Kate Winslet on Commanding From Both Sides of the Camera
After decades as a shining film star, Kate Winslet has taken on the role of producer, pouring her heart and soul into 'Lee', a biopic of a woman Winslet considers a role model for her own life.
Photography by Alasdair McLellan
Fashion by Marie-Amélie Sauvé
For three decades, Kate Winslet has been showing audiences that acting is both an art and an endurance sport. Each performance is a feat of strength. She has played historical figures and thoroughly modern women; characters who have it all and those on the brink; people awash in love or lost in grief; the flawed, the fierce and the perfectly imperfect. Her numerous awards speak to the excellence of her work and its emotional resonance with viewers.
Winslet is ever-evolving, both in front of the camera and behind it. In recent years, she has begun executive producing the projects she stars in: Mare of Easttown, for which she won an Emmy, and The Regime. Now she has starred in and produced Lee, a film about World War II photographer and correspondent Lee Miller. Having fought hard to win a seat at the table, Winslet is now determined to invite more women to join her there.
Does your work as a producer lead you to make more political choices in your films?
KW Working as a producer definitely affects how I hope to be part of a more integral, collaborative process. I wouldn’t say that there are no politically charged or motivated reasons behind that. You have probably noticed that I have never, ever talked about my own personal politics publicly. I try very hard to keep that absolutely separate. I think it’s such dangerous territory, especially now, to open up about. So, I definitely shy away from sharing those thoughts – of which I have many, quite robust ones.
What I appreciate the most about this time in my life is that I feel I have a proper understanding and appreciation for the job of an executive producer and a producer. It’s not just something I’m calling myself. It is something that I have earned, my place at that table, and I will continue to earn my place at that table and my right to sit there. I do feel a very strong duty now, as a woman who has been making films for nearly 32 years. I feel that a sense of sisterhood is very palpable now, in a way that it has never really been before, and we have to keep that togetherness. We really must do it because it will hopefully inspire other women to do the same.
I feel a very strong duty now, as a woman who has been making films for nearly 32 years. I feel that a sense of sisterhood is very palpable, in a way that it has never really been before. Kate Winslet
What is the greatest challenge about working as a producer and as an actor on a project?
KW The hardest challenge, honestly, is trying to do absolutely everything. Because there’s always so much to do, the sheer volume of it. The hardest part is just being incredibly thorough and, also, never getting wound up by things, never getting frustrated. I am a profoundly impatient person, but it’s a process. Everything takes time. I was so lucky on Lee because Kate Solomon, my producing partner, was amazing. We got to a certain point in production where she was like, “Now you have to stop. You just have to go and play Lee.” I never really did just let go completely. It was always like, “Ah, we have to sign the thing, and we have to do this, and, oh, shit! – we can’t afford to block off the street tomorrow, so we’re going to have to rewrite!” We lived together when we were making Lee, and we would just be round the clock, round the clock, round the clock. It’s incredibly rewarding when you do it. You think, “We’ve fucking done it.” And even when I watch Lee now, I can’t believe we really made the film.
Lee Miller started out as a muse for the Surrealists in Paris and learned photography with Man Ray before photographing the Blitz in London and becoming one of the first war photographers to document Auschwitz. What I found compelling in the film is that we really discover the war from a woman’s perspective. What is it about her photographs and her story that resonated so strongly with you?
KW In every single image that I’ve seen of hers, in every aspect of her work, what I see more than anything else is absolutely no vanity of her own and no ego. I just see the truth. And it’s really powerful. To spend time researching her and truly immerse myself in her work and her material and her personal letters and artefacts was so overwhelming and powerful. The amount of time, the number of hours and months and years that I spent with her son, Antony Penrose, talking about her, learning about her, digging under her skin and sometimes discovering new things about her that even he had not discovered… It was sometimes completely overwhelming because there would always be more. Her life was so vast, and her interior world and her exterior world were just gigantic. She wasn’t fearless, but she was very courageous, and that was staggering to me. The positions she would put herself in in order to photograph and document the truth – just incredible.
You seem intimately connected to her.
KW Well, I have to say, of all the parts I’ve played over more than 30 years, I was most inspired by her, by far. In all of her choices, she lived on instinct. She was utterly free, utterly spontaneous and remarkably without malice. I now try and live my life more closely to how she lived hers, with intention, real grace, real integrity and opinion. She had something in her that was absolutely humble and compassionate but also utterly at ease with her physical and sexual self. And that is the ultimate inspiration to me because it doesn’t matter how much I might also appear to be very comfortable in my physical femininity and myself and all of those things, we all have off days. Lee appeared to never have any of those days, ever.
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