Kate Winslet says hello to directing with Goodbye June

0:00From KCRW Santa Monica and KCRW.com, it's The Treatment.

0:11Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. Has it been a year since multiple award winner Kate Winslet was last here? The actor who was last here for her film Lee, the incredible biopic, is now a director. Her directorial debut is a film written by someone she had to, I guess, really persuade to give her the script for the film, The title and I think kind of the figurative location of the film is also Goodbye June. First of all, it's a pleasure to have you back here. Thank you. It's a great pleasure to be here. And it's a family psychological journey. I don't want to call it a drama because it's not that.

0:46It was not just that. I don't want to call it a melodrama, though it has that. I don't want to call it a comedy, although it has all that stuff too. What it has a lot of is patience. And what's striking is that it was written by such a young person. And it's such a movie about taking time to observe the world. Actually, that's a very accurate description of the writer who happens to be my son, Joe Anders. And he's only 21 years old. And he's always been a very watchful, mindful, observant person of other people and the world. It's just a part of who he is. He's very calm and a very observant, smart boy.

1:25And he's always written. so when he finished school post-Covid he really wanted time to kind of meet the world I think like that post-Covid generation of teenagers really did because they felt so sad about the things that certainly in my country were taken from them that they lost out on and his creativity was something that really pulled him out of that time and he had the courage to write a short film script and he applied to screenwriting school and he was encouraged by a wonderful writing tutor, write what you know, write what you know. At the age of 19, he was coming out of COVID, as I said, but that was the biggest thing that had happened to him since the loss of his grandmother, my mother, in 2017.

2:13And he was inspired by how our very large family of people who live in many different places were able to come together and give her a wonderful passing. So he took that as a backdrop and then created a fictional story from there. It's got this kind of teeming melodramatic aspect of a Ken Loach movie for the first 15 or 20 minutes, where it feels almost like this kitchen sink drama in extremis, where everything that can go wrong is going wrong. There are explosions everywhere. It's like the world is fulminating and everything is exploding, including literally the house eventually, on this family where the mother of the matriarch, who doesn't have a line of dialogue for the first half of the movie almost, we just feel her present.

3:01And the first person really we see who was playing against type is Timothy Small, as a father who is doing something so different. He always plays, he's so often these guys who are way too in touch with their own emotions. And this is a man who is not. and we feel almost a kind of anger about his, what feels like his... Avoidance. Yes, until we get to know the family. I mean, this is why I say this is such a script and story about patients because we don't know anybody right away. We think we do because they're so vivid, but we don't. It's such a lesson, isn't it, really, in how you can never know all of someone else's story until you get to know who they are.

3:43and what I love about this film and the story itself when I first read the script and Joe handed it to me, it's all the things you describe, it's incredibly real and you're right, you know, there is drama and that sense of isolation, you know, a family of grown siblings really existing quite separately to one another even though they are flesh and blood and they have the same parents and that's life, isn't it? You know, as you get older, you grow apart, you come back together, you grow apart again, you come back together and sometimes you grow apart and you stay apart. And at the centre of the sibling story, there are two sisters, Molly and Julia, played by Andrea Briseborough and myself, and they had pulled apart and stayed apart for too long, during which time their mother was growing sicker with a terminal illness.

4:30And it's that sibling relationship that becomes part of the focus of what the matriarch, June, played by Helen Mirren, feels she needs to get them to resolve so that she can be at peace and let go. And what I love the most is that my son didn't write a story about death or loss. He wrote a story about a family. Death happens to all of us. We also all lose our parents, whatever parents may look like to any individual, depending on what kind of family you come from. But these things are so rarely talked about. You don't have the kinds of conversations when you're about to lose somebody about what do they want when they go?

5:13What will we do afterwards? How are we all as a family going to come together and deal with this? And actually, largely, families find it hard to come together and very, very hard, even harder to have those conversations. The confrontation of that is so arresting because of how vulnerable everybody is and how raw everybody feels. and so as the person directing this because I said to my son after the development process having read it originally realized my son was for sure a screenwriter telling him we are making this into a film at which point he sort of looked at me and was like what mum no it's not no look it's not some piece of it's not an assignment you have to like big me up about it's just like that don't don't do don't do that thing and I said no this is going to be a film and I was going to produce it.

6:01As I had done with Lee, I was going to play Julia, one of the sisters. But as the development process unfolded for him, and he got so good at taking notes and adapting, I realised I couldn't let it go. And it felt more and more personal to me. And I said to him, listen, we can go out to directors and I think the script is ready. But when we do that, we are giving it to them and it will become theirs. Because that's right. That's what happens when a great director comes on to anything. They make it their own. And I said, I want us to keep this as the thing that you have created. And I know that I can tell the story and be that directorial voice for the film that you've created.

6:40And that was the decision that we made. And then I got really scared. Well, it's the treatment we're talking, I guess, fear with my guest director, Kate Winslet. She's also starring in the new film, Goodbye June, which has a theatrical release December 12th. And then Christmas Eve on Netflix. What you told me about your dad, who boisterous and a performer, and Tim Spall gets to do that at the pub. He gets to be that guy where he, this part of him we have not seen before. We go, oh, this is the guy she fell in love with. Yeah. This is why they're still together. Because she still knows that person.

7:15Yeah. Even though he doesn't show that side to anybody else anymore. Really anymore, I mean to say. But just watching, again, those two scenes for me is kind of these sort of counterpoint. And I wonder if that was sort of the strain of you just holding things together as a filmmaker because we can see her back tense up and her forearms. It's just the thing you're doing right now. Yeah, because I'm thinking about it. So I'm sort of holding my body. I'm kind of bracing. I think that's the thing that I felt as the person also playing Julia, you know. But what I felt as the person playing Julia, the kind of practical sister, the one who's trying to just be forward thinking, you know, keep things as almost calm and manageable as possible, simply in order to cope, because that's what she's always done.

7:59There was always a sense that she was bracing herself, always that feeling, and trying very hard to be sensitive, be kind, forgetting entirely about her own self and her own stuff and how much she had put to one side. Which is why in effect she's a single parent because her husband is constantly away working. Yeah, her husband is constantly away working. She has three children, one of whom has special needs. And she's a very, very busy, quite high powered working mother. so all of the challenges that she suddenly faces at having to drop everything with no husband available to help with childcare and be there not just for her mother but for her children as well and the feelings of failure that she actually experiences as she starts to unravel in realising that she's about to lose someone who she has looked up to all of her life and has really held as a beacon in a very, very special way probably more so than she ever actually realised.

8:55But it's also a story about these individual, very different siblings, three sisters and one brother, all realising what their mother truly has meant to them and the impact that she has had on every single heartbeat of their lives. It suddenly hits them in a hugely emotional way. And Tim Spall, I mean, like you said before, again, I feel it's a kind of a performance that we haven't seen of Tim Spall. I've loved his work for years, in particular his work with Mike Lee, and Mike Lee was an inspiration for me. Oh, clearly. Also, in addition to Ken Loach, we see a lot of Mike Lee in that first half hour of the film.

9:32Yeah, it really, it's impossible not to see the brilliance of both of those directors, Ken Loach and Mike Lee. When I think about Mike Lee, and I think about the steady confidence and ability that he has to just stand back and observe, and it really mattered to me when it came to figuring out how we were going to shoot this film. And, you know, great actors, like the ones that I was very, very lucky to have, great actors, they will always show you. They will always show you what a scene is meant to be. They will always show you how many different versions of that scene you could have access to through the brilliant work that they do.

10:11So I had to feel, in the first half of the film, really unafraid to stand back and observe this family Because as much as the story is about them coming closer together in the second half, it's also about observing the terrible tension and the spaces between them and how they position themselves, how their body language is in response to one another. And a physical reaction to what they now know is happening to their mother and that they're going to lose her in a finite period of time. So it mattered to me to be unafraid to stand back and observe. and it was a specific choice I made to start creeping in with that camera at pretty much the midway point of the story when Connor reads his mother a poem in a room together and it's the first moment of quiet between a mother and a son that we see in the whole story and I am suddenly very, very close on Helen Mirren's exquisite, translucent, beautiful face.

11:07We're going to take a break thinking about Helen Mirren's translucent beauty. My guest who has a beauty of her own, clearly, is Kate Winslet. I'm sorry, forgive me. Director Kate Winslet. Her first film as director is Goodbye June, and it's The Treatment. We'll take a break. There's more to come.

11:27It's The Treatment. My guest is the director, Kate Winslet. Her first film as director for Netflix is Goodbye June, which I keep saying it's so striking this is written by such a young person because so often in the stories about a family written by a young person, And at a certain point, there's a judgment that comes in. Well, this is the bad sister, or this is the bad brother, or this is the bad father. And initially, we meet all these people. We have that feeling. Oh, it's almost like a series of villains being introduced in a thrill. Oh, this is the bad one. No, this is the bad one. And we realize that none of them were.

11:59No. I love the fact that it is absolutely an ensemble film with someone playing the title role. I love it. And for me, as an actor, as part of the company of players, I'm so happy in that environment. I always think I just don't know how I'd ever be able to do a one woman show or something. And I admire people who do. But I so thrive off other actors. There's nothing more thrilling than being in a room full of incredible performers. And so this was like, oh, my God. I mean, I didn't want it to end. None of us did. It was really, it was an absolutely extraordinary experience built on trust. And just to go back to that Mike Lee thing for a second, because when I think about Secrets and Lies, I mean, if you watch that movie, which I did do again about a year ago, and there are just so few close-ups, you know, there really are.

12:50He just, he stands back. But you're really sparing close-ups for the first half of the movie. Yes, and it was a very specific choice because I wanted to feel that. And I kept saying to my cinematographer, Alvin Kutchler, I kept saying to him, look, it's in one room. Largely, this story takes place a corridor and in one room. You know, let's don't let's we're not going to try and do something clever with the camera to mix it up and keep it interesting. That's not it. The actors are going to mix it up and keep it interesting. And it's our job to watch them do that. However, as we creep closer to the family, the audience, and they creep closer together, it mattered to capture that cinematically.

13:29So really going in for close-ups in that back half of the story. So you see the backs of people's hands, you see every mark and every line on their faces as their grief and realizations are unfolding. And that sense of acceptance, too, because there's denial, so much denial. They are protecting their mother from knowing the truth about her situation. But she knows. She knows exactly what's happening to her. And that scene between June and Julia, my character, I won't reveal what June says to her most responsible daughter in that scene, but it is such a turning point because you know that that mother is OK with what's coming.

14:16She just needs everyone else to be okay with it and to be okay amongst themselves. And actually, when we do reach the end of the story, you do know that that family, they're going to be okay now. It's the treatment. I hope my guest is not having a difficult conversation with me. No, I'm loving it. It's director Kate Winslet. I can't say that enough. Her first film as director is Goodbye June for Netflix. I was expecting kind of a moment of, like, over-dramatization in it to happen. Oh, that's interesting. Why? because of the milieu and because your command of the medium is shown in that first half hour where it's just so intense but we know where we are because it could have just been chaotic and us not knowing and that's somebody who can really track the action but you're building to an explosion at least in those old school especially the Ken Leach movies Ken Leach movies I mean to say there's often an explosion in that first 40 minutes then people are kind of dealing with sort of the aftermath of the emotional shrapnel And instead, this is the moment you say, wait a second now, we've been, in effect, really close to these people.

15:21Let's step back for a minute and actually look at them and watch them view through somebody else's eyes. And there's such generosity in that. These are things that matter to me. And I know what you mean about, you know, watching it and expecting, you know, something that was... Were you aware of that kind of build? People must have mentioned this to you before because there's so much intensity. I was very, very aware that, you know, a family drama can get melodramatic, you know. I don't like melodrama and I don't like self-indulgence. And I also don't like saccharine false sentiment. I can't stand it.

15:58So I was very aware that those things were, you know, they were sort of looming things that could have easily kicked in. Especially when you've got actors who are brilliant at playing and experimenting. And you got two forces of nature between Timothy Spall and Helen Mirren at the center of that family. Yeah, well, exactly. And, you know, believe me, those actors pushed every possible button that they could and were encouraged to do so. So that when I got into the edit with Lucia Zucchetti, my editor, who's absolutely brilliant, started in the very early days of Lynne Ramsey, etc. She's a wonderful person.

16:29She's also worked a lot with Stephen Frears. But I wanted for Lucia and myself to be able to really find the right balance between the drama and and also the the emotion that draws an audience in but never gets sickly. You know, finding that balance. Yes, it was on the page, but we also could have got it very wrong. and so in the edit a huge amount of time was spent with me saying no no no that's we can't use that take it's just it just pushes us a little bit too far in that direction we've got to hold on let's ease off maybe we should come back to that wide actually because I think you know so there was a lot of detail and a huge amount of thought that went into making sure that the tone really felt not just consistent but absolutely believable because I wanted the film to feel real I wanted it to feel like these are people who are just like everyone else.

17:27These are spaces that are occupied by individuals who are going through exactly that level of loss, impending loss, and experiencing lack of ability to articulate how they're feeling. It's a very odd space to be in. And I didn't want to get it wrong. Finally, what the film is about. And Lee is about this too. and these things you've kind of really gotten involved with in the last 10 years are about forgiveness and the people having to forgive themselves. And for me, that's kind of constant with what you've been doing. We've had this talk last year, but there's something about these people having to finally forgive themselves what they've been.

18:10Yeah, forgiving and moving on. And I think maybe that has something to do with the loss of my own mother, you know, and I think how polarizing that moment was in terms of making the most of everyone around you who you love so intensely because life is so precious. And I do think too, you know, as I've gotten older, I'm much calmer and more grounded in myself. I'm way less hard on myself than I was even 10 years ago. All of that stuff is just, for me as a woman, that's all just evaporated. I'm just, here I am. I've thought about directing before now, many times, and I know you mentioned it to me last year when we were talking about Lee, but I've been on so many film sets in my life and increasingly in the last 10 years specifically many people other directors included have said to me you do think like a director you do you you think like a director you know when are you going to direct and my response was always oh please don't make me partly because I was married to Sam Mendes a director and directing is a huge job it's not pop in for 35 days and go home again it's a year if not more of your life depending on the size of the budget and the length of the actual film that you're making so it's a much much more substantial commitment I've been raising a family there was no way I was ever going to be able to apportion that amount of consistently sustained focused time in a workplace until this year my youngest is about to turn 12 there's just no way I was going to be able to have done it before now but also Elvis if I'm really really honest, I just wouldn't have done it if I didn't feel I knew what I was doing.

19:48I just don't do something by half. So I wouldn't have gone into it until I felt truly, truly ready emotionally, but also technically really ready. You can't just get there and wing it. You have to know what you're talking about in terms of the technicality and the visual capacity that I had to have to be able to confidently tell that story. Well, my guess is director Kate Winslet. She directs and co-stars in the film Goodbye June, which starts theatrically December 12th, is on Netflix December 24th. I can't wait to see what you're going to be doing this time next year, Kate. Oh my goodness, I wonder what I will be doing.

20:25Hopefully I'll be looking after a wonderful group of actors and preparing to go off and shoot something as a director again, because I loved it and I really hope that I do it more. Well, whatever your next project is, please come back here to talk about it. Oh, I will. Thank you. Thank you.

20:50Kate Winslet is an Emmy and Oscar winning actor with roles that range from Titanic to The Reader to Mayor of Easttown. She is now also a director. Her debut behind the camera is Goodbye June, in which she co-stars with Timothy Spall, Tony Collette, and fellow Oscar winner Helen Mirren. It's now in theaters before moving to Netflix on December 24th. At the archive, kcrw.com slash thetreatment, you'll find a previous and equally epic conversation with Winslet, along with other actors and directors and actors turned directors. And at kcrw.com slash thetreat, you'll find creators talking about the inspirations that shaped their lives.

21:39And this week, we hear a moment of inspiration that goes back to family from another actor turned director, the late Rob Reiner. The show is produced and edited by Rebecca Mooney and mixed by Katie Gilchrist. To better days, everyone, I'm Elvis Mitchell. It's the treatment.