With Little
Children premiering as the Centrepiece
Gala at the Times BFI 50th London Film Festival
last week, Director Todd Field and star Kate Winslet
were in town to chat about the film
What
have you been doing for the past five years?
Todd
Field: We completed In The Bedroom in 2001.
It was acquired by Miramax and then there was a very
long period of promoting that film - all the way until
April '02. I took about six months off and then started
on another project which I worked on for about a year,
year and a half. I had trouble getting funding for
it. Then I read Tom's book in 2003 and began working
on the script.
On paper, it sounds a dream for actors. Did it take any persuading to play
the role?
Kate
Winslet: Well, it didn't actually take much persuading
at all. Todd had wanted to meet with me and discuss
the possibility of me doing this and playing this part.
The thing that was so different about this process,
of committing to playing Sarah, was that Todd sat me
down and - I've never had this before - he was very,
very specific about why he thought that I could play
that part. In really minute detail to the point where
I thought: "God, I feel good about myself now!
Of course I could play this part!" [Laughs] But
it's a big decision to make, to play someone like Sarah
because it's such a challenge. She's an American woman
and is nothing like me essentially.
Also, there was some part of me that thought, "can I do this?" Have
I actually got the stuff that's required for Sarah? Once Todd had convinced
me that it was all going to be alright, I then read the script and it became
clear to me that I would be some serious kind of fool if I said no.
Was Kate the first person on board in terms of casting?
TF: Kate
was the first person that I asked to come and make the
film with me.
Is it true that the film itself evolved from another book that you couldn't
get the rights to?
TF: One
of the things that I'd thought about doing after In
The Bedroom was another book but yes, there were
rights problems and I didn't pursue it. There was an
idea in that book among many things that resonated for
me in Perrotta's novel that I thought were present in
this book. So that was probably a large part of the attraction.
How did you tune in to the peer pressure and parental dynamic of playing
Sarah. Did you draw from anything that you might have experienced in your own
life as a mother?
KW: To
be honest with you, the only similarity [between myself
and Sarah] is that we were both parents. Although I have
to be honest, now that I'm talking about the film and
having seen it myself I realise that there's a lot of
who I think Sarah was up until the moment that you meet
her in the film and various things that have happened
to her. I feel that in creating a back story for her,
I was actually able to relate to a lot of that stuff.
But the person that you actually meet in the movie, it's
obviously only that we're both mothers.
The biggest challenge was playing somebody who was not a good mother. That
was very hard. It's not that she's violent or shouts or is incredibly aggressive
or anything like that. It's just that she's so inept at it; she doesn't how
to be a parent, she doesn't know what to do with this small child. Of course
she loves her but there's something to Sarah that is rather inconvenient about
this little girl - she sort of gets in Sarah's way a bit. I think that one
of Sarah's great weaknesses is the fact that when she had this child, she somehow
felt that she was losing a part of herself.
Obviously, for the majority of parents and certainly me you gain a million
worlds when you have a child. Certainly, it's the thing that's changed my life
and made me unbelievably happy.
But Sarah somehow resented the presence of this little girl and I think there's
something so remarkable about the end of this film in the sense that she has
that moment, almost of punishment, where she gets her back into the car seat
and realises that she could have lost her in that one moment - anything could
have happened; a car could have come by and knocked her over... She realises
that she's been making a terrible, terrible mistake. She's forced to look into
herself and what she sees is somebody who's been completely neglectful emotionally
and is now not going to do that anymore, at all. More importantly, she realises
that her chance at future happiness is entirely dependent on looking into the
eyes of that little girl and being the mother that she always should have been
and being the parent that Lucy really needs for her to be now.
Do you have any personal stories or experiences of suburbia that influenced
the creation of the version of it we see on-screen?
TF: In
The Bedroom takes place in a fishing village off
the coast of Maine. There's about 5,000 people there
so it probably couldn't be further from suburbia. It
is a small town and there are currents of behaviour
there that you won't find in the rest of America. It's
almost another country. It's more like Scotland or
some place like that. It was part of what interested
me about those characters because the rhythms of their
lives and what they're allowed to say or not say are
very different than our characters, who have diarhoea
of the mouth. They're not 30-year-old people living
in LA.
But in terms of the suburbia component of Tom's book, it's probably the one
thing that probably made me hesitate from actually doing this story. Only because
there's a long tradition for exploring what you call suburban angst, or the
lack of identity in America based on the homogeny of culture and the hijacking
of culture. But I don't think that in the time we're living in right now there
really is suburbia. If you go to the middle of Ohio, or the Upper West Side
of New York City, everyone is wearing the same Banana Republic sweater, they're
listening to the same music, they're talking about the same things...
For instance, the first couple of lines in the movie are these women that Sarah
sort of audibly editorializes for herself that came in on things that justify
her paranoia?? about them before the camera turns around and we realise that
we're listening through her ears. They're lines that were said in a fairly
Tony area of the Upper East Side of Manhattan in Central Park. They couldn't
be further from suburbia. These are very well-heeled women living in multi-million
dollar town houses.
I think what interested me about his book had to do with a much political nature.
By that I mean playground politics, parental anxiety, the judgement we have
of ourselves and others, characters in search of an identity and how that is
berated and bridged with this idea of the opposite of that, which is in passion
and turning the other cheek, giving the other fella the benefit of the doubt,
and encouragement and lack of judgement. Those two things are what attracted
me to the book. The fact that it's set in some kind of area outside of Boston,
Massachusetts, supposedly, is really beside the point. I wouldn't have really
cared where the setting was.
In terms of what's visually depicted in the movie, it's not real; it's not
meant to be real. The playground is a playground from my imagination about
the way I remember a playground when I was a boy. Those play structures don't
exist. My children never played on play structures that old - they're from
1965. That house full of clocks... I grew up in a house full of clocks. Those
hummel figures at the beginning with the little children, those are from Tom
Perrotta's house as a boy growing up in New Jersey. We tried to find a setting,
or almost dreamscape, that had meaning for us personally as children. It was
never meant to be a realistic depiction of suburbia in any way, shape or form.
KW: Not really. There was definitely a time in my first marriage when
Jim and I moved to Surrey. It's actually something that he and I now say: "What
an earth were we doing? Why did we do that?" It was a perfectly nice house
but there's something about making a decision to move out of the city, or move
away from an area that you're used to and going somewhere else, that somehow
this sort of feeling of "is this it?" surfaces. Do you know what
I mean? I was in a situation where Jim and I both felt the same thing and in
actual fact, while we were still married, we moved back into London.
I didn't have the same sort of feelings of being isolated and trapped because
of where I was living. But it was very clear, very very quickly that 'oh no,
we're too young to have done this'. But I do know women who have moved out
of bigger cities into areas near the countryside or more suburban areas that
are still close to bigger towns. I remember I asked one friend, "so how
is it now that you've moved?" And she said: "It's a choice." For
her it was a choice and actually she was very, very happy with it.
I think that's a difference. When I think about these women in this film, they're
living in this area but they've always wanted to live there. All the women
on the park benches, that was their plan for themselves. I believe as teenagers
they wanted to get married and have children and move out of the city and live
in the suburb in a perfect little house with a picket gate at the front. That
was what they wanted but the thing about these women that's slightly off is
that they're so smug about it. They do sort of think that they're slightly
superior to other people because they've got what they assume everyone else
wants. Sarah is obviously entirely different to all of them and has found herself
living in this part of society quite accidentally. She's found herself leading
a life that she really had not planned at all for herself. I think if circumstances
were otherwise she'd probably be off traveling in Morocco, or India, or going
to Paris and listening to wonderful lectures. So the thing that has made Sarah
feel so isolated and trapped is not, I believe, because of where she's living
but because she's so completely divorced from who she once was and who she'd
planned to be. It's given her this terrible feeling of fear and isolation.
TF: She also feels superior to those women, even though she doesn't
really know how the hell she got there....
KW: Yeah because she can see that at some point those women may in fact
go mad. She's very aware of how important it is to never become like that.
That would be making the choice to be someone that she's not and also be like
them. I did admire those qualities in Sarah. She doesn't buckle or give in,
she just carries on trying to remember who she is and embody that person, however
weak she may have become. There's still this kind of flicker of strength in
that.
You've got four films coming out in the next two months. Are you as much
of a workaholic as that suggests?
KW: Absolutely
not. These are films that I've done over the last three
years. They just are coming out in a particular four
month period of time. I'm not a workaholic, I'm a home-aholic!
Do you feel the desire to be at home more now?
KW: I'm
actually taking a year off at the moment. Yes, I ordinarily
do one film a year and the rest of the time I'm at home
with the kids. Even when I am working I'm still basically
at home and with the kids. I've never left them to go
to work.
The only time I did have to leave them was when we were shooting All
The King's Men in New Orleans. We had about four days of shooting
in an area where there literally alligators climbing out of the bayou and sitting
in the garden. I'm sorry but I don't know a single parent who would willingly
take their children to that place. [Laughs] So they were in LA with Sam at
that particular time. Other than that, we've always gone everywhere together.
So this notion that busy actresses somehow just swan around and leave their
children for two months while they go and pursue their acting career is quite
honestly not actually true. I certainly have never met an actress who has done
that.
Joe's nearly three and this is what I've been doing for the first part of his
life with big gaps in between. It's just that all of a sudden everything's
coming out now. As an actress, you have absolutely no say about that, or any
control.
You and Patrick enjoy some fairly physical and explicit sex scenes in the
movie. Do those scenes get any easier?
KW: First
of all, I wouldn't say that either of us necessarily
enjoyed it. I do feel the need to correct you there because
I don't want to run the risk of being misquoted [laughs].
But it doesn't get any easier, no. Every time that I
shoot a nude scene or a love scene, I always find myself
saying that's it now. I'm not going to do this again
because it's really difficult and it's really, really
scary and I'm not quite sure how much longer I can get
away with it for, anyway!
But then with Little Children, the thing is those scenes weren't the
hardest scenes. The hardest scenes were the more emotional ones, or the more
revealing ones about the character when you're so concerned about being as
honest as you can and really get it right. So, yes it's tough, it's totally
and utterly tough. But we try to kind of laugh about it because you sort of
have to - the situation is so completely ridiculous. But also, more importantly,
Patrick, Todd and I were very concerned to make sure that the performances
in those scenes - with regard to the acting and the saying of lines - was right.
Because these two people have an affair and, yes, they're having sex behind
closed doors and are having this entire affair essentially behind closed doors
and they're afraid that people may find out, etc. But the point is that through
the intimacy of those scenes, who these people are as individuals is not only
revealed to each other but also to themselves. Sarah really comes out of herself
and changes as a result of being in that physical position where she's feeling
something that she's never felt before. It completely changes who she is and
it changes who Brad is too. I couldn't have imagined turning around to Todd
and saying: "Now about this nudity..."
How did you approach the nude scenes as a director?
TF: As
an actor, I've certainly had to do my lion's share of
that - you know, really embarrassing situations where
typically your sitting in an abandoned building in the
Philippines on a Roger Corman movie with some Filipino
girl on a long lens where they're going to dissolve some
body parts with some kind of synthesized music underneath
and everybody's drunk....
So I had no desire to do that. Yes, these people are
making love but there's more happening in those scenes
other than two people shagging. It is about the emotional
forward movement for the two of these characters, first
and foremost. Other than the titillation factor of shooting
those kinds of scenes with maybe 200 crew members standing
around holding robes, for the actors they know that they
have to be acted like anything else, and so you approach
them just like any other scene. Both Kate and Patrick
have had experience of having to do something like that,
so we talked about it like any other scene. Truthfully,
it was probably the easiest thing that we did during the entire shoot. We were
fairly alone when we did those scenes - there was only a sound man, a camera
assistant and the three of us for a couple of days. So we were able to work
very efficiently and really focus on what these scenes were about as opposed
to "okay now let's do the bit where you guys are climbing the wall..." It
was much more about what had to be accomplished dramatically in these scenes
for these two characters.
Did you get any bruises or scrapes while filming those scenes?
KW:
I was fine. Patrick actually bruised the front of his
legs when we were doing the scene in the laundry room.
I warned him. I actually said to him that you do need
to ask if they can put some padding on the front of the
seat - see if the sound man has got a sponge. Sure enough,
they did bring the sponge in for him and it was a little
bit more comfortable but it was a bit too late. He came
in the next morning and asked: "Do you have injuries?" I
said: "No, I'm completely fine." But I think
he'd kind of bruised the front of his thighs or something....
I read somewhere that you don't read anything about what's written about
you. Does it matter to you what's written about you?
KW:
I don't read reviews. Just because that is something
that's directly connected to my job. I'm doing this because
I love it, not because I'm necessarily looking for approval
or anything like that. To me, it seems that reading reviews
- whether they're good ones or bad ones - can only sort
of force the person to divorce themselves from the reality
of what it is they do for a living. So I don't read reviews.
You're married to a director, though, who through reviews must get perceptions
of his own work. Is it not a discussion point for you?
KW: We
actually don't discuss that. We don't discuss reviews
together. He wouldn't come to me and say: "Oh look
what so and so wrote about blah, blah, blah." If
he reads reviews of things that I'm in, or have been
written about me, he wouldn't tell me because he knows.
There's already an Oscar buzz surrounding your performance. Do you think
that might have been knocked on the head given your role in Extras?
KW: Well,
to be honest with you I certainly hope not. Extras was
a real lot of fun but that was Ricky Gervais and Stephen
Merchant's perception of what they feel the Academy Awards
to be. I'm incredibly proud to have been nominated in
the past and it really means a lot to me because I do
work very hard when I'm making a film and I do really
do absolutely give my all. To get that kind of pat on
the back, it's really amazing and also never something
that I anticipated would possibly happen to me, ever.
So I am very, very proud to have been there before. And,
you know, the nice thing about nominations is that, same
as awards, no one can actually take them away from you
and I'm proud of that.
A festival report praised the film but described it as controversial, probably
because of what may be perceived as a sympathetic portrayal of a sex offender.
How important was that element of the film for you? Where do you see this film
in comparison to Happiness or The Woodsman?
TF: For
me, that character represents a very heightened living
and breathing expression of the fear, anxiety, paranoia
and destructive nature that comes out of that fear for
these other characters. In terms of depicting someone
who may or may not have that kind of abhorrent behaviour,
I'm a father of three children and I have no desire to
explore that certainty. The aforementioned films are
deep explorations of people who have that kind of psychosis.
This character and his circumstances are intentionally
mysterious and circumstantial. The only thing we know
about him is that he has been accused of exhibiting himself
to a minor. That could be a 17-year-old or someone younger,
we don't really know. He's accused of all sorts of things
by another character and consequently by the media and
by the community. He's used as a conversation topic at
dinner party chit-chat and a lot of other things. Every
other character in this piece is introduced and an interior
part of their life is reflected through a third person
narration with the exception of Ronny McGorvey and there's
a reason for that.
What was important to me about that character was that he would be up for grabs
for you - you can damn him, or you can pardon him or you can think about him
in any fashion that you wish to. But as far as I'm concerned he is not a devil
and he is not a saint. I don't know what he's done; you can decide that for
yourself. There was never any impulse that I had of trying to explore a clinical
explanation of somebody who may have extreme behavioural problems that would
make me not interested in spending time with that character. The only important
thing about that character was almost in a fable-like way - that he would be
almost like the troll under the bridge. What if the troll under the bridge
had a mother, and what if the troll under the bridge could experience pain
and self-examination, but the troll under the bridge is also a troll so be
careful. That was it...
How much of the narration springs from the book or was your decision?
TF: The
narration is performed by an actor out of Boston, a theatre
actor named Will Lyman who I had known from a programme
called Frontline. I like that programme very much mainly
because it's framed in an incredibly even-handed way.
You can't really classify it as being armchair liberalism
or conservatism. It's probably the most even-handed form
of reportage that we have in our country and his voice
has a really unique authority to it that's probably the
closest thing in terms of my generation to what we would
have as Edward R Murrow or Walter Cronkite. The thing
that struck me about his voice is that I would believe
him if he told me anything and that was very important
for this narration. As soon as I proposed this idea to
Tom while we were in the room together and starting on
the script, I said I knew what the voice is and started
doing very bad imitations of Will Lyman for him. Having
said that, I didn't ask Will to do it until after the
script was complete, so had he said no I don't know what
I would have done.
Comeback of the year must go to Jackie Earle Haley. What made you choose
him?
TF: Well,
I hadn't started looking for that character yet. Typically,
we don't have this problem in theatre but we have this
problem in film which is that typically if you're what's
considered a "character actor" there's only
five people that get those roles, male or female. There
were all kinds of reasons because we're not going to
meet this character until about an hour into the picture
and most of what we assume about him is through the eyes
of other people, so I didn't want to spend two reels
trying to forget "oh, it's that actor playing this
role". I wanted to really find someone who I hadn't
seen before. I hadn't started looking, honestly, but
this tape arrived and somehow Jackie had got his hands
on a very, very early draft of Little Children that I'd
never circulated. To this day, I still don't know how
he got it but he made this 20-minute film of himself
playing this character which was extraordinary.
The next day I saw Kate and said: "When you were down in Louisiana on
Steven Zaillian's film did you happen to come across Jackie Earle Haley?" And
she said: "Oh my God, yes of course I did and he's wonderful, he's marvelous,
are you thinking about him for this part?" I told her about the film and
said I didn't know where it came from. But she said: "Well, if you have
him in you have to let me come in and read with him, I want to read with him." So
I rang him up and asked him to come to New York, he did, and they played the
last scene together. It was one of those really beautiful moments that you
have as an actor if you're very fortunate sometimes, where you want something
really badly and you come and you take it for yourself. No one gave him that
role; he wanted it. He was very nervous but Kate was rooting for him, I was
rooting for him because it had been a long time since Jackie had really played
a role. It was a fantastic thing - actors wear their hearts on their sleeve
- they have to, it's an occupational hazard - and it's wonderful when it works
out like that.
KW: Todd gave him the part on the spot; that's such an actor's dream
and Jackie actually burst into tears.
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