Once upon a time Kate Winslet was a young and virtually unknown actress who looked up at the marquee and suddenly saw her name in lights above the title of what would become the top grossing film in movie history. Rather than cash in on her ‘Titanic’ fame, however, the fiery Brit defiantly turned her back on the fairy tale life of a Hollywood A-lister and set out to make inconspicuous, almost epigrammatic films such as “Holy Smoke” and “Hideous Kinky.”
It’s been seven years since Winslet helped make James Cameron the king of the world, and the immensely talented star is still eschewing the sure things in order to do worthwhile things. Her latest film is “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless” mind — a fantastic fable from director Michel Gondry and writer Charlie Kaufman that teams her with Jim Carrey, Tom Wilkinson, Elijah Wood and Kirsten Dunst.
QUESTION: Screenwriter Charlie Kaufman is Hollywood’s most eminent heteroclite. What, in your experience, separates his material from all the rest?
KATE WINSLET: The genius that is Charlie Kaufman is that he actually creates these very simple stories and then gives the characters very complex minds. That’s what makes them kind of crazy and wild and sort of abnormal in that way. They go against the grain.
Q: Your character, Clementine, voluntarily has pieces of her past erased. Are there any memories in your life that you wish you could go back and remove?
KW: I don’t really like talking about my own relationships and my past. All I can say is that I’m very, very happy, and there’s nothing I’ve been through – whether it was a good thing or a bad thing – that I would erase, because those are the things that make us stronger and change us as human beings.
Q: You might say that the memory-erasing doctor in the film (played by Tom Wilkinson) is akin to a plastic surgeon. Both, in essence, offer their patients a new identity by altering the old one.
KW: That’s a very accurate comparison. You watch programs like “Extreme Makeover,” and they’ll say, “Listen, all we’re going to do is take out all of your teeth, and give you a lovely, natural smile.” And you completely buy it. They’re going to change this person’s mouth around, and in the process they’re probably going to numb half the nerves in their face and the feeling will probably never come back. But they don’t tell you that part.
Q: How do you prepare for a role? KW: Every character is different, and it’s the actor’s great privilege to explore the different levels of emotion and to take bits from other people – friends or relatives – if the role demands that you do that. With the period pieces that I’ve done, there’s a lot of text book reading that goes on, and just researching the period to fully have an understanding of where that person came from.
Q: What went into playing Clementine? KW: For this part I applied some rather different rules. I didn’t prepare much at all. I had to stop myself from writing down the ideas that popped into my head, because I knew that no single thing was going to work for Clementine. She’s kind of a boiling pot of so many things. I just had to have a ton of ideas, keep them up there, and then try them all out. The most I did was read the script a ton of times so I had it in my head, and just went with it and left a lot to chance. It was important that I did that, because it meant that I could then be as open to Michel’s ideas as possible.
Q: You and your “Eternal Sunshine” costars – particularly Jim Carrey and Elijah Wood – have appeared in some huge blockbusters and created memorable characters with whom you’ll likely always be associated. So how do you deal with being Rose from “Titanic?”
KW: At the time, it was really difficult because I was younger, for starters, and probably less adept at describing things. But it was also very hard kind of bearing the burden of this massively successful film and trying to keep up with it. It was a huge machine, and I really didn’t know how I was supposed to deal with it at the time. How I did deal with it was to run off to Morocco to make “Hideous Kinky,” which was a tiny, tiny movie. And that kind of helped me hang on to my sanity.
Q: Has it gotten easier, now that several years have passed?
KW: So many people still love “Titanic.” Even the most unlikely of people who I would have thought would have found it incredibly cheesy, will say “I just love that film, and I’ve seen it so many times.” It’s a tremendous feeling to be able to say I’m in that film. Me — Kate from Reading. How could that happen?
Originally published in the Santa Monica Daily Press print edition on March 19, 2004. Read the original PDF.