The Pinoy in ‘Mildred Pierce’

LOS ANGELES, California—Oscar-winning actress Kate Winslet (“The Reader,” “Titanic”) was to be interviewed by the Television Critics Association—all right, via satellite from Paris. But costars Guy Pearce (“LA Confidential,” “The King’s Speech”) and Evan Rachel Wood (“Across the Universe,” “True Blood” ), and filmmaker Todd Haynes (“Far From Heaven,” “I’m Not There”) were present, and the afternoon’s featured network, HBO, had invited journalists from around the world to sit in as it presented a glittering slate of new programs.

The Haynes-directed, Winslett-Pearce starrer, “Mildred Pierce,” was one of the star-studded HBO offerings. Big names from a few other shows who were sitting in separate panels that day included Tommy Lee Jones and James Gandolfini. No wonder the Langham-Huntington Hotel in Pasadena was abuzz, and the electric excitement was felt as one walked across the main lobby.

TCA is made up of about 200 US and Canadian journalists who cover television programming. It was a big gathering, thus a high-ceiling ballroom had been equipped with tables and connections for some 200 laptops, more than a dozen mics along the aisles, and a video wall on the huge stage. Translators’ booths? There were none; still, it could be the show-biz equivalent of a UN summit.

Soap flavour

“Mildred Pierce” is a five-part original miniseries coming to Asia on HBO and HBO HD on June 9, with a special two-hour premiere starting at 9 p.m. It is both Winslet’s and Haynes’ first venture into television.

Kary Antholis, president of HBO Miniseries, told the gathered journalists: “Todd came to us [and] presented this story of a mother’s (Winslet) epic battle to earn her daughter Veda’s (Wood) love and the immense power the daughter exerts by withholding it. While James M. Cain’s original novel, ‘Mildred Pierce,’ is set in The Great Depression, this clearly has great resonance for our times still.”

Major aspects of the story recall stuff that Pinoys love in their soaps. Romantic entanglement, for one: The daughter falls for the mother’s second husband. Is this just to spite mom, or does she have true feelings for the older guy (Pearce as Monty Beragon)? Plus, Mildred Pierce is a socially disadvantaged woman who succeeds financially, but fails miserably in love.

Excerpts from the interview:

Kate Winslet (on the video wall): I can’t see any of you, which is really upsetting because I want to kiss Todd and Evan and Guy (blows kisses).

Todd Haynes: We’re kissing you back.

Evan Rachel Wood: We’re kissing the screen.

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Did you have reservations about working in television for the first time?

Haynes: No. I’m a great fan and consumer of television. I love serial drama. It was a challenge [for] my cowriter Jon Raymond and I just to balance out all this material in a five-hour sort of spectrum where you have to have endings for each [episode] that makes the viewer want to see the next one.

Winslet: It certainly never occurred to me, “Wow, this is television; therefore, it’s going to be different.” But we had more to shoot, and we had to work a lot faster, so the level of focus that we all had to have was so much more intense than certainly any film I’ve been a part of. I’m telling you, television is much harder.

Pearce: We had a rehearsal period—which you don’t get for every film that you work on, and which achieves so much. It always surprises me that [for films]… you discover what you can once cameras start rolling, which often feels too late. So to have a week to just sort a few things out beforehand means the edge is definitely taken off the shoot.

Don’t you wonder—we’ve had Australians play English or American [characters]. Here we have an English woman playing an American. Do accents mean anything anymore in movies today?

Pearce: Only if they get them wrong.

Haynes: It wasn’t an impediment to me for casting these amazing actors. I’ve seen them explore dialects and regional specificity in many, many different roles. Evan here had to speak a very specific dialect that no longer exists.

Evan, this is a bold depiction of an often ugly mother-daughter relationship. Was that appealing or scary to you?

Wood: It’s a very extreme relationship… daunting, but playing opposite someone like Kate made it a little easier.

Did the two of you discuss the psychology of the relationship?

I think we both drew from personal experience. Everyone has a complicated relationship with their mother, especially daughters. It comes with the territory.

Does Veda have true feelings for Monty?

I think she does. I think being her mother’s husband makes him twice as [attractive]. She jumps at any chance to get a dig at her mother.

The scene where Mildred discovers Veda and Monty is devastating. But what’s most shocking is that your first nude scene was for “Mildred Pierce” and not for “True Blood.”

I was a lot more nervous than I thought I was going to be, but Kate was a great coach. After it was all done we had a cocktail and she said, “Cheers to your first full frontal!”

Guy, Kate confesses to having a teenage crush on you.

And we share birthdays so we have an odd connection as well. When people talk about chemistry between people, we really felt it was there.

So, Kate, you have a history with Guy…

The dreamy Guy Pearce, who happens to be my teen heartthrob. He played Mike in “Neighbors.” I would fake illness to stay off school and watch the 1 p.m. show, then watch the 5:25 p.m repeat. Obsessed! And then I read that we had the same birthday—that was it. He was coming on the white horse!

What do you and Mildred have in common?

Her desire to be successful comes from this incredible survival instinct, which I do share a little bit. My parents didn’t have money. I did grow up with very little and so I was able to connect with Mildred on that level.

“Mildred Pierce” seems to beg the question: Can a mother love too much?
Every woman has a mother whom they will have an issue with. It just depends on how you choose to process the lessons that you learned from yours.