What became Kate Winslet’s directorial debut was just her son Joe Anders’ school assignment.
Kate’s son Anders thought she wanted to turn Goodbye June into a film only to make him feel good.
“I just read it and said to him, ‘You’ve written a screenplay,'” Winslet recalled in an interview with People. “He was like, ‘No, mom, it’s not that. It’s an assignment that I was set in my screenwriting course. You don’t have to do that. You don’t have to make me feel good about this thing that I was just trying to do to see if I could write something.'”
But the Lee star had made up her mind to turn the moving screenplay into a film.
“I’m really sorry. We’re going to be making it into a film,” she told Anders.
“He’s like, ‘What are you talking about?'”
After convincing Anders, the Titanic alum worked on the script with him and eventually decided to direct it herself.
“At that point it really felt like ours and I just didn’t want to give it to another director,” she said.
And their dream cast, including Toni Collette, Johnny Flynn, Andrea Riseborough, Timothy Spall, and Helen Mirren, all said yes to the film.
The film follows an aging mom, played by Mirren, whose health takes a turn for the worse and “thrusts four adult siblings and their exasperating father into chaos as they navigate messy family dynamics in the face of potential loss.”
Mirren’s June “orchestrates her decline on her own terms — with biting humor, blunt honesty, and a lot of love,” the official synopsis concludes.
Goodbye June will be released on December 12.
