Kate Winslet has stated in interviews that working on this film led to a humorous incident where Harvey Keitel wanted to improvise to create more intimacy between their two characters. Keitel proceeded to get on the floor and act like a dog, asking Winslet to be his owner who was helping him to die. Winslet initially took it as a joke, but once she realized Keitel was serious she carried on with it just as he asked.
Ruth (Kate Winslet) lives in Sans Souci, Sydney, Australia. "Sans Souci" is French for "carefree".
Lead producer Jan Chapman said of location filming in outback South Australia: "The Flinders Ranges shoot was physically hard, with long distances between locations, dusty difficult roads, freezing temperatures, and constant rain when it wasn't supposed to be raining. It was wild, strange, dirty, but beautiful. I have to say, that the extreme beauty of the place tended to overpower the stresses. [Cinematographer] Dion [Beebe] did a wonderful job of capturing those figures in that brutal majestic landscape: the colours, the light, the scale."
Co-screenwriter Anna Campion said of this film's writing: "When we first began, we used to sit in coffee bars and argue, almost like the two main characters Ruth [Kate Winslet] and P.J. [Harvey Keitel]. Our arguments in the first draft were the usual unprovable business...Is there a God, is there not a God?. Whether God is merely a projection of human need. The right of one to believe. We were working out the parameters of these inexhaustible arguments about the meaning of life and how the different characters might express them. P.J., in particular, has really thought these arguments through, which is extremely threatening for Ruth whose spiritual experience is emotional, not intellectual."
Kate Winslet has said in an interview years later that, while she has performed nude, including full frontal, for this and several films, she actually hates doing it. She just doesn't get why films require nudity and really can't stand knowing everyone on set is staring at her body. So when the time comes, she just says "Oh f*ck, let's just do it!" Then she just takes off her clothes and gets the job done as quickly as possible. In another interview, she said that she second (and third) thoughts about all those nude scenes. "I can't keep getting away with it," Winslet said. "I don't want to become 'that actress who always gets her kit off.'" But even Winslet knows that she keeps breaking her vow to keep her clothes on. "It definitely makes me the hypocrite of the decade," she admitted. "I'm just going to stop saying it."
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