Todd Haynes, Kate Winslet and Guy Pearce Discuss "Mildred Pierce"

Todd Haynes and Guy Pearce

At Friday's TCA Winter Tour, out director Todd Haynes (Poison, Far From Heaven) was joined by Kate Winslet (Titanic), Guy Pearce (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert) and Evan Rachel Wood (True Blood) to discuss the HBO five-hour miniseries remake of the 1945 film Mildred Pierce.

In what will be Winslet's television debut, she plays Mildred, the overbearing mother of Veda (Woods) as the two struggle to get by in 1930's Los Angeles.

Haynes, the writer-director-exec producer for Mildred Pierce said that when he first read the James M. Cain novel in 2008, he was struck by how different it was from the Crawford film. "This felt modern and contemporary and approachable," said Haynes. "And it’s one of the reasons why I wanted to take it on."

In Hayne's version, Wood's is a tawdry singer and that the frankness with which he deals with Mildred’s sexuality was much more nuanced. Asked bout his approach to Mildred, Hayne's contrasted it with his 2002 film Far From Heaven:

When I did a film last that dealt with a woman’s story primarily, Far From Heaven, I was very interested in the sort of stylization of ’50s American filmmaking tropes and wanted to sort of use that in various ways in my sort of “look back at Douglas Sirk” style film making. This film was quite different in motivation, and I also felt it was different because of the venue being television and being in a long dramatic form than a feature film and what its audience for a feature film might be, but 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 reexamined by younger filmmakers and these filmmakers were bringing a real sense of sort of contemporary, sophisticated, nuanced kind of performances to what were otherwise classy genre films, like “The Godfather” or “The Exorcist” or “Chinatown” and there are many, many others from that period.

And I kind of looked — we all — 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, bringing 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.

Kate Winslet

Winslet said she was drawn to the project by the intense relationship between Veda and Mildred

“The intense relationship between Mildred and Veda is based on pure love and her adoration for this child does teeter on the brink of obsession,” said Winslet, who only watched the first five minutes of the original movie. “Every mother-daughter relationship is complicated for its own set of reasons but this one was something else. Mildred was in this position where she didn’t know whether to love her or kill her. And the amount that she did love her was suffocating.

“Mildred’s need for approval is something every mother does feel for their child, whether it’s a daughter or a son. With Veda being this determined, defiant creature that was so out of Mildred’s grasp and the adoration she has for her and the desire that Mildred has this [feeling] that she maybe could have been this person,” Winslet added. “In Veda, Mildred saw her own disappointments — little pieces of her kept dying every time she saw how brilliant, wonderful and rich Veda was and how much more extraordinary her life could have become. Al she could do was love it, encourage it and support it and want to be a part of it so, so desperately. It’s just crushing. On many levels, they’re extremely normal paternal responses to any child, but they do get very twisted and disturbing as the story goes along. It was utterly compelling to me because I can see how that can happen to any parent.”

As for Pearce, who plays Monty Beragon, he says of his character, "It was delightful playing Monty, I mean. He’s somebody who really is pleasure-seeking. You know, he’s had everything pretty much that he’s ever wanted in life. Financially he’s never struggled. And I think having been brought up in a particular world which is obviously counter — very different to what Mildred has experienced, he just doesn’t struggle with the same things that something like Mildred does. And on some level, the coming together of these two people is really quite fascinating.