Interviewers encounter all sorts of people selling all sorts of content and some of them have less to say than others. As far as the interviewer is concerned, of course, the more the guest has to say, the better. It's probably fair then to say that Kate Winslet, Oscar-winning actress and first-time director, is an interviewer’s dream, at least when it comes to the subject of Goodbye June, her first film as director (she also acts in it). The film is written by Kate’s son, Joe Anders.
On Arena, Rick O’Shea asked Winslet where her son got the inspiration for his screenplay:
"I mean, I can’t be specific about where he drew the characters from, because that was very much his own invention, but he had experienced, along with myself and the rest of our family, the loss of his grandmother when he was a teenager and he was always so moved by how we were all able to be there for her and we were there because we came from this one woman."
So what is the film about? The great Helen Mirren is the June of the title, the matriarch of the family who’s diagnosed with terminal cancer in the run-up to Christmas. Winslet, Toni Colette, Andrea Riseborough and Timothy Spall play June’s children and husband. It’s a terrific cast and a tribute to Joe Anders’ script that they all signed up for it:
"So [Joe] took that as a sort of emotional backdrop and from there created this fictional family with a fictional story set at Christmas, which I really thought was just so genius because what the Christmas idea gives us is that sense of a clock ticking, the momentum of time, time passing as you creep closer to this one day in the year that everybody becomes very heightened emotionally about, with the siblings simultaneously desperately trying to get to that day so they can give their mother that last Christmas because she loves it, you know?"
Kate drew on her memories of her own mother’s final days when she was working on the film, something – probably inevitably – that became an emotional experience:
"I think because I had gone through that loss myself of my own mother, it was inevitable that, as the director, there were things that I would, you know, compare those situations to and inevitably probably draw from, even though the circumstances were wildly different. And there were also things that were very emotional to – scenes that were very emotional for me to direct because my parents were together until my mum died, but I was never in the room when they had any of those private conversations, you know, my father didn’t leave her side. So, of course they would have had those conversations, so sometimes I literally felt like I was watching possible conversations that they might have had playing out before my eyes with Tim and Helen’s beautiful performances."
When it came to directing the film, Kate was eager that the film turn out to be authentic, and this meant avoiding making choices that might result in scenes or shots looking excessively self-indulgent or overly sentimental:
"I cared enormously about making sure that there was nothing haphazard about the way I was choosing to shoot it. It had to make sense. Nothing could be indulgent. Nothing could be manipulative. I didn’t want to trick the audience. Audiences are clever. And especially with a film about something that I think is so relatable, you know, I would have been an idiot if I’d ever tried to lay it on too thickly. And I had those brilliant actors. Actually, a lot of the time it was about pulling back, pulling back, you know, reminding everybody, you know, this is a family who doesn’t really say a bunch of I love yous, let’s not get too comfortable in how much we all love each other as the actors making this film."
In other words (maybe), when the cameras are rolling, leave your luvvie tendencies outside. Sounds like a formidable mother-son collaboration.
Goodbye June is in cinemas now.