this adage right that actors often make better directors and in this movie you've got an embarrassment of riches in the casting department Andrea Riceboro Helen Mirren Timothy Spall Johnny Flynn, also Toni Collette, one of the hardest working women that we see in Hollywood also. And you get great performances out of everyone here. So, you know, Anne asked about the producing aspect and how that prepared you. But what about acting?

9:01So you're absolutely right. It's an embarrassingly glorious cast. And actually, when they all said yes, literally our wishlist of people, I thought to myself, OK, how do I now make all of those great actors disappear into these roles because it's such a real script, such a real family and a story that I really think resonates in terms of being about something we find hard to discuss, you know, loss and family, the complexities of family life and impending loss and how each individual person within a family structure processes their emotional response to that. And of course, people respond largely in very, very, very different ways.

9:46So 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. I mustn't try and come up with something that Helen Mirren may never have heard before, or Tim Spall might never have considered before, because that would be completely pointless. They've heard it all. I know myself, when directors try and sort of trick you into doing something different by either what they say, or using some tactic, you smell it out as actors. You just know. So the most important thing was the trust. And so we all worked together very closely for an intense week of rehearsal, during which time I cooked meals at my kitchen table and we shared stories and it really started there.

10:30And when you establish a space that is entirely bound up on trust and discretion, there's a sort of a code of silence that you wrap around one another that becomes something of a security blanket. And that meant the world to me because I knew that they all felt that right away. Now, I did want to offer these actors a different type of working environment by way of the day-to-day experience on set. And I thought long and hard about things that I wished had been differently for me as an actress and what I would love to offer if the crew were on side. I had a brilliant crew, largely made up of people I have fostered relationships with across decades.

11:14And I started with the sound department because one thing that I find distracting, and it is really my one thing, is overhead booms. OK, so it's an individual who is busting a gut, holding their arms in the air for sometimes six or seven minute long takes, especially if it's like Sorkin dialogue and it's 15 pages long. I know that that person's body is hurting and possibly even sometimes shaking and I can see it and I find it very distracting. Not only that, but for those brilliant individuals who do that job, they follow the actor. So if they know the scene as well as you do, which they do, they know that you might walk from the bedside to the window on a certain line.

11:57And they often preempt your move by moving that boom before you've even gotten there. But as actors, we change our plan of what we're going to do depending on where the emotional thrust of the scene is leading us. And spontaneity is so important. 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 mic'd. And I also hid little mics everywhere around the set. So what that meant was that we never had to do something again because sound was lost or the boom person wasn't quite ready.

12:38And all those gorgeous, joyful nuances and little moments that you get from not just the adult cast, but the children, the children bring the joy. And I was able to use every little thing that they discovered in our make-believe scenarios that we all, as key leading grown-up actors, were giving to them. They just folded in and copied whatever we were doing, followed along with the scene. If I turned to Benji and Tybalt and I said, now, you know, in that hospital bed over there, I've actually hidden something. And your job is to find it. and little did they know that the cameras were always rolling and lo and behold there they are playing some version of their own game of hide and seek whilst a very difficult emotional scene of the entire family leaving the hospital room is happening around them because that's what children do so I did that and I also was able to lock off cameras and have our entire crew leave the space so sometimes you know you'll hear this term of like oh a closed set it was a closed set So typically what that actually means is as many key personnel as possible will walk away.

13:53And it's often applied when there's a love scene or a very sensitive, intimate scene to give the actors the space so they don't feel embarrassed or watched. What we did was we went one step further and we genuinely set our cameras and our positions and our focus. They would press a button, roll the cameras and actively walk away. So those actors were really in those spaces sometimes alone to feel unobserved, to feel small and quiet and intimate, having conversations that were sometimes hard to have. And I wanted to do that, not because I was doing it to be clever myself, but because I wanted to give them a space that felt disarmingly real so that the sense of realism that was very apparent in the screenplay was never diminished.

14:43And they really genuinely appreciated it. Helen Mirren was struck by how different it made her feel. And she commented on that, which made me really happy for her. Not for me. It made me really happy for her. And it had an impact on the general feeling of how held I think they felt. And that really mattered to me a great, great deal.

15:09Anne Thompson:So you had two cameras? We had two cameras on everything, two film cameras on everything. We shot on digital. And we used a third camera only with the children. Sometimes when they were in separate quiet corners playing around, Our B-camera operator, Natasha Mullen, who's a brilliant young filmmaker, she had worked with a camera on a different film, which is attached. It's a body rig. It's not a Steadicam. It's much, much smaller. It has a smaller frame to it. So she could hold it below her face and she would be able to interact with the children by my side. So she and I would be in a circle playing with the kids and they just never knew that this thing that she was holding would be catching their little fingers going into the packet of the potato chips and leaving the dust of the crisps on their faces, talking with their mouthful, sharing the ham sandwich.

16:07You know, it was absolutely glorious to find that level of magic. And eventually she sort of disappeared for them because she was just their friend who was sat there playing. So things like that. And it wasn't overly clever. I was aware of not trying to do anything that was gimmicky or new. It was just what I felt we needed to do to best support the environment that I wanted to create.

16:38Ryan Lattanzio:um well one thing i'm curious about is uh the fact that the movie is set uh this is a christmas boxing day movie that's going to be on netflix on december 24th and yet death is very much at the forefront of the project and so i wonder why set it around the holidays and have the movie timed to that release other than the fact that i guess these holidays are often when people are forced to be together anyway if they often when they don't want to be well i think joe's intention behind setting it at Christmas was simply because Christmas is such a heightened emotional time for anybody. And it's a time when we all get together or not.

17:17We all have our different rituals and rhythms or not. But it is a time when there's a sort of a pressure cooker of emotion and that sense of a clock ticking as you creep closer to that big day. And when you talk about how at the centre of the film there is death, I never saw it as that. I actually, I actually saw the centre of the film as being the family. For me, it's a film about a family who are facing impending loss. And actually, what I found so heartwarming, and I do feel is in our story, is the extent to which you really feel that family starting to creep closer together, as she is inching further away from them.

18:01And they're only able to do that because of the person who is moving and passing away. And there's such a beautiful message, I think, in that, because life is so short, and it is so precious. And we don't talk about loss, we don't talk about death and grief in Western culture, I actually think we're really not typically very good at it at all. And I think it's just a reminder to have those tough conversations, because, because life

18:28Anne Thompson:is it is very short so Helen Mirren uh played plays the dying matriarch and she's really quite extraordinary she doesn't do big things that's what I was struck by it was all very little very heartfelt things and she's hiding her pain you know and not trying to show it to to anyone you didn't have much time with her I had an a 35 day shoot with seven male seven adult actors and seven children which was actually eight children because the baby was identical to in girls but I had Helen Mirren in the title role for 16 days so you know you just get ready you run at it and you are just as prepared as possible so I knew it a lot she's in it a lot and I knew that every single day that I had her myself and my first assistant director Lydia Curry who is absolutely brilliant and I'd worked with intensely for six months on the regime, Lydia and I sat down and we figured out exactly how much time I was going to be allotted per scene with Helen on any given day that she was there because on a shoot that was not a big budget and relied enormously on the goodwill of an extraordinary crew, you just have to be ready and you can't spend every day going into overtime because the funds simply aren't there.

19:56And you also want people to feel happy to come back to work the next day and not to have anything be a nightmare. You don't want them to resent being there. It mattered to me hugely that the crew were equally respected. 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. When I spoke to her and asked her if I could send her a script, she said, darling, what's it about? And I said, well, and I explained the story. And she said, I do need to stop you.

20:35She said, I do have two personal rules and I've always had them. I will never play someone with dementia and I won't play somebody who has cancer and I said okay I said would you prefer that we leave this conversation here and I don't send it she said no no because it's you and I want to support you and of course I will read it and I just thought she would say a flat no and would read it quickly and that would be that she read it very quickly and she said my darling I will break my rule I would love to support you I don't I don't actually think I want to play this part I I do feel uncomfortable doing it, but I will do it.

21:13And she did have days where she would get into that hospital bed and I'd say, how are you? And she would say, well, I don't like it. And I don't like this gown. And I don't like the bed and the feeling of I don't like it. OK, tell me what to do. Tell me what to do. And I just had to be very practical with Helen. And that was what she appreciated the most. She would say, how many days until the end of the film? And I would say, well, actually, it's only story days now. This scene is sort of one day away. It's in fact the night before. So try and be a little bit more still or, you know, look a bit more this way.

21:45I mean, it was sometimes as basic as that with Helen and just making sure she felt comfortable. And as I said, stripping out the crew wherever I could so that she just could take her time and find, as you say, that that that smallness, you know, because you're right. This is a matriarch who knows exactly what's happening to her. She knows that it's coming and it's her children who think that she's in denial. So strangely, all family members are kind of protecting one another from the truth. And I think what's so beautiful about the story is that they are able to all individually reveal exactly what is happening and that they know that that's the case.

22:28and also how fearful they are of it, apart from the matriarch. She knows it's coming and she's only going to be okay with letting go as long as she knows that everyone is going to be okay when that moment comes. And it's just so beautiful that you really do feel that they are. This is a family who are going to be okay.

22:51Ryan Lattanzio:What about how you connected with Andrea Risborough? I know you co-starred together in Lee, but you also were very supportive of her on a surprisingly effective Oscar campaign for To Leslie, even before Lee came out, as was your Titanic co-star Frances Fisher at that time. I have worked with Andrea three times now. So in fact, she was brilliantly supportive of me producing Lee. She came in and she played Audrey Withers. She was the first actress to commit to the film, two and a half years away from principal photography. And she committed and she stayed committed. She didn't drift away. She didn't take something bigger or better.

23:31She kept saying to me, tell me the dates. What do you think? Is it this year? Do you think maybe because I've been offered this thing, but I want to do it. make sure that I'm putting you first and she was incredible and then we worked together again on the regime and we spent a huge amount of time together across the six months of that shoot and it was during that period of time that she had To Leslie released and you know Ryan I'm just somebody who supports good people and I certainly get behind great performances and I did a moderated Zoom Q &A with Andrea and the director, which I enjoyed so much, I thought that her performance was worthy of being seen.

24:12And she was in a position with To Leslie where there was not a very big distribution budget. And sometimes when that's the case, you do rally as troops behind the scenes and do what you can in terms of supporting people just to generate that word of mouth. And I was very, very happy to support an extraordinary performance. It was a tiny shoot, as I understand, unto Leslie. It was something insane, like 28 days. And I just thought what she did was completely, completely brilliant.

24:43Anne Thompson:So how did you get Netflix involved in this project? Well, I have been lucky in my career in the sense that I have been able to nurture and maintain great relationships with people. And Tim Bevan of Working Title is one of our executive producers. And he had somehow read the script. And he actually approached me and he said, listen, anything you need by way of support, I'm here, I can take a backseat, I can be more present, just whatever you need. But I really love this project. And I want to support you in getting it made. And so in those early conversations, we talked about finding a home for it.

25:18Netflix was one of the people that we approached and Anne, they said yes. And where I do feel they have been utterly extraordinary is in championing not only a first time director, but a first time writer and someone so young. And that has meant the world because we just felt so supported. And then in turn, what happened was I felt I wanted to pay that forward in terms of giving first time department had the opportunity to step into those roles for the first time ever in their lives so

25:53Anne Thompson:our composer was my children's music teacher he had taught both Mia and Joe and then much later on my son Bear who is now 12 years old nearly 12 years old and Ben Harlan is his name our composer and he had children himself very very young raising a young man raising a young family and when his kids were all up and grown he stepped away from his workaday job and decided to go to school for composition and it was at the end of his second year that both joe and i looked at each other and we said oh my gosh we should ask ben and so we did and he did it and i think he did an absolutely beautiful job i think the music is there and yet completely unheard it just supports the narrative um and then we were also in a position to offer a first-time uh department head as our production designer a great lady named Alison Harvey Alison Harvey has been an on-set props person for years I'd never worked with her but endlessly have heard her name mentioned oh you must get Alison Harvey was Alison Harvey going to be on that job oh god she's but I'd heard it from so many people and I kept thinking well if she's so good why isn't she designing and I thought to myself well I bet she had a family and that was priority in her life and she couldn't rely on speculating whether or not she might get a gig as a designer and just had to take the work that was there so I had a zoom with her and I said Alison I just have to ask you why have you never been a production designer and she said oh well you know I think that that ship sort of sailed for me really because I you know I had my son when I was very young and that was her story and I just said you can do this come on and she did and I just think her work is extraordinary and Grace Clark our costume designer she was our third first-time department head she is somebody who I've become friendly with she was an on-set costumer on ammonite and she herself is in remission from a really unpleasant form of breast cancer and I said to her look Gracie I know that you can do this and I'm going to send you this script you need to know what it's about and she said no Kate I'm telling you I can't have been through all of this and been inside all of those machines and had all that chemo to not be able to use my experience in my creativity and I would love to support you and I'd love to do this and so it was very special to be able to elevate people in that way.

28:25And what that actually did, which I was happiest of all about, was it pulled us all together. We were all in it together. 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 really came together and got made.

28:41Ryan Lattanzio:Obviously, I don't go back with you the way Anne does. And Anne has been around more than me, but I go way back with a lot of your movies. And so I'm wondering if there's a particular project or performance of yours that you would direct people to that you felt like didn't get a fair shake or wasn't widely seen enough. I know you were Oscar nominated for Little Children, but that's a movie that I watch like once a year. That is really one of my all time favorite movies. And and that's when I try to direct people to. And I know working with Todd Field was probably inspiring for you even becoming a director.