Leo Di Caprio and Kate Winslet Step Down that Revolutionary Road

Feature Story by Brad Balfour

At a recent press conference in New York preceding its premiere, the essential members of the Revolutionary Road cast (Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Michael Shannon and Kathy Bates) and director Sam Mendes (American Beauty) answered questions before a small room of journalists. Of course, the big news--that the film re-unites actors DiCaprio and Winslet, who first made their mark in Titanic as a couple madly in love--drove the interest in this film about the disquieting side of the 1950s corporate society. It also drove the nomination of the film and some of its cast for the 2009 Golden Globes (Winslet won for Best Actress) foreshadowing the upcoming Oscar nominations.

In Titanic, these two came together against the odds of diverging social backgrounds and relationships and with the backdrop of the tragedy about to occur. Audiences were stirred by the burgeoning love affair between them.

The opposite happens in Revolutionary Road. Audiences see the destruction of a relationship never really fated to be, somewhat thrown together by expectations they have for each other but are never realized. In fact, the two don't really share much or see eye-to-eye about their goals and life in general.

Based on the late Richard Yates '60s novel (of the same name) which described the unfulfilled, alienated life of the '50s (and led to the rebellion of the '60s), Winslet plays actress wanna-be April, who meets the diffident but charming Frank Wheeler at a party. They share their dreams of an individualistic life. Ultimately, though, unrequited dreams and emotional frustration beset their relationship as they start to have a family. Wheeler sets aside his vague goals and falls into the same man-in-the-grey-flannel-suit salesman's life his father had. April feels the anomie of life lacking personal accomplishment. They became further estranged, leading to damaged lives and a tragic ending.

Q: This is obviously a movie about a troubled marriage. Would you say it's because of a failure to communicate?

KW: It's a combination of different things. It's an inability to communicate, or certainly more to do with the fact that they have forgotten to communicate with each other for some time. It's only when April turns around to him and says, "We can't go on pretending that this is the life we wanted," that they are both then truly forced to question exactly that.

For April, it's very clear that this isn't the life she expected for herself, and Frank is then forced to question that too. And it's at that point that they realize maybe they aren't the people they were when they first met. They want different things from life. April, ultimately, is so determined to find happiness, to feel something again other than what she has, that she's prepared to risk anything in order to get that—which to me is a very heroic act, and not a cowardly one.

LD: And my character, on the other hand, is very un-heroic and cowardly [laughs], which is the truth. Ultimately, he's a product of his environment. He doesn't have the courage to manifest any tangible change in his life. On the one hand, April is wanting to risk everything for a new opportunity, or to pursue the dreams that she once had of what she wanted her life to be, Ultimately, my character is my father's son—I want to conform to my environment. Is it about two people that don't communicate enough? I don't think that's the truth.

It's about two people that are being forced apart, but are desperately trying to salvage their marriage and stay together. I think they are trains on different courses. Ultimately, the facade of what Paris represented, the ideals of what Paris was to them, was an opportunity that could or could not have resulted in something positive or tangible. But I think they were being forced apart by different intentions for what they wanted their lives to be.

KW: Also, I think, for April, Paris represents, possibility, hope, and change. The notion that she might be forced to live a life without possibility is ultimately the kiss of death.

Q: Having worked together before on Titanic, were there any surprises was this time around?

LD: Well, Kate and I have remained close friends for many years. Since Titanic, I think we've been both actively looking for the right project to do. This wasn't at all treading on similar territory. We knew that that is a complete set-up for disaster, having done Titanic. We knew we needed to try something completely unique, it was just about finding that project.

And this was something that Kate was shepherding for many years, and putting the pieces together, and I felt very fortunate to be chosen for it. As far as how Kate's changed or not changed, I think that she's always had that pursuit of excellence within the characters she plays. She's got an unbelievable work ethic that she's retained ever since I knew her in her early 20s. She cares about the movie being great, and the other actors involved, and everything.

That's all still there [plus], the fact that Sam was attached to this, the fact that this was a great piece of material, and such a departure from what we'd done before.

What has changed is we don't approach the filmmaking experience quite the way we did in our early 20's. We don't look at the director or the producers involved as parental figures, which I feel we did in our teenage years—we were constantly looking for that guidance. We come into movies now as kind of equal pieces to the puzzle, and bring our own ideas for what the movie should be and, for lack of a better term, we're more like "adults"—whatever that word means.

KW: Any major surprises? I think he's nicer than he was (if that's possible). He's funnier than he was (even if that's possible); and he's a better actor than he was (if that ever was possible). And quite honestly, playing Frank and April Wheeler, there was a surprise every day.

I so much loved playing some of the difficult scenes with Leo, knowing that, because of the trust we have as two people who have known each other for so long, there were no boundaries. That was a real gift to have as two actors playing these parts. I was able to do off-camera dialogue for him, and had to stop myself from crying because I was seeing someone for whom I have so much respect doing things as an actor that I've never seen him do before; [I got to watch him] morphing his face into positions that I've never seen him morph his face into before, as an actor or as a person. There were moments like that pretty much every single day.

Q: Was there one scene that stood out as the most exciting or most rewarding for the two of you?

LD: The most rewarding? What was interesting about the way Sam set this whole film in motion was [that] he really attacked it like he would a theater production. He realized it was an ensemble piece that depended so much on the actors, and listened to all of our different ideas endlessly in the rehearsal process.

Then what we got to do was sort of live this tiny microcosm of a life in a four-month period in almost real time. It was bizarre because we shot the beginning sequences at the beginning, and there was so much unsaid throughout the first two-thirds of the film, so much pent-up within these characters, that when the kettle sort of explodes at the end of the movie, all that stuff felt ultra-realistic because we were confined to this tiny suburban house for months at a time. And there was so much that our characters had wanted desperately to say to each other.

When those scenes finally happened, that was something I was really looking forward to because I just felt there's such a comfort level we have just being friends and knowing that we have the best intentions for each other, like she said. So we can be brutally honest and savage to each other onscreen, and we trust each other in that regard. So that was the stuff I was looking most forward to, and it was ultimately fun.

KW: For me, one of the most memorable scenes that we shot together was the breakfast scene at the end of the film. I remember reading it on the page and thinking, "How the hell are we gonna get through this? How on earth are we gonna do this?" And everything about that scene took me by surprise from the way that it was lit in that incredibly stark, beautiful, naked way; from the way that Sam really steered us through the very difficult emotions. Rhythmically, the scene is very delicate.

I remember feeling very strongly that Leo and I were very much in Sam's hands when we were shooting that scene, because it was so difficult for us to have a kind of sixth sense of what we needed it to be. All we knew was that we had to be very honest about every word we were saying, and we just had to trust in Sam so completely, because emotionally it was just very difficult to get through.

Q: Was your character a heroic figure?

KW: I feel that April is a heroine. I didn't feel she was a coward, neither did I feel she was suicidal, and I certainly didn't think she was bipolar. But I do believe that this was a woman that was taken to an emotional brink in her pursuit of happiness, and I think it literally sent her mad, I really do. And in giving herself an abortion, I don't think that she was intending to kill herself, but she knew that it was a very big risk, and there's something incredibly courageous and stoic about that. And it's a fine line, you know? It's very difficult to translate those two things simultaneously.

Q: And Leo, your character is such a tragic figure. Do you think he ever recovers?

LD: Where do I begin? I think what's interesting about the novel and the way Yates writes all these characters is that the sympathy shifts constantly throughout the course of the book. Where you think Frank is sort of despicable for cheating on his wife at the beginning of the film, at the end of the film you realize that he's the one trying to salvage the relationship. I just loved playing a character that just slightly fell short of his ambitions. I thought it was a compelling thing to do. He just did not have the courage at the end of the day to follow through with the life he wanted. He would be happier conforming to his existence.

Q: Do you think the '50s were as much a character in this film?

LD: At first, having read the novel and the script, I thought the '50s was a huge component. This was the era of prescription medication, and we're moving to Levittown and the suburbs. Trying to have that symbolic American family existence drove a lot of people nuts. But I thought as much as that was a product of the movie, once we did the film, a lot of that stripped away and became the backdrop to the emotional drama of these characters’ lives unraveling.

Q: What did you think about the plight of oppressed women in the days of Revolutionary Road?

KW: We should also share this question with Kathy. But one of the things that was so touching to me and moving to me about April Wheeler was that this was a woman who seemed to me, like so many women of that time, whose interior world was so much bigger than her exterior world. I'm very different to her, and I had to find a way of understanding her and loving her, which I did and which I do, but it was not always easy. She's a very complex and complicated woman who has no emotional outlets.

I'm lucky. I get to express my passions and the spirited side of myself, and the strong-willed side of myself through the jobs that I do. I was so moved by April's lack of emotional outlet, and it was just crushing to me, and it was very difficult to play. Frank and April do see themselves as being slightly more glamorous than everybody around them. In many ways, I think that that's the one thing, actually, that's kept April going, living this life that she's really unhappy living. She's somehow managed convinced herself that everything's okay because they're not like the Campbells [their friends], they're not like the Givings [their neighbors], they're just a little bit better than everybody else.

She goes to Frank, "We can't go on pretending that this was the life we wanted," and in many ways she's incredibly brave, even to be able to admit that to herself. So many women were coasting along and living this lie because they simply had no other option. As Leo said, prescription medication and sneaking beverages midday all began during that time.

Q: Leo, you've done a lot of big movies with many famous directors including Martin Scorsese four times. What did Sam Mendes bring to the table as a director?

LD: He knows how to work with actors, that's simply it. He's kind of masterful at that. And he realized very early on that we'd all have questions about our characters, and the true intent of our characters, and he let us unleash a lot of that.

We got to express all our doubts and disbeliefs about what our characters’ intentions were, and what we felt. He listened to a lot of that and asked us these very penetrating questions. Sometimes it's jarring, when you're in the middle of doing a scene and he says, "What do you think your character's really doing this for?"

You have to stop and say, "Actually, I didn't think of that. I have to admit you're right. I should have an answer for that, but I don't. Let me think of that answer." That ability to question his actors in a very gentle way. It gives you all that subtext that you need. I could go on and on about it, but I think you get the picture.

Q: Kate, with this and The Reader, you are competing against yourself in various awards races--especially since the Oscar noms are upcoming. How do you feel about that?

KW: I'll answer the last part of your question first. I feel very proud of both of these films, and proud to be a part of them. Quite honestly, I don't know how categorizing of actors even happens. I really truly don't. It certainly has nothing to do with me. It's incredible to be talked about in that way, and I can only hope that I can live up the expectation. I hope the work speaks for itself. It's my job to make myself available to support both these films equally.

Kate Winslet Copes With Making the Reader, The Nazi era and Oscar Buzz

Feature Interview by Brad Balfour

With both Revolutionary Road and The Reader coming into theaters around the world, this has been quite a creative year for 33-year-old British actress Kate Winslet. There's Oscar®-talk for each film, with Winslet in line for best actress, best supporting actress or both. And ironically, these two films complement each other in that they're both partially set during the same period--the post-World War Two-era of the mid-1950s.

Winslet already has five Oscar nominations to her credit, two of which made her the youngest actress ever to be nominated twice. She's also regarded as a champion of showing women's bodies as they naturally are and has always refused to conform to anyone else's template for female nudity.

As a novel by Bernhard Schlink, The Reader offered a forceful look at the seductive effect of the Third Reich as it gained power and the effect it had on the first post-war generation. Once World War II was over, the generation that followed had to reconcile how their parents, uncles and aunts had allowed Hitler and the original Nazis to gain power and draw the nation into its insidious system. As this country begins to cope with this post-Bush era, a slew of Nazi-related films like The Reader (Valkyrie, Good and The Boy In The Striped Pajamas) are examining the slippery slope that led to total compliance with a Fascist dictatorship.

Virginal 15-year-old Michael Berg (played by German actor David Kross; the older version is played by Ralph Fiennes) is similarly seduced by Hanna Schmitz (Winslet) and then the relationship is discarded. As he grapples with its effect on him, he also grapples with building a life afterwards--a life that includes becoming a lawyer and dealing with an untested legal system established in the wake of the Nazi regime. As part of his legal studies, Berg witnesses the trial of four female work camp guards who sent countless people to their deaths. When he recognizes one as his former lover, the ever deepening gyre of emotions and ideas spins.

During screenings, this film has produced polarizing responses. When the opportunity arose to speak with Winslet in a near-exclusive interview setting, it produced equally strong emotional reactions on both sides of the table.

Q: I saw both Revolutionary Road and The Reader on the same day; you played two very different people. Was it a different process for each film to adapt or adopt these people?

KW: it's an extremely different process with any character; every character is different. I would hate to use the old regurgitated emotions of another character and layer them into a new character with a different wig on, or a different costume and a different accent.

These two projects were wildly different in terms of how I had to approach them. But both were unbelievably complicated, the most challenging experiences of my working life. I find myself saying again and again: the fact that I got to play both of these characters in my lifetime, let alone in the space of a year--it doesn't even add up; that doesn't happen to people.

To say that creatively it's been the most rewarding two years of my life would be a massive understatement. I've learned so much about myself as an actress. I've just honestly learned so much.

Approaching someone like Hanna Schmitz is so different from somebody like April Wheeler [of Revolutionary Road]. The one thing that they both do have in common is that they're based on novels, and the source material is so rich in each case that they really became my bible in both instances, which doesn't happen all the time.

My copy of The Reader is on my shelf right next to Revolutionary Road and they both don't really resemble books anymore; they both [look], sort of, like a dog has had a go at them. They're practically falling apart.

[With] Hannah I was very much playing a character, and I remember staring down the barrel of the gun and thinking, "Shit. I really have nothing I can relate to here. There's nothing of my own experience I can put into this character, at all. So let's just start right there and hope for the goddamn best."

It's such a terrifying position to be in, especially when it's such an extraordinary book; the material's so rich. It's a much loved piece of German literature, and so important to Germans and I wanted to get it right. I was the person asked to play Hanna Schmitz.

It was an enormous pressure [on me]. "Jesus Christ! Don't fuck it up, girl." The thing about playing Hannah that quite honestly was the hardest--aside from all the obvious things: the dialect and so on, and the aging, and the illiteracy and the moral illiteracy--the hardest thing was to hold on to my instincts as to who you are.

With something like this--a very, very intricate and difficult love film that is set up against a Holocaust backdrop (though I don't feel it's a Holocaust movie at all)--[is that] everyone had an opinion about Hanna Schmitz. She meant something different for everybody. People were alarmingly vocal about that, and everyone would assume you shared the same opinion, "Well obviously she was a Nazi; obviously, she was in control of her action; well, obviously--" and the list goes on.

I would sometimes think, "Oh my god, that's not what I thought. Oh shit. Am I wrong? Hang on. No, wait a second. I might not be wrong. I actually might be right, maybe they're wrong. Does it matter who's right or wrong?"

All that mattered at the end of the day was that I made her my own and hung on to that and played the honesty and the truthfulness of that, the vulnerability of her and that I understood her. That's the most important job, I think. I'm really learning more about this, actually. All the time is that as an actor it's really so key that you get inside the character and you understand them--the good bits and the bad bits.

You don't have to forgive it; you don't have to sympathize with it. You just have to just have to understand why those things [happen] to that person and why they behave the way that they do. That's what I was able to do, somehow, with April and with Hannah. And that's why I'm absolutely not good right now, because of having gone through these two extraordinary experiences. It's literally blown my mind.

Q: Why do you think Hanna had an affair with this high school boy and why did she keep calling him "kid?"

KW: You'd have to ask Bernhard Schlink why she called him "kid," quite honestly. You really would. That's what she calls him the book and I don't know why that was. That was a little nickname, an affectionate term she had for him. I don't think she was calling him "kid" and really meaning a child, or baby, or anything like that. Also, Hannah thought he was 17; he's a 15-year-old boy, but he let her believe he was 17 years old. I just don't think she really thought about the age.

She's a woman who--because of her illiteracy--has probably never had a close, intimate relationship of this nature. She's never been able to let anyone in for fear of being found out, and being exposed, and the shame of that she carried in her day-to-day life. Her illiteracy informed everything about her existence.

For her, to feel these things, be touched in that way, be overwhelmed at how much she ended up, ultimately, [made her] emotionally need this boy. I would actually say that in many ways I feel, she ended up emotionally needing him almost more than he needed her. You don't expect that to happen.

I think she genuinely loved this boy, this young man. And that's how it always felt to me: he was a young man. It didn't feel inappropriate even--it didn't feel salacious, or uncomfortable, or wrong. It somehow always seemed so real, and so pure, and so tender. That's what it was for me.

That's why I think it didn't feel uncomfortable or unnatural to do those love scenes with David [Kross], because I always understood them--we both did as characters. And it doesn't matter how nervous you get before shooting scenes like that. At the end of the day as long as you believe in the reason that they're there and present in the story, then you can embrace it, and really play those moments out and fill them with as much honesty as possible.

Q: What was that process for you--to get into her mind, you had to do a lot of research since you don't have much of a frame of reference for her to begin with?

KW: It was really hard. It was incredibly helpful, and so interesting. But it was a long process, and I felt like I had to cram quite a lot in. I really only had about two months, and there was a lot to do--with the dialect and the general preparation of Hannah: who she was, her back story, where she came from. I came at it and thought, where do I begin? Okay, I thought, I could do this thing, I could do this thing, or I could do all of these things. Okay, let's start with that. I'll just do all of these things and I'm just going to see which one helps me the most. And ultimately everything I did was beneficial.

I had to educate myself a little more about the Holocaust; and I had to educate myself a lot about the role of an SS guard, about which I actually knew very little. And I'm not embarrassed to say that, because I think that's the case for many people of my generation.

Once you see documentary footage of the camp, you read anything on the Holocaust, you can never un-see those things, you can never un-hear, un-read them. I'm still absolutely haunted and traumatized by so much of what I saw during the preparation process. At a certain point I just had to stop, because I thought, "I have what I need now; I get it. I really get it."

Then what became most beneficial to me was the book. I practically memorized it.

Understanding the mind of an illiterate person--that was crucial to me. Have I said this already in this interview or am I having déjà vu? Have I talked about the literacy part in it yet? So I spent a lot of time with a group in New York City, the Literacy Partners, and they teach men and women to read and write, and that was really the most helpful stuff I could possibly have done because I had to understand the level of shame. I had to understand how you live with that lie, how it affects every single area of your life.

I literally sat in on classes with people that were learning how to spell cat, bat, sat and mat. And some of the younger people in that group were 22, 23, and some of the older people were 72 and 73 years-old. And they had spent a life being so ashamed that they can't turn around to anybody and say, can you help me?

There was one woman in particular who spent a lot of time with me--she's in her early 60s and she had learned to read and write two years ago; she's just so proud of herself, I can't tell you. And she was happy to talk about it, happy to talk about how she survived.

So I would say to her, "Hold on a second. How did you get jobs? What kinds of jobs did you do?"

"Well Sugar, let me tell you. I was a telephone operator and when you can't read or write...I have the gift of the gab--you become a good talker. You talk with people a lot. You try to escape from it."

But I would say, "Yes. But how did you get the job in the first place? How did you fill in forms?"

"Oh honey, did you ever hear of Ace bandage?"

"Yeah"

"Well, I would go to the store and I would buy myself an Ace bandage and I would go to my girlfriend and say, 'Oh my hand; I can't hold a pen. Could you fill in that form for me?' And I would tell her what to put, 'Yeah, you put that.' That is what I did, for years and years of my life."

"But how many jobs are we talking about?"

"We're talking a lot of jobs and a lot of Ace bandages," is what she said. She had a son, so I would say, "How would you help him with his homework?"

[She said,] "No. I did not help him with his homework. I employed somebody to do that, because his life and his education was so important to me, but I knew I couldn't do it. I couldn't let him know that I couldn't read and write."

I said, "What about bedtime stories?"

"No ma'am. I would sing to him made-up songs that I would make up."

I was blown away. And then, [I asked,] "Okay, restaurants; what would you do in a restaurant?"

"I would sit with my menu and my beautiful suit that I had made for myself, which I had perfectly pressed that day myself, and I would look at that menu and say, 'I'll take the chicken.'"

And I would say, "How did you know they had chicken." "Oh honey, everybody has chicken." But I would say, okay, "Salads, whatever...?"

"I would say to the gentleman, 'What vegetables come with that today? Oh, that sounds good. Let me take some of those."

So my understanding of how good you get at hiding that, the lies that you live through, and the level of control you have to exert on your day-to-day life just to simply understand what happens next is a level of protection. That was the most valuable, eye-opening stuff.

You cannot imagine how fascinating that whole process was for me. It literally blew my mind. Walking down the street, I just think, pretend that you can't read that sign. Could you imagine that, all of those things?
Also being told that illiterate people can count, so that when we were putting the process together of how Hannah was actually able to teach herself to read and write, we realized the counting element was quite important. The-lady-with-the-little-dog--one-two-three-four [syncopated]. You see her doing it on her fingers. It helped a lot with how [director] Stephen [Daldry] put this together.

Q: Even when you're doing these interviews, you seem to be learning something about yourself; about what you did to get there. It sounds like this was a pivotal experience for you.

KW: It was huge. I full-on broke down and thought, "I'm going to have to leave the room." Don't get me started on the trial. I am still coming to terms with the whole experience of having played Hanna, I really genuinely am.

We wrapped on July 12th, and I sort of walked away like some car crash victim who somehow hadn't been hurt on the outside, but I felt like I couldn't speak [about it]. It was truly overwhelming. I really went somewhere. I was in some kind of a trance. And I'm still coming to terms with all of it. I'm so blown away by the movie.

There are moments in the film when I actually make a noise. The moment when he goes to the camp, and the camera's on the inside of that barn, and I go [makes guttural sound]. I just can't watch--and we're not seeing any bloodshed. It's just the emptiness and the power of the imagery and the memory and the fact that that was a real camp.

Q: Is Hanna naïve when she's telling the truth, telling it the way it is? When the Judge and prosecutor ask her questions, she's the only one saying, "What did you expect me to do? This was my job." Does Hannah realize she's taking the brunt of it while the other three female concentration camp guards are lying through their teeth?

KW: No, no... It's both. She's naïve; she's vulnerable; she doesn't have the intellectual capacity to articulate what's happened. She doesn't know about lying on that level. Someone's asking the question--she's giving them the answer. So when she says to [the judge], "Well, what would you have done?" she really wants to know.

She just thought she was doing her job. In those moments she sitting there, she's realizing, for the first time, "Oh, so I had a choice then? Ok, so doing my job meant I was committing a crime, is that what it is?" She didn't know. That is because she was illiterate.

And when those other women realized very quickly that they can pin this thing on her, you just feel her spiraling out of control. Because all she can do is speak faster, say what she said already and say more of it, again and again. You just see her losing control in this catastrophic way. Of course [there's] that moment when, "I need to see a sample of your handwriting," she will take that life sentence [rather than] admit she's illiterate. God, it's devastating.

Q: Everything is left up to the audience; no judgment is made in this film. It asks more questions than it even tries to answer. How important is that in the telling of the story to you?

KW: I think it's crucial. I think it's absolutely crucial. We didn't want to give answers. We wanted to ask questions and have an audience walk away questioning everything, and possibly questioning their own morals if at any second they felt sympathy for Hanna Schmitz.

I knew it wasn't my job to make an audience sympathize with her, humanize her or warm her up. I had to make her a person; I had to make her real; and I had to be 100% committed to conveying the honesty of every single emotion in order to give the audience the opportunity to understand her if they wanted to, feel any level of sympathy if they wanted to.

And the most exciting thing for me, personally, is if the audience feels morally impure, if they feel any degree of sympathy towards her, that's what is interesting. That means that it is getting some kind of new perspective; it is raising questions for people. I think your observation is absolutely right, and it's absolutely what we hoped people would feel about the film.