The 'Today' Show - April 13, 1999
Hostess
Katie Couric: She's garnered two Oscar nominations, and starred in the most
successful movie of all time, 'Titanic'. Not bad, Kate. Now in her first film
since 'Titanic', she plays Julia, a British single mother who finds herself in
early 1970's Morocco. She and her two young daughters have fled London to find
adventure and a new life in the movie 'Hideous Kinky'. [Clip of Julia meeting
Bilal]
C: Kate Winslet, good morning.
K: Good
morning.
C: How are you?
K: I'm very well.
C: It's great to see you again.
K: You, too.
C: Now, this was a very interesting
choice for you, Kate, to make, probably, following 'Titanic'. I assume you were
sort of barraged with various offers from big movies, wanting you to star and be
in their 'vehicle', or whatever you call it in Hollywood. Tell me about those
offers.
K: It
was a very kind of crazy time when 'Titanic' was coming out, and everyone had
said to me, 'oh, you know your life is going to completely change.' And I was
thinking, 'oh, I don't want my life to change, and I always want to be me and
have my family, and all of that stuff.' And I was more concerned with the fact
that me, myself, I wanted to remember to stick to my instincts and to remember
that, actually, you know, I'm here because I love acting, and I want to always
very much love my job. And I think just after 'Titanic' I found myself just
wanting to do something that was completely different, and also to do something
that was a British movie because I didn't want all my fellow Brit actors and
friends to think that I was just bypassing the whole thing and was just going to
go straight to Hollywood, and, you know, and all of that stuff. And it's not
that I'd ever sort of say I would turn my back on Hollywood, not at all,
because, you know, the movies that are generated from there are simply
incredible, and the scripts are always amazing. But I just found myself wanting
to do something that was kind of closer to home and sort of more me and smaller.
And it was nice 'cause I knew everyone's names, all the crew members. I could
actually say, 'oh, hello, John,' or 'hello, Bob,' in the morning when I would
greet them. And with 'Titanic', with there being so many people, it used to
really upset me that I didn't know everyone's names.
C: And
it was such a huge saga. Were there any big roles that you turned down in the
aftermath of 'Titanic', that now you're thinking, 'I'm crazy'?
K: No, 'cause I have no regrets. I
mean, you know, that's one thing - I never sort of choose to have any regrets in
life because, you know, everything, I believe, happens for a reason. And you
have one life, and you have to make the most of it. So, you know, there were a
lot of things that I sort of turned down, just thinking, 'no, that's not right'.
And then 'Hideous Kinky' came along, and I'd read the novel when I was 17 and
had loved it then. And then someone had written this screenplay, and my original
reaction was, 'that's just so brave.' Because it's quite a hard story to kind of
compress and make clear because there's not actually a particularly strong
narrative to the story.
C: Right.
K: It's really about this woman and
her children and the time that they have in Morocco, and then they go home at
the end. But it was just, to me, so full of joy and color, and just sort of some
kind of really heartfelt, warm reality that I just thought, 'I've got to do it,
I've got to do it.'
C: It's very, very different, don't
you think, from most movies that you might find these days?
K: Well, that's right. I thought,
you know, 'when has there ever been a movie about, you know, a young, English,
single mother, set in the early 70's with her two daughters in Morocco?' I mean,
I thought, 'this is just completely, completely different.'
C: Explain the title.
K: 'Hideous Kinky' - well,
actually, the other day I was a little bit concerned 'cause I was in the 
back
of a taxi in London and I was speaking to a friend on my mobile phone. And
she said, 'so what are you up to?' And I said, 'well, actually, I'm off to New
York next week for hideous kinky stuff.' And I thought,
'what must the taxi driver think I'm talking about?!' [Katie finds this very
funny.] Kind of hard for people to understand it,
but the title... 'cause the novel was written by Esther Freud. And there's sort
of an autobiographical context 'cause she was one of the daughters. And 'Hideous
Kinky' was a game that the two sisters used to play when they were little. It
was called 'Hideous Kinky Tag'. And I said to Esther, 'but why hideous and
kinky'? And she described it as being that they thought that the two words were
kind of very grown up and forbidden and sort of naughty and exciting. And they
just latched onto these two words, 'hideous kinky'. So, that's where it
comes from.
C: We have a clip that we're going
to show real quickly. As I've mentioned, you're a single mother, you have two
daughters - one is six and one is eight. In the scene we're about to see, one of
your daughters has been temporarily taken in by an orphanage, and all is not
well. Let's take a look and then we'll talk some more. [Clip of Julia and girls
at the orphanage] Meanwhile, the two girls in the film have never had any acting
experience, I understand.
K: No, none at all. They were just
so wonderful. And what was great, 'cause I was cast quite early on, and I had
lots of meetings with Gilles MacKinnon, the director. And he said to me, 'you
know, would you mind sort of sitting in on some of the auditions for the girls?
Cause, obviously, they've got to kind of bond with you and you have to enjoy
being with them. And it was incredible - being in a room with loads and loads
and loads of little ones, just all wanting to be bounced up and down on my
knee and play with my hair, and all of these things. And Carrie and Bella just
really sort of stuck out like sore thumbs as being just the perfect, perfect
choices, because they were exactly those characters. I mean, everything that
they do on screen is just so completely them, completely natural. And Gilles
said to me, 'look, for a lot of the time…because sometimes they do interesting
things with their hands or they play funny little word games with each other, do
you mind if we just turn the camera onto them and you just kind of jump into the
shot, and we just, you know, all kind of improvise?' And I said, 'no, no, no, of
course not,' 'cause you've got to capture those little moments with children.
C: And you captured something else
on the set - your husband!
K: I did - yeeesss!
C: You got married, and everything's going well?
K: Everything's really, really great. Look, I'm smiling now, and I shall walk away with my cheeks aching!
C: It's
so good to see you. I could talk to you for hours, but unfortunately they're
going [makes cutting motion across her neck] to me. So, Kate Winslet, good to
see you, Kate.
K: Thank you; you, too.
C: Best of luck. [Turning to
camera] 'Hideous Kinky', by the way, opens in New York this Friday and
nationwide on April 23rd.