Zoe Saldaña and Kate Winslet connect easily, as colleagues who haven’t seen each other in a while often do: They worked together on James Cameron’s “Avatar: The Way of Water,” which was released in 2022, and will also appear in next year’s third film, “Fire and Ash.” Saldaña had created the role of Neytiri in the first “Avatar” in 2009, and Winslet — a Cameron veteran, of course, from “Titanic” — joined the ensemble as the character Ronal, a shaman and warrior.
Winslet recalls the warm environment Cameron established during the films’ rehearsal period, and “that sense of collaboration and willingness to share and listen and to invite ideas.” Saldaña agrees, and says, “It’s crazy what you can do when you’re given an unlimited amount of resources to put a character together. It’s the most rewarding process.”
Speaking about Cameron and the Na’vi, who in the “Avatar” movies are the embattled native people of Pandora, she adds: “It’s so beautiful how he totally gave us free agency to build the Na’vi people from scratch with him.” Not that there wasn’t competition on set — addressing Winslet, Saldaña says with a laugh: “You have to be in the room every time he talks about you. He’s like, ‘Well, Kate can hold her breath for seven minutes.’ And he goes, ‘Sigourney came in second with almost six minutes. Zoe allegedly says that she did it for five.’ And I’m like, ‘I did it for five!’”
Their two films this year, Winslet’s “Lee” and Saldaña’s “Emilia Pérez,” are quite different from Cameron’s otherworldly blockbusters. In “Lee,” Winslet plays war photographer Lee Miller, who determinedly broke down gender barriers to shoot harrowing images during World War II. In “Emilia Pérez,” Saldaña stars as Rita, an attorney in Mexico who becomes enmeshed with Emilia (Karla Sofía Gascón), first to help with her gender transition and then to guide her through making amends for the sins she committed as the leader of a drug cartel — all in an opera format.
The two old friends, in other words, have a lot to discuss.
KATE WINSLET: When I was told that I was going to be speaking with you today, my heart just jumped for joy. Not only because I’m so excited to talk to you about your movie, but because you are just radiance and light, and it’s such a joy to have proper time with you — which we probably will never get to have again!
ZOE SALDAÑA: I feel the same about you. I saw “Lee” — I was deeply moved. I was very emotional. There’s something really rewarding about discovering women who throughout history have affected the fabric of life for the better. And Lee Miller is someone that I was asking myself, how is it that I don’t know about her? Thank you for telling her story. But how did this all come together?
WINSLET: Thank you for saying that, because the reason I wanted to tell Lee’s story was precisely because of what you just identified: You didn’t know who she was. So many people don’t know that those photographs they may have seen connected to the conflict of World War II and the Nazi regime, so many people have never connected the dots and realized that actually it was a middle-aged woman who took those images.
She had been a model in her life for a brief period in her 20s. She had been defined that way — defined through the male gaze — often described alongside her love life. And it just drove me crazy, because her life was so much beyond that.
SALDAÑA: Absolutely.
Alexi Lubomirski for Variety
WINSLET: We are trying to live our lives as women, redefining femininity to mean resilience and power and courage and compassion. And that to me is who Lee was. I’d been to an exhibition of hers in the early 2000s in Edinburgh, and then years later, some friends of mine called me who work in an auction house, and they said, “This table was the kitchen table in the home of [Lee’s] family.” They know how much I love to cook and appreciate family mealtimes. And Lee was a great cook, and she would cook all these wonderful meals, and they would have these wonderful times around this table. I bought this table.
SALDAÑA: Oh, wow.
WINSLET: I sat down at the table, and I thought, “Why hasn’t anyone made a movie about Lee Miller?”
SALDAÑA: How long ago was that?
WINSLET: That was in 2015. This was the first time that I have actively really produced something right from the very beginning, finding the writers, really crafting the story — because Lee lived so many lives throughout her life. But this particular decade was when she went to war as a flawed, middle-aged woman, and paid a huge emotional price for the things that she witnessed.
We had a female director on “Lee,” Ellen Kuras, who has been a much-revered cinematographer her whole life. I did “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” with her years ago, in 2003. And when it came to the point of “The script is ready; let’s go out to directors,” I just suddenly realized it can’t be a man. It can’t be a man! I was so immersed in Lee’s world, having finely tuned and constructed this story in terms of the screenplay and that 10 years that we cover. I spoke to Ellen — I knew that she had moved into directing television, but I also knew that she hadn’t directed her first feature yet. And I thought, “OK, girly, it’s time. Come with me.”
But let me ask you about this extraordinary movie, “Emilia Pérez,” in which you play Rita. I had deliberately not read anything knowing I was coming to speak to you. And so the second you open your mouth and your beautiful singing voice comes out, I’m like, “Yes! She’s done a musical!” I just was so excited because, of course, I have heard you sing on set, on “Avatar” — one of the things you do hovering around the dressing room block. How did the project come to you?
SALDAÑA: I wish I could say that it was through a table that I bought on auction.
WINSLET: No! You don’t! Because then you’d be telling the table story over and over again. Tell me.
Alexi Lubomirski for Variety
SALDAÑA: It was through my agents. But I have to say that it’s through the power of manifestation. I’ve always been a little bit cynical about the relationship that we have with the universe, and yet the universe has always been talking to me directly whenever I’ve sought direct advice and guidance. And these films, “Avatar,” “Star Trek,” “Guardians of the Galaxy,” they gave me so much. But as they became super successful and became machines and worldwide phenomenons, all that was happening while I was also getting married and starting my family. So there was very little time for me to …
WINSLET: … be an artist.
SALDAÑA: … start stretching my muscles again and challenge myself. You find yourself just full of frustration, and you don’t know where to put it. I had a conversation with my agents, and we wrote down a list of great directors — a very small list. They called me up and they said, “Jacques Audiard is casting for his next movie, and it’s going to be in Spanish, and it’s an opera and it takes place in Mexico, and we really do believe there’s a part that is just perfect for you.”
Your self-sabotage comes up. Immediately, it’s like, “Oh, wait, wait, wait. You’re not Mexican. Oh, wait, wait, wait. You can’t sing, you can’t dance, you can’t do this.” And I was like, “Well, but I want to meet him. I just want to have a conversation with him.” And we had a Zoom, and it was such a great connection that I had with Jacques.
WINSLET: He’s a brilliant director. My God. The deeper you dig and the more layers of the onion that you peel away. And to turn that into opera, it was extraordinary to me.
SALDAÑA: It was beautiful. It was brilliant. And those are words that I don’t like to use that much in what we do, but I do believe that Jacques’ decision to make this a musical, to make this operatic, was brilliant in the sense that these women needed to have these breaths of song and dance in order for you to really get to feel them and get to know them. I love the fact that he wasn’t afraid of how complex they were, and these are women with really damaged lives — very fragile, very desperate. And yet they were deserving of love. They were deserving of freedom of their journey. And I hadn’t seen that in a long time.
WINSLET: But the combination, as well, of fragility and vulnerability in the face of fear and phenomenal courage — that kind of “OK, fuck you, world! I can do this, and I can do it by myself.” It kind of made me think, “OK, hang on a second. Rita and Lee, quite similar in that sense of just ‘I’m not going to be deterred by that thing or that thing or that thing. I’m going to go after the thing I believe in.’” And it’s so true to now! But all framed in this fantastic, almost at times heist-style opera. I loved it so much.