Kate Winslet had not anticipated directing, starring in, and producing Goodbye June, a Christmastime family drama about siblings forced to come together in their mother’s final days. “I didn’t actually mean to do all three of those things,” she revealed recently in an interview at The Lineup: Live at the Egyptian. The multihypenate was joined by Krista Smith for a wide-ranging conversation about her unconventional approach to directing her troupe of performers, the personal importance of hiring first-time department heads throughout the production, and more.
She had originally attached herself to play one of the central roles after first reading an early draft of the script, which was written by her son Joe Anders, and after months of development and refinement, as the start of production loomed, Winslet had a career-shifting realization: she was ready to be a filmmaker, and Goodbye June had to be her directorial debut.
In Goodbye June, a messy yet affectionate family composed of sisters Julia (Winslet), Molly (Andrea Riseborough), Helen (Toni Collette), brother Connor (Johnny Flynn) and father Bernie (Timothy Spall) must put their differences aside as they gather around their mother June’s (Helen Mirren) hospital bed to grapple with grief, complicated love, and the tenderness of a final goodbye. “We’re not very good at talking about that,” Winslet said. “We’re not good at preparing for a moment like that one, especially if you’re part of a family like this film, where people aren’t talking to each other. There are two sisters who haven’t spoken for several years, their children haven’t even met, and they were thrown together in this way to deal with the impending loss of the matriarch.”
“It’s a story about family. It’s not a story about a person who dies, and it is cathartic,” explained Winslet. “It was up to me to get in there and bring that off the page.”
An edited version of the conversation follows.
Krista Smith: What made you choose Goodbye June as your directorial debut? Talk about how this film came to be and how you came to produce it, direct it, and star in it.
Kate Winslet: I was given the script through quite an unusual source actually, and it was something that I hadn’t expected. It was written by my son, Joe Anders. He had left school, and he had started to declare that maybe he was interested in acting, actually. And he had some small successes across a year or so, but he’d always been a writer from when he was a little boy, and wherever we went in the world, he always had a notebook. Throughout his life, it seemed to be a creative side of him that always pulled him through.
So he left school, he plucked up the courage, and he got a place, and he was in screenwriting school. And he came out the other side, and he said to me, “I wrote something, and I wonder if you’d read it.” And he said, “It’s probably really crap. Just read it, and you’ll tell me what you think.” And I read it, and immediately it was clear to me that this was a screenwriter, and this was going to be a film. And I said, “OK, we’re going to do it. I’m going to produce it.” And he was like, “Well, no, Mom, no, don’t. That’s not a thing. It’s not supposed to be like an assignment you have to big me up about.” And I said, “I don’t need to big you up. I’m telling you we are going to make this into a film.”
He developed it across approximately a year after that. And I was going to play the role of Julia, as I ended up doing. I found myself turning to my son when it was ready to be sent out to directors. And I just said, “We can’t do it. I’d never forgive myself if we let this story go, and I think I’m ready, and I would like to direct it.” And so I did.
Kate Winslet and screenwriter Joe Anders.
There’s so much nuance in the script. At one moment, it’s heartbreaking, and then it’s hilariously funny, and so moving and touching. Talk a little bit about assembling this cast, because it’s an all-star lineup.
Winslet: The willingness that they all showed in jumping onboard right away was absolutely extraordinary. Andrea Riseborough, I had just worked with her several times in a row, and she read the same first draft that Joe shared with me, which actually was incomplete. He still had 20 pages to go until he finished it. And she said yes based on that. She said, “Oh, I’d love to get the character of Molly.”
Some of these actors I’ve worked with before. Toni Collette, strangely, I’d never met, and I’d never met Johnny Flynn. My son was at an event that he happened to be at and kind of dared to say to him, “Hi, I’m Joe Anders, and I’ve written this script, and maybe when it’s ready, would you read it?” And he said, “I’d absolutely love to.” So this sense of goodwill that was very apparent, it really felt like a heartbeat. And it was so important that I cherished that, and acknowledged it and pulled them all together, and created, really, a circle of trust.
I wanted to offer these actors a different way of working on a film set because there are so many things that we’re all used to when it comes to the technical side, but a lot of those things actually serve to create obstacles in the way of really playing those parts and really finding the intimacy.
I wanted to offer these actors a different way of working on a film set .
Kate Winslet
I altered the on-set environment by doing a few very specific things. I thought to myself, “How can I offer Helen Mirren and Timothy Spall, two veterans of the film world, an opportunity to really be utterly real? How can I give them that?” So what I did was we didn’t have any overhead booms, we didn’t have radio booms, we had radio mics on all of the actors.
I wanted to let the audience discover this family. This is a family who is dealing with a terminally ill parent. This is a situation they’ve been in for several years. So when you’re dealing with long-term illness in that capacity, there’s a degree of monotony that kicks in with the hospital appointments. You go through the same sliding doors, you sit in the same chairs, and the linoleum floors are the same. The vending machines, you know the button is C17 for the Snickers. You get used to these things. And it was important to hold the space to show not just those areas that they had been occupying for several years, but the sense of which this family were emotionally flatlining whilst the matriarch was also slipping away, and the amount of coming together that they needed to do, that she needed for them to do so that she could leave in peace and that they could give her a good goodbye.
As a first-time director, you did something very interesting here with this film. You hired a lot of first-time department heads as well, so there’s a lot of first-timers on this shoot. Talk to me a little bit about why you made that decision.
Winslet: I believe in lifting people up. I believe that everyone has to start somewhere. I thought, “If my son’s a first-time screenwriter and [I’m] a first-time director, we have to pay that forward.” And also, that’s how we are as a family. That’s how we live. That’s how I parent. That’s how we walk through the world. So I try and have that always transfer in my working life; it matters a great deal.
Ben Harlan, this was his first film as a composer. And the work that he did is just beautiful. [It was great] to be in a position where I was able to turn to my children’s music teacher [for the film’s score], who had children very young himself. He had to work his job in private education in the UK to do what he could with his family, and he was denying himself the opportunity to start composing. He went back to school, he did composition for three years. And it was in the third year that Joe and I had a conversation. I said “I’m going to ask Ben.”
Our production designer, Alison Harvey, she’s a very well-known set decorator, and I kept hearing her name. I actually hadn’t worked with her before, but knew so many people who had, and said ““Go get Alison Harvey to do your set dec, she’d actually fantastic. She’s just amazing”” And I thought, “Okay, well, great. Let me have a conversation with her. But why isn’t this woman designing? That seems strange.” And I thought, “I bet she had a child,” and that probably took priority in her life. I said, “I’ve heard so many wonderful things about you. I’m curious, why have you never gone into designing?” She said “I sort of thought that ship had sailed because I had a child when I was quite young, and I said, “Right, it’s your turn now.” And she came on board.
I believe in lifting people up. I believe that everyone has to start somewhere. I thought, ‘If my son’s a first-time screenwriter and [I’m] a first-time director, we have to pay that forward.’
Kate Winslet
And lastly, our costume designer is a brilliant, brilliant first-time costume designer named Grace Clark. She’s very young, she’s in her early 30s. I had worked with her on a film called Ammonite, which was directed by Francis Lee. She was an on-set costumer in our film. And she’s just survived a really, really horrible breast cancer, and she’s become a friend. I sent her the script, and I said, “Grace, it might be a tough read, but I’d absolutely love you to do it if you can.” And she said, “Kate, I can’t have been in all of those machines, have lost my hair, and have pieces of me cut off, to not use that in my creativity. I would love to do it.” And she knocked it out of the park.
I’m very, very proud not only to be able to give those people those jobs and to elevate them in their own lives, but it also counted for so much that we were in this together. We were building this very real world side by side in lockstep, and speaking the same language, and trying to create the same atmosphere and energy for those actors every day. And it took a lot of collaboration. But I led the way as best I could with sincerity and grace. And I had these extraordinary actors on this wonderful script. And I have never felt so blessed in my life. I never wanted it to end. I loved it. It was just amazing.
