LITTLE CHILDREN
Q&A with Kate Winslet and director Todd Field		 Search all of phase9.tv






Movie Interview by Silvia Felce

Winslet and Field arrive a bit late in the suite at the posh hotel in London reserved to present LITTLE CHILDREN to the press. But this must be a busy day for them. In fact today, after its world premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September, LITTLE CHILDREN has its UK premiere at the Centrepiece Gala at the Times BFI London Film Festival. LITTLE CHILDREN is based on Tom Perrotta’s novel and it is the second film of director Todd Field, who raised to fame in 2001 with the acclaimed IN THE BEDROOM.


Five years ago you did a tremendously acclaimed film, IN THE BEDROOM, which did very well and got a lot of nominations. What have you been doing since? Were you just working on this new film? Five years it’s quite a gap for somebody who is obviously …hot.

KATE WINSLET: (Laughs) That’s right!

TODD FIELD: We completed IN THE BEDROOM in 2001 then I started on another project and I worked on it for 1˝ years and but I had trouble getting funds for it. Then I read Tom Perrotta’s novel Little Children in 2003 and I have been working on that since. Maybe on paper it looks like I took longer…

On paper it seems like a dream job for actors, working with Todd Fields, but did it take some persuasion to take the role and when did you get involved?

KATE WINSLET: It didn’t actually take much persuasion at all. Todd wanted to meet with me and discuss the possibilities of 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 have never had this before, but he was very specific about why he thought I could play that part and went into so much detail that I thought, “God, I feel good about myself now” and I thought, “of course I can play this part now!” It was a big decision to make to play somebody like Sarah, because it’s such a challenge. She is an American woman, nothing like me essentially, and also there were some parts of me that thought, “My God, can I actually do this? Have I actually got the stuff that is required to play Sarah?” and once Todd convinced me that all was going to be all right I then read the script.

In terms of cast, was Kate first on board?

TODD FIELD: Kate was the first person I asked to come on board.

Before started working on LITTLE CHILDREN you were working on another book, for which you couldn’t get the rights for.

TODD FIELD: One of the things I thought of doing after IN THE BEDROOM was another book that had some rights problems so I didn’t pursuit it, but when I read LITTLE CHILDREN, there was a theme in that, among many things, that was present in Perrotta’s book and probably that was what attracted me to the story.

You said that you and Sarah are very different but you are both parents. I wonder if you had to tune in to the question of parents dynamics which you may have experienced in your life?

KATE WINSLET: To be honest with you, the fact that Sarah and I are both parents was the only similarity, although, I have to be honest, now that I am talking about the film and seeing it myself, you have to bear in mind that I hadn’t seen the film either until August, now that I’ve seen it, I realised that there is a lot of who I thought Sarah was, up to the moment you meet her in the film and the various things that had happened to her. I feel that in creating a back story for her I was actually able to relate to that stuff. But I think that the biggest challenge was to play somebody that wasn’t a good mother - that was very, very hard. It’s not that she is violent or shouts, it’s just that she doesn’t know 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 about Sarah, that this little girl is rather inconvenient, she sort of gets in Sarah’s way a bit and I think that one of Sarah’s great weakness is the fact that when she had this child somehow she felt she was loosing a part of herself. For some people like me, you gain a millions worlds when you have a child and certainly it’s the thing that has changed my life and made me unbelievably happy every day, but Sarah somehow resents the presence of this little girl. I think that there is something very remarkable about one of the scenes of the film when Sarah has a moment, almost a punishment, when she gets Lucy back into the car seat, when she realises that she could have lost her and she realises that she has been making a terrible mistake and she is forced to look into herself and what she sees is somebody who is been very neglectful emotionally and is now not going to do that anymore at all and more importantly, she realises that her chances of future happiness entirely depend on looking into the eyes of that little girl and being the parent Lucy needs for her to be now. Sorry I rumbled…

You have four films coming out in the next two months, you have been a workaholic…

KATE WINSLET: No, absolutely not! These are films that I have done over the last 3 years, they are just coming out in this period of time. No, no, I am not a workaholic! I am a … “homaholic”!

Continued on page 2


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