— A single mother struggling to feed her family and ascend heights she
never prepared for is the substance of the shadowy 1940’s movie “
earn the love of her spoiled daughter. And her maternal ministrations
won Crawford her first and only Oscar.
But that was then, and this is now. Another Academy Award-winning actress will be fighting that good fight when
The miniseries is directed by
sympathetic pawn of the Depression. … “I was so startled and
surprised by reading the
at how incredibly frank and how much he was really purposefully trying
to NOT do a film noir as he’d come to be known for in ‘The Postman
Always Rings Twice’ and ‘Double Indemnity,'” Haynes says.
“But (he was) really doing a realistic portrait of a mother-daughter relationship set in the 10-year span of the Depression in
He was gripped by Mildred’s frank sexuality and the
complex mother-daughter relationship, Haynes says. “(It) was so much
more nuanced and so much more relevant, I thought, and relatable than I
ever truly felt about the original film, which is a beautifully,
stylized piece of
“This felt modern and contemporary and approachable,” he says. “And it’s one of the reasons why I wanted to take it on.”
For Winslet it was a different test. “The priority
was really just to capture the sort of the horrible honesty that does
appear at certain moments in this story,” says Winslet, who finds
herself a single mother after two divorces.
“They’re very real people experiencing very real
emotions. And the most important thing for us, in terms of the ones who
were conveying this story, was to simply be as pure and as honest as
possible and as true to the book as possible as well, because it is
such a spectacular piece of writing.”
For Haynes, a film aficionado, “It made me think a
lot about the great period of the American revisionist film in the ’70s
where a lot of genre filmmaking was getting sort of re-examined by
younger filmmakers. And these filmmakers were bringing a real sense of
contemporary, sophisticated, nuanced kind of performances to what were
otherwise classy genre films like, ‘The Godfather’ or ‘The Exorcist” or
‘
“And there are many, many others from that period.
And … we all, the creative people involved in ‘Mildred’ looked
closely at a lot of those films to see what it was that made — because
we were still dealing with a piece of classic American popular fiction
in ‘Mildred Pierce’ and wanted to honor that and honor its
bigger-than-life aspects, but at the same time, bring elements out of
it that might have been overlooked in the original production that was
so codified and stylized that you kind of missed the real human nuances
and human conditions that made it feel incredibly modern and relevant,
and I think we did accomplish that.”
Winslet, who’s better known for her film work in
movies like “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “The Reader,” and,
of course, “Titanic,” says television is a whole different playing
field.
“We had more to shoot, and we had to work a lot
faster, but the determination and the level of focus that we all had to
have because we were limited was so much more intense, honestly, than
certainly any film I’ve been a part of. I mean film, schmilm. I’m
telling you, television is so much harder.”
She says it forced the cast and crew to re-examine
their work ethics. “… It just meant we were like hyper-focused every
single day, all of us. I mean, the crew was spectacular and absolutely
rolled with it, and it was a really truly collaborative and an
extraordinary experience, totally team-led by Todd.”
Though, like Mildred, she’s suffered through tumult
in her personal life, Winslet says she harbors no regrets. “I would
never erase any part of my life or things that have happened to me even
if they’ve been tough to get through at the time or frightening or
whatever they might have been. Those things do become wonderful
memories to learn from and share with people and share with your
children and grandchildren, and they’re all kind of character-forming
experiences. And for an actor that’s all you have. So I would never
change any of it.”
for his role in “The Fighter,” but Bale acknowledges he’s not always
sure of himself. “I didn’t really ever take acting classes. I didn’t
go to drama school or anything. I always feel like I’m having to make
up for that while other people know where they’re going really, and I’m
just sort of winging it. I saw something one time, it was
and I just adore the guy’s talent and just raw ability to just
communicate through his guitar, and I saw something about his fingers
just bleeding, just blood dripping off of the strings and I always
went, that’s it, that’s it. You know, that inspires me to no end.”
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TNT liked
“Hawthorne” last season, that they’ve invited him back as a regular.
Mr. JLo will return in June as a possible love-interest for star
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(c) 2011, McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
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