Kate Winslet

Interestingly, back to that thing of how other directors handle things, a lot of directors are scared of how do you direct children.

And the reality is you can't really teach a child unless they're very gifted.

You can't really teach a child how to act.

You can just encourage them to be.

And so I did spend a lot of time trying to work out how I could create an environment that the children just sort of felt like they were all on a play date with their friends.

And so that started with, we have two five-year-olds in the film.

And one of those children is a little boy with Down syndrome, a beautiful little boy named Ben Shortland.

And Ben,

Ben's character was actually called Benji.

And it was just really fortunate that we found this child.

So I never had to teach him how to think of himself as a different name because that probably just would have been too many things for him to have processed.

And so I thought, well, hold on a second.

This is a great strength.

We've got this gift.

We have this child whose name is Ben.

everyone else should just think of themselves as their character names.

And so all of the children, I just very gently said, particularly to my two teenagers, I said, look, let's just all call ourselves in our character names.

And that's what the children did.

They introduced each other to one another as the characters that they were.

So there was never any, A, confusion, but B, it meant that when we were on set and in this sort of very playful environment, they were completely off script and would be calling each other