Kate Winslet about to unveil her fourth film at the New York Film Festival, sat down with Film Comment Editor-In-Chief Nicolas Rapold for a career spanning conversation to celebrate the release of her newest film “Wonder Wheel.”
“It all started last summer,” she said about her latest film, “my agent called and said, ‘Woody Allen wants to talk to you. He’s going to send you a script and he wants you for the lead but he wants to talk to you.’ ”
Winslet, doing one of the best Woody Allen impressions this writer has ever seen, went on to explain that Allen was convinced the role in the film would be a “tour de force” for her. “I was not myself at all. I felt like I was giving a bad telephone audition,” she said regretfully. “[Allen] went on to say all these extraordinary things, then telling me I was going to hate it. He said he thought of me for the role and would very much like me to consider it and then told me again said that I might hate it.” The audience began to laugh and Winslet said, “that was literally the whole conversation!” Winslet of course assured him she would read the script and Allen promised to get it over to her.
After getting the script Winslet said she immediately read through it. “I was so stunned by this character and this incredible film that he had written and I promise you I said out loud, ‘Oh I can’t do this,'” she recalled. “I just can’t do this. No. I thought there is just no way I can do this.” Her husband even asked for details to which Winslet said she replied, “It’s brilliant of course, but I can’t even do it. So don’t look at me, it’s not happening, I can’t do it, I’m not doing it!’ ”
“She felt so far out of my grasp,” Winslet elaborated. “Ginny felt so far away and complex is isn’t even a word I can use for her. There’s a lot of confusion with her, but she is living a life so full of shattered dreams and proper mistakes that really made a difference to the course of her life.” The character started off having the luxury of choice in her life but no longer does. “To play this character who throws it all away at the possible chance or hope of something new somewhere else and to play a woman like that, who also drinks and shouts and has a son who lights fires. I just thought to myself well, I don’t know where to begin.”
Eventually Winslet said she got herself together and decided that she had to do it. “We were all really terrified actually. The idea of working with Woody Allen, it’s so thrilling. I’ve been aware of him for as long as I wanted to be an actor, and my parents were so proud that I had the change to work with him,” she said.
Winslet said she met Allen twice before, once for a film around the time she was doing press for “Heavenly Creatures” [in 1994] and she said to a stunned audience, “I didn’t get the part! I remember meeting him, being sick at the very thought of it, and he just said, ‘Okay very nice, thank you.’ I don’t even remember what film it was for but I thought I was never going to work with him again.” The second time was for a different film but, “I just had a baby and it wasn’t a good time because of my family life so I’m very very lucky I got him this go around.”
When discussing Kate Winslet’s character in the “Wonder Wheel,” Rapold described the home the character lived in as a “kind of stage” and also noted that the character is very aware of herself and at one point even says, “I’m just playing a role, I’m not really [Ginny].” Winslet agreed and said, “That’s why she was difficult, because I think that every step she took, every breath she took, every moment of her life she just kept thinking this really isn’t me, and of course the tragedy perhaps is that it is really her. This is what she has made her life and that’s it, she cant really blame any one else for it.”
In terms of the production, there are two very common misconceptions about working with Allen that Winslet was sure to clear up. The first is that he doesn’t rehearse and the second is that he doesn’t interact with the actors, “neither of which are true,” she said. The whole cast would go on set in the morning, get hair, makeup done to be totally camera ready. “When Woody [Allen] would arrive we would rehearse the daylights out of the scene and much of it was readily choreographed and thoroughly thought out,” Winslet said. She is also sure that Allen only saw the cast in costume. “He certainly always saw me in costume and I actually liked it that way, always in character,” she said. Allen goes through great lengths to ensure his films are properly constructed as well. “He might cut a piece of dialogue in a scene, and if a scene is too long he would tell us to break for lunch and go fix it!” Winslet said these changes would sometimes make her panic, but the adjustments were commonplace, as were the rehearsals. “We would always rehearse, so it became very much like a piece of theater. It was something that included everyone, the camera guy was running around, there was lots of Steadicam happening, so lots of wires needed to be hidden and carpets pinned down so people didn’t trip.”
Winslet noted that of all the film sets she had been on in her career, this was the most purely actor/director relationship she’d ever had. “There were no dinners, none of that social stuff going on. It was very much like a business thing and I really liked that. Often for me, I find myself wanting to really make sure the director feels included with the actors in some way because they are usually off doing other things,” Winslet said. “It was really nice to not bear the responsibility of planning and arranging gatherings for the cast no crew [so I could] focus on the job and really, there was no way around it, there was just so much dialogue.”
Also of key importance was establishing the dialect of Ginny. After working with her dialect coach of 20 years, Susan Hegarty, the actress said, “we found something from a broader New York accent, as if [the character] had some education maybe some proper theater training.” Winslet then recorded the dialogue and sent it to Allen. Winslet described the anxiety of waiting to hear back as “waiting to know if Father Christmas was actually going to bring me a present or not.” As expected, Allen approved the dialect and the character of Ginny began to take shape. “I haven’t done many films that were quite as immersive as this one was,” Winslet said, “it was a diligent and committed experience for everyone involved. ‘The Reader‘ was a little like that, ‘Little Children,’ and ‘Revolutionary Road‘ were a little like that too.”