How Kate Winslet and Her Son, Joe Anders, Made ‘Goodbye June’ Together

Kate Winslet and Joe Anders have a habit of interrupting each other. In a normal interview scenario, this might indicate some tension – not that a film’s director and screenwriter always get along – but here, the effect is nothing of the sort. They talk to each other in excitement about working together professionally for the first time. He’s still getting used to interviews, just starting the rollout of his new film, goodbye june (In theaters December 12, and streaming on Netflix starting Christmas Eve). And it’s not like they don’t know each other very well. Finally, here’s a sweet example of a mother and son who have some history of completing each other’s sentences.

21-year-old Anders wrote goodbye june As part of his screenwriting course at the National Film and Television School in England, he was inspired by the vivid emotional experience of watching his grandmother – that is, Winslet’s mother – slowly die in hospital after a long battle with cancer. “Most of the people in that room were for that one woman, and everyone in that room at that time was for that one woman,” he explains. heartAs Winslet nods into the Zoom window next to her. “And that was the only thing that mattered.” Anders’ script goodbye june respected this basic idea, even though his characters and dialogue were fictional. They took the NFTS course with a script that wasn’t finished yet, but they wanted some feedback on whether they had something.

So he shared the incomplete draft with Winslet. “I wasn’t pitching it, I wasn’t doing anything like that – I had no intention of making a movie out of it at all,” he says. But Winslet was impressed. She said she thought the script was great and should try to make it into a film, to which Anders said: “I said, ‘Mom, no, you don’t have to do this – you don’t have to pretend just because you’re my mom.’

“He never believed me — even now, he still doesn’t believe me,” says Winslet. “Jo definitely felt like, ‘But will people just think this only happened because you’re my mom?’ I kept telling him, ‘If the script was crap, then yes. But it is not so.

Anyone who has followed Winslet’s career can see that she is gearing up to direct. The Oscar-winning actress, who turned 50 last month, has taken on more responsibility behind the scenes over the years. He worked as a main producer in recent acting projects mare of easttown (for which she won an Emmy) and Took (Nominated for a Golden Globe). with goodbye juneWinslet remains deeply attached to what Anders wrote, but has been open about the fact that her ultimate choice to direct also had a lot to do with keeping such a personal project close to both of them.

Winslet says, “It’s what happens when a director comes in – I always find it very strange, but the writer disappears. I couldn’t even imagine doing that for Joe.” “I didn’t want Joe’s experience to stop at the point where he was given the script. I wanted him to open up immediately from that point on, because that’s the most important thing, that’s when it becomes the most exciting – when you see the actors lifting it off the page and putting the words you wrote into their mouths and making it their own.”

He had to work on completing and refining the script. “It’s interesting to try to figure out when your whole life has been mother and son — and then suddenly it becomes director and writer,” Anders says. “But I never thought I would be in a position where I would have to work with one of my parents, who have been in the industry for so long, but it feels like we’re just starting out together.” (Anders’ father is Oscar-winning filmmaker Sam Mendes, who was Winslet’s husband from 2003-2011.) In other words, Anders may have been a first-time screenwriter, but her mother — despite all her accolades and experience on film sets — was moving into uncharted territory herself, making her directorial debut.

They had their disagreements, and there were moments when Winslet had to chide Anders – such as when their first finished draft was too heavy on narrators, but too light on dialogue. “I had to find a way to say to my son, ‘This is fantastic. Cut it in half,'” says Winslet. “Or one of us will have a bad idea and the other person will think, ‘Well, I’m not sure about that’ – we definitely had a few of those.” Eventually, Netflix signed on, complicating the process — Anders was getting notes not only from his mother, but from a major international studio — and hooked the pair.

“There was a great moment like, ‘Okay, fuck me. We’re in this. Okay, we’re stuck on that — non-negotiable. We can be totally willing to talk about that scene. And yes, we can move that scene,'” Winslet says. “It was never a fight, but we had to stand our ground in some areas and be willing to bend and adapt in others.”

Winslet, who also produced goodbye june With Kate Solomon, the script highlights an area that both she and Anders prioritized from the beginning: “It meant a lot to us to reflect real life the way life is today. Having a child with Down syndrome meant a lot to us. One of our children was high-functioning autistic. And we have a child who presents as a girl, but is 100 percent a boy,” she explains. “I would say to everyone, ‘I’m just going to remind everyone again: We have a male actor who dresses exactly like a girl and is a boy. His pronouns are he/she.’ Everyone was amazing with it.”

If that sounds like she’s describing a lot of kids on set, well, that’s just the way it is. goodbye june Taking place primarily in a hospital room where our eponymous matriarch (Helen Mirren) is dying, accompanied by her husband (Timothy Spall); their four children (Winslet, Andrea Riseborough, Toni Collette and Johnny Flynn); and several of his grandchildren. “Mother’s personality was really amenable to this project – she really ran a set for the actors,” says Anders. “She knew how to make everything look as natural as possible. Most of the time in the hospital room, she would have the cameras on for long periods of time and pick up things that these kids were doing and they didn’t even know they were being filmed.”

Winslet laughs: “I don’t think I’ll ever want to direct something again in seven weeks with so many actors – and so many kids.”

His intimate filmmaking is matched by a performance that helps anchor goodbye juneShe plays the character of a daughter named Julia, who has to put her challenging career on hold to support her family. Although she doubted her ability to wear so many hats on set – and thought about leaving the role until the close of filming – Winslet felt that the role Anders had built into her bones, and realized that he had opened a new path for her as an actress.

“I often play Americans, and I actually rarely get a chance to play English people. (goodbye june) I was playing versions of all my friends – guilty-busy mom syndrome, being part of a big family and learning to love and communicate with a completely different set of personalities coming from the same woman,” she says. “There was a lot about the story that reminded me of all the great movies I love – like secrets and lies, Be happy-be lucky, life is sweet -And he stayed with me. Very rarely have I got a chance to play roles that feel like they exist in this world right now.

Maybe it was that, or the personal nature of the project, or simply exploring their relationship in a new register — but things turned sour between Winslet and Anders. goodbye june set. In keeping with the strong mother-son theme that emerges between Mirren and Flynn’s characters, Anders says, “We cried a lot.” “Making this film with my mother, and seeing that live action on screen, was quite emotional in a strange way.” There’s also a poem that Anders gave to Winslet for Mother’s Day years ago, and which plays a key role in goodbye juneHeartbreaking climax.

“Joe and I have a really close relationship — we’ve had our own journeys, but now I know how to be a mom to a 21-, almost 22-year-old,” Winslet says. “As a mother to this young man, I am constantly changing.” In fact, she can now call Anders a colleague. Yet at the end of our interview, when Winslet says, “Joe, I’m going to call you right now – please pick up,” you feel like the work is over for the moment, and it’s back to family matters.