Sun-shiny days

In Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Kate Winslet plays Clementine Kruczynski, a woman who erases all memory of her partner Joel Barish (Jim Carrey) when their relationship turns sour. Directed by renowned video maker Michel Gondry, the film was scripted by current buzz writer Charlie Kaufman (who also wrote Gondry’s 2001 film Human Nature).

For Winslet, the chance to work with a Kaufman script was a major plus for the project. “The script was so amazing… Charlie is just a complete genius and when I received the script I couldn’t believe how he’d managed to create this larger than life, wonderful, eccentric kind of bitchy lunatic who also has a very vulnerable side.”

Having been won over, the normally methodical Winslet started preparing for the part, but it wasn’t the kind of part where a lot of real groundwork could be done. As she explains:

“I thought about her [Clementine] a lot and familiarized myself with the script, but there was a lot I left to chance on purpose because there is normally a lot of really researching a role and reading up about the period and so forth but with this one I couldn’t pre-plan anything because it would have been wrong for the piece. It was a very fast moving, spontaneous story to me about two very real people so I just went with the flow and let myself be led by Michel and the script and the dialogue and Jim and it was as really new experience for me in that sense because it was terrifying for me to go into something more unprepared than I’d ever been.”

But going in with little preparation was only one of the things that scared Winslet about the production. Starring alongside über-funnyman Jim Carrey in a role where her character was wilder than his brought its own challenges. “At first it was scary,” she explains. “I thought, my God, I’m doing a movie with Jim Carrey; how can I match that level of comedy; how can I possibly be the funny one when he isn’t so obviously that. So initially I was terrified but I like being frightened a little bit because it makes me kind of rise to the challenge.”

Having gotten over her initial trepidation, she soon found that Carrey wasn’t all that intimidating after all. In fact, she found to her surprise that he wasn’t funny all the time. “He has a normal side and has a very sensitive side and is very private,” she says. “Yes, he would be kind of goofy and silly and pulling faces on set; but there were other times where we would shoot difficult scenes and he would really retreat and sit in a quiet corner. I have a vision of him fiddling with the top of his water bottle a lot, thinking something through. I do that a lot too, so I could see it a mile away and that the atmosphere was very, ‘leave me alone a while’ – not in a bad way but as actors do. I think that was the thing that surprised me; he was a very regular guy.”

She also managed to find her comedic feet as the shoot progressed. “It was a lot of pressure on me to hold up the more comedic side of the story and I did go into this thinking, ‘can I be funny?’ Nothing was more joyous to me than when Michel, would come over and be doubled up laughing at something I had done. That was a very rewarding feeling.”

Equally rewarding it seems was her reaction to the finished product. “I love the fact that … it’s not an obvious, mushy love story. It’s about two people who I think are really meant to be together. You have to wait until the end of the movie to see things in perspective and it says a lot about destiny; that if something is meant to be it will come round again. That’s what it said to me.”

So what about the film’s ultimate question – would she erase someone from her memory? Her response is typically candid:

“I would never do it because I think all the good and bad experiences that we all go through in life form who we are and without some of the tougher things I’ve gone through, perhaps I wouldn’t be me. Perhaps I would be quite different and I can’t imagine how but I wouldn’t choose to erase anything or anyone because it’s all good character-building stuff that helps you be who you are.”

David Edwards

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Kate Winslet

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