Kate Winslet had a very special date to the world premiere of her directorial debut, Goodbye Jane.
Winslet, 50, attended the Wednesday, December 3, red carpet premiere in London with her son Joe Anders, where they twinned in black. The Oscar winner looked elegant in a scoop-neck gown cinched with a gold belt and a coordinating choker, while Joe, 21, opted for a sleek suit and a golden chain of his own.
Winslet shares Joe with ex-husband Sam Mendes. (The actress is also mom of daughter Mia, whom she welcomed with ex Jim Threapleton, and son Bear with husband Edward Abel Smith.)
Goodbye Jane was a family affair the whole way through. While Winslet served as the director, Joe had crafted the script.
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“Joe had written a script on a screenwriting course that he was fortunate enough to be accepted onto,” Winslet said during Wednesday’s screening, per Hello! magazine. “At the end of the course, he said to me, ‘I’ve written this thing, and you know it’s probably [explicit], but would you read it?’ I read it, and I realized it was very much not [explicit] and could definitely be a film.”
Winslet also realized that she could direct the project, her first time doing so.
“I found myself in a moment of realization, having spent so much of my life advocating and trying to elevate other women in male-dominated spaces,” she said. “I did have a moment of thinking, ‘Well, who am I really if I’m not actually doing that thing to try and change the culture?’ So in my 50s, I did it!”
Winslet further called her filmmaking experience “amazing.”
“It was so amazing, but there’s lots of people from our crew who made it possible, and the contributions that they all made are just overwhelming,” she gushed. “I mean, the film feels incredibly real, and so much of it is to do with a lot of the people and incredible actors.”
Joe, for his part, previously revealed that he wasn’t expecting Goodbye June to get made when his mom first read the script.
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“I wasn’t pitching it, I wasn’t doing anything like that — I didn’t have it in my mind to make a movie of it at all,” he told The Hollywood Reporter last month. “I was like, ‘Mum, no, you don’t need to do that — you don’t need to pretend just because you’re my mum.’”
Once Winslet decided to make Goodbye June, she aimed to keep Joe involved throughout the entire production process.
“There’s this thing that happens when a director comes on — I’ve always found it so strange, but the writer just disappears. I couldn’t bear the thought of that for Joe,” Winslet told the outlet. “I didn’t want Joe’s experience to stop at the point that he’d delivered the script. I wanted it to open up immediately from that point, because that’s the most important stuff, when it becomes the most exciting — when you see the actors lifting it off the page and putting the words that you’ve written into their mouths and making it their own.”
