Kate Winslet made her directorial debut with her son’s movie Goodbye June because she was personally invested in the project.

The Titanic star’s 21-year-old son Joe Anders wrote the screenplay for the Christmas family drama on a screenwriting course when he was 19, and she was so impressed with the script and felt it could be a movie.

Winslet helped produce the film and signed up to play the character Julia, but when the time came to find a director, she realised she wanted to take on that role too.

“I suddenly couldn’t let it go. I said to (Anders), ‘Look, I would love to direct it,'” she explained on Jimmy Kimmel Live! on Tuesday night. “Because when you give it to a director, it becomes theirs – which is exactly the right thing that should happen – but I didn’t want that for him. I wanted him to remain a part of it, I wanted him to experience seeing this beautiful thing that he’d created come to life.”

After she signed on as director, Winslet and Anders went through his script together and figured out “what should stay and what should go” – a process she described as “glorious” – and he joined her on set every day during production.

Of their working relationship, she said, “We learned different things about one another in this working capacity. We didn’t fight, we didn’t do that. I had to learn how to say things to him in a sensitive way and he would also disagree with me… But I did it, Jimmy. In the 50th year of my life, I directed my first feature.”

The Holiday star helmed the movie six months after she admitted on the How to Fail podcast that she was feeling the pressure to direct and that she felt she was “actually letting down other women by not doing it”.

Goodbye June, which is a fictional story inspired by the death of Winslet’s mother in 2017, also stars Toni Collette, Helen Mirren, Timothy Spall, Johnny Flynn and Andrea Riseborough.

It will debut on Netflix on Christmas Eve after a brief theatrical run.

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