Kate Winslet Rewatches Titanic, Eternal Sunshine, The Regime & More

[gentle music]

Oh, come on, get on with it.

Get on with it, do the kissing part.

Yep, so you can't breathe.

My boobs practically up to my chin.

Close your eyes.

My God.

Hi, I'm Kate Winslet and I am going to watch some scenes

from throughout my career.

Right, here we go.

[upbeat music]

[upbeat music]

[fast forwarding tape sound]

[ocean sound]

[gentle music]

[Rose] Hello, Jack.

Oh my lordy.

This might be really cringe.

See, I look at that and I just see

how much I couldn't breathe in that bloody corset.

They said you might be up here.

Oh, this was a nightmare, shooting this,

because Leo couldn't stop laughing

and we had to re-shoot this about four times

because the light, the light was...

Jim wanted a very specific light for this, obviously,

and the sunsets kept changing where we were.

This was a section of the ship.

It wasn't part of the actual whole ship set that we had.

It was a little sort of sorn off bit.

We had to climb up a ladder to get to it.

I remember, it was sort of

hair and makeup couldn't reach us.

Now, what you wouldn't know,

because Leo looks completely natural,

but he had to lay on sun beds,

there's a lot of fake tan makeup going on.

So I have got hidden in here and here,

I've got his makeup and brushes and sponge

and my makeup and brushes and sponge in the other side,

and between takes, I was basically redoing our makeup.

Step up on the rail. [gentle music]

Hold on.

Kept bumping my knees on that third railing.

Oh, come on, get on with it.

Get on with it, do the kissing part.

It's quite funny.

Giggling, covered in each other's makeup.

Oh my God, it goes on and on and on.

Yep, so you can't breathe.

My boobs are practically up to my chin.

My God, he's quite the romancer, isn't he?

No wonder every young girl in the world

wanted to be kissed by Leonardo DiCaprio.

It was not all it's cracked up to be.

So we kept doing this kiss

and I have a lot of pale makeup on

and I would have to like do our makeup checks,

me, on both of us, between takes,

and I would end up looking as though

I had been like sucking

a caramel chocolate bar after each take

because his makeup would come off on me,

and he just looked like there

was a bit missing from his face

because there was this big pale bit

from all my makeup getting onto him.

Oh God, it was such a mess.

I do feel very proud of it

because I feel that it is that film that just keeps giving.

Whole other generations of people

are discovering the film or seeing it for the first time,

and there's something extraordinary about that.

It doesn't mean that people

don't get me to try and reenact this

every time I'm on a flipping boat, which does my head in.

[Interviewer] Oh really? Every time, without fail.

[Interviewer] And you do it?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no.

[upbeat music]

[fast forwarding tape sound]

[Clementine] Really solid this time of year.

Whoa.

I don't know.

Come on, come on.

Come on, come on, come on.

I'd forgotten how good I look with the blue hair.

I look good with blue hair.

They were all wigs because we had to change them.

Sometimes I'd start the day

and we'd have a scene where I had orange hair

and then in the afternoon it would be green

and then maybe back to orange before the end of the day.

Like the way that it was scheduled, they had to be wigs,

otherwise we wouldn't have been able to do it,

it would've been impossible.

[exhaling]

Quite a lot of this was improvised.

[screaming] I remember that there just

wasn't much dialogue written on the page,

so we just added stuff.

It was extremely cold.

Just all of the stuff about the ice,

you know, slidey, slidey,

it's not gonna break itself, thick this time of year,

all of that, that's all improvised and added,

and him saying, oh no, I think I should go back,

it was mostly improvised, actually.

My ass.

[Clementine] I think I should go back. Come on.

[Clementine] Huh? Come on.

What if it breaks?

With Eternal Sunshine, everything about it

was not what I expected it to look like

because Michel Gondry is such an avant garde director

and he's very experimental

and none of us could have ever known

how the film was going to look, what it was gonna feel like,

how it was all gonna come together.

The shoot was quite bonkers in how experimental it was

and fast paced it was and things would often happen

that weren't part of the plan

or we'd end up shooting in the snow

when it wasn't meant to be snowing

and we would just adapt the scene

to whatever was going on that day.

Oh, there wasn't any prep for this scene

because we didn't know what to expect.

We got there and it really was a very thick frozen river.

Most of the prep was in just hiding sort of hot packs

and layers of thermal clothing underneath our costumes

because it was absolutely freezing

and trying not to shiver whilst saying dialogue,

trying to relax yourself as much as possible.

[mellow music]

Show me which constellations you know.

[Kate] This is a scene that does stick out in my mind

as being a lot of fun.

That particular night to shoot was fun.

I love doing night shoots, actually.

I always sort of feel like I'm going to work

and I've got a secret or something.

It's a great feeling.

And I remember thinking, oh God,

we're gonna be putting the whole film crew on this ice,

and no, they'd been monitoring the ice

and experts had told us it was safe,

but you do hear like a sort of a cracking noise

when it's sort of cracking at the very deeper parts,

but this was about 14 inches thick,

so there was no way it was gonna crack.

[upbeat music]

[fast forwarding tape sound]

Come and tell me about your Christmas presents.

[upbeat music]

♪ Darling, you ♪

One of our only days where we were all together,

of course, on this shoot,

because my part of the story takes place in England

and separately to the Cameron character story.

Oh, we all just had such a giggle.

It was all just great fun.

They're all lovely people,

and Cameron's whole thing ever in life

is how can I have the most fun possible?

So she's constantly laughing, she's constantly joking.

And Jack, of course,

he just does something different every take,

which is eternally refreshing.

And for something like this was very, very good

because with romantic comedy,

things do have to remain fairly scripted

because so much of it is about the comedic timing

and how it's shot.

And yeah, the rhythm is,

and the cadence to everything is quite important.

So there wasn't much room

to sort of add things spontaneously,

but Jack would always find a way to slip something in

and I was always really grateful for that,

especially with something like this

where everyone's having to pretend it's Christmas.

So actually Jack was brilliant at kind of adding things

and he was brilliant with those little girls.

So that was fun.

It kept it fun, which is what it was meant to be.

I would love to work with Jack again and again and again.

So my on set nickname to this day is K Dub.

People just call me K Dub and he started it.

Jack started it.

And that is my name.

Everyone just calls me, at work, everyone calls me K Dub.

[upbeat music]

Although, I will tell you that all of the interiors

of that beautiful English country cottage

were studio builds in Los Angeles,

which is devastating to everyone who hears that.

And the cottage itself, that picture postcard perfect,

chocolate box, jigsaw puzzle cottage,

it was just a shell, it was just a facade,

it was just the sides, the front and a roof,

and every time I'd go through that door into the cottage,

I'd be standing in a bunch of like rubble,

surrounded by scaffolding, old [indistinct] the ground,

bits of old chewing gum wrapper.

Yeah. [upbeat music]

[fast forwarding tape sound]

[somber music]

Oh God, I can't watch it.

Oh fuck.

Oh God, I can't watch it.

I was dreading shooting this scene

because the triggers that I created for myself

in playing this character

and in concealing all of that grief was, ugh,

they were just so real for me

and I was absolutely dreading shooting this.

Hanging from one of the beams,

he'd gotten a tow rope from the garage.

Oh, fuck.

[Mare] I cut him down.

That particular sequence of running into the house

because I hurt my toe and I was limping,

so we got that twice, thank God,

and then the little piece when we are inside the house,

that was a separate time,

that was interior studio, actually.

The dummy that had been made,

that was exactly the physicality of the actor

who was actually playing Kevin in the flashback sequences.

It was just awful.

And we had a camera up there, obviously looking down at me

because we have that angle, that down angle where I fall

where I sort of collapse,

they just kept as much to one side as they could

so that I didn't see them at all,

I just saw the dummy hanging and the camera itself,

I didn't see the operator or the focus puller,

which was enormously helpful.

And that was filmed about a month

after the exterior part of the scene,

and then a couple of months later we shot this part.

[Gayle] I'm so sorry.

Do you still live in the same house?

I was almost trying to charge myself up

with as many distractions as possible

so that when I had to sit and say these words,

that I would feel shocked by saying them

and that they would feel fresh in my head

and that it would be something

that was springing into my body, I suppose,

in the moment that I had to play it out

and it was just awful.

It was awful.

The emotion of this whole sequence,

it was so embedded in me, actually,

that I had to just sustain it

across the entire time of playing the character,

because what had happened to her with her son

defines who she is and how she is

with people every single day of her life.

So it was the main thrust of the character, really.

As you can see, hard to shake.

[upbeat music]

[fast forwarding tape sound]

[gasping]

So what they did so that they could get the physicality

of me climbing up onto her fin and sitting there

and putting my hands on something,

someone had taken a foam noodle

and just bent it in the shape of an eye

and zip tied it onto the metal grill.

So that was what I was acting to,

to create that sequence,

and I do remember thinking, this is never gonna work,

I'm sure this is dreadful.

And of course it works because Jim Cameron is a genius.

[bird squawking]

No.

There are moments where I can't see myself at all

and then others when I really can.

I think my mouth looks very much like my own mouth.

So it's certain expressions Sam makes

where you can really see Sam.

And Zoe, again, it's her mouth.

There's something about her mouth

and how she hangs her head is very like Zoe.

It was absolutely amazing working with Jim Cameron again.

I think we're both such different people,

really, since Titanic.

It's such a long time ago.

He just covers everything from a million angles.

There are actual cameras there,

probably about 22 actual cameras in the room,

then there are rigged cameras in the roof

capturing everything.

So you can be extremely free.

[upbeat music]

[fast forwarding tape sound]

[dramatic music]

[sound of paper falling]

What is it?

The Vernon regime has been defeated.

The country is yours.

This obsession with finding--

Disregard any news of the country.

All services will soon be restored--

Totally improvising like a mad person there.

Yeah, I liked the scene a lot.

This was great fun.

This is at the beginning of episode six in The Regime,

and it's actually my favorite episode of The Regime.

It's very funny.

Sometimes I actually still will fall asleep at night

thinking about moments from episode six of The Regime,

and it makes me laugh as I'm falling asleep.

[dramatic music] The country is yours.

Disregard any news of the country.

All services will soon be restored

by the Westgate Resistance Army.

[screwing up paper sound]

[Kate] So the voice that we ended up

settling on for the character of Elena

was something that I came up with during the prep period

because I knew that it just didn't make any sense to me

to speak in my own voice as I'm speaking now,

because it is a satire, it is set in an imagined universe,

and there are things about the whole show

that are meant to be completely absurd.

So I needed to find a way of

creating something for the character

that immediately let the audience know

that they weren't necessarily

supposed to take this seriously.

[screwing up paper sound]

Fuck them all.

Yeah, there's a moment when I go, cunts.

I think that was improvised.

Cunts. Stop.

Stop. [screaming]

Nicky, Nicky, Nicky.

[Kate] Oh my God, we improvised so much throughout this.

We would just often add things

because sometimes when it's fast paced dialogue,

adding little bits here and there

to the beginning or the end of a line

or even in the middle, just does help

to keep everything feeling very alive and real.

It was a huge amount of fun to play around with comedy,

to be with so many actors on set every day.

I loved that, being part of the big ensemble

and working with Mathias again,

I'd worked with him 11 years ago

and we'd had an amazing experience working together.

Got on extremely well.

He's very playful, really collaborative.

[fast forwarding tape sound]

[upbeat music]

So that's it for me.

We're done.

This torture has finally come to an end.

And if I wasn't afraid of breaking something,

I would probably throw this remote

at that television and smash it,

but I won't, I'll just turn it off.