Isn't She Deneuvely? (original) (raw)

Revolutionary Road has long been scheduled for December 26. Worried about having enough time to edit The Reader, which only finished shooting in July, the director, Stephen Daldry, hoped to release his film sometime next year, but producer Harvey Weinstein, whose Weinstein Company is distributing the picture, insisted on putting it out this year, leading to some ugliness in the press between him and Scott Rudin, another of the film’s producers and a producer as well of Revolutionary Road. Eventually the principals settled on a December 12 release for The Reader, though Rudin ultimately decided to take his name off the film. (Depending on which report you read, Weinstein moved the movie up for financial reasons, or Oscar reasons, or both.) Winslet, who wasn’t involved in the machinations, acknowledges that the back-to-back schedule puts some pressure on her, but prefers to view her glass as half full: “How the hell did I get that lucky [to have two compelling roles] in the same 12-month period? It’s really rare and remarkable, and I don’t take that position lightly. It might not happen like that again—I’m well aware of that. You know, the truth is, I’m just going to bloody well make the most of it.”

T_he Reader,_ Daldry’s first feature film since The Hours (2002), is based on the controversial 1995 novel by Bernhard Schlink, an Oprah’s Book Club selection about a young boy’s obsession with an older woman in post–World War II Germany; the screenplay is by David Hare, who also adapted The Hours. (With the story spanning almost four decades, Winslet performs much of the part in age makeup.) The Reader was filmed on location in Germany over the course of five months—the longest Winslet has been away from her children, although there were frequent visits on both sides of the Atlantic.

“I’m just going to bloody well make the most of it,” Winslet says of her confluence of Oscar-potential roles. Photograph by Steven Meisel; styled by Jessica Diehl.

Shot in New York City and Connecticut, Revolutionary Road was the more family-friendly production. It was adapted from Richard Yates’s 1961 cult novel, a meditation on suburban anomie. If Titanic was about the thrill of romantic attraction (at least before the hull hit the iceberg), Revolutionary Road charts a more mature, complex, and fraught relationship. The story involves Frank and April Wheeler, a married couple with two young children, who struggle with the quiet dissolution of their dreams, both as individuals and as a couple. It’s familiar territory for Mendes after American Beauty, and for Winslet too in the wake of Little Children (2006). She read the script, by Justin Haythe (who previously wrote the Robert Redford kidnap drama The Clearing), was moved by it, and thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if Sam directed?” Once he signed on—he had been working with Haythe on an earlier project—Winslet says, her next thought was: “How do we get Leo?”

Winslet and DiCaprio had become friends while shooting Titanic and have remained close. She thought he would be perfect for the role of Yates’s restless but cautious young husband. “I mentioned the script to Leo because we’d always have conversations about interesting things that either one of us has read, and we’ve just consistently done that over the years. When it became much more concrete with Sam’s involvement, the conversations really started with Leo, and then it all happened very quickly: he read it, loved it, said ‘Yes.’ And I’m not kidding you—within three months we were on set and doing it.”

The re-uniting of Hollywood’s most iconic screen couple since Bogart and Bergman gives the film an obvious commercial hook, one that might be especially welcome for an adaptation of a bleak and not that well-known novel. “Leo and I were always aware that if we were going to do something together again that there would be a sense of expectation,” Winslet says. “It was going to have to be the right thing. We could see ourselves playing that married couple. The friendship that we have and the solidity of that was something we would be able to use. There’s an emotional shorthand that Leo and I have and a physical ease because we’ve known each other so long.… Leo and I, you know, are sort of kindred spirits—we’re cut from the same cloth. Both of us just got lucky [at a young age], started working and kind of learned on the job. We’re sort of self-educated actors in a way, and we’ve just been lucky to work with unbelievable directors and actors who have taught us so much. I mean, it’s been spectacular.”

“We both knew if we were to work together again we couldn’t tread on the kind of similar territory as _Titanic,_” says DiCaprio, via e-mail. “The characters [in _Revolutionary Road_] were a departure from what we did together before, and we knew we could push each other as actors to get some interesting performances out of each other.” Asked how Winslet approaches a role, he observes: “Her working script is riddled with notes, with different colored bookmarks, every page has detailed reference points for her to infuse into her role. She takes on her characters like a detective might survey a crime scene.” He adds—no ifs, ands, or buts—“Kate is the most talented actress of her generation.”

For his part, Mendes had to navigate a kind of de facto triangle offscreen. “Leo and Kate’s instinctive, almost wordless understanding of each other saved us weeks of work,” the director says. “I encouraged them and wanted them to go off into a corner together. I wanted them to be the unit of the movie—not me and Kate. For me it was a lot about Leo: I wanted him to feel that she and he were on each other’s side and looking out for each other, rather than me and Kate. Because the person who was in the most complicated position in many ways was Leo, because he was there having to be married to, you know, the director’s wife. And also I made a decision very early on, in rehearsals, that I just had to treat Kate as I would treat any other leading actress of her stature. And I had to do it 24 hours a day because otherwise it would be confusing. Because if I came back and started talking as her husband, rather than her director, then it would have been very, very confusing for her, and for me too.”

Marital status notwithstanding, Mendes is passionate on the subject of his lead actress: “I didn’t realize the extent of her absolute dedication—and I know it’s such a corny word to use, but I really didn’t—until I worked with her. I had seen every aspect of her in many ways except the professional side of her and how incredibly focused she is. I mean, she makes me look like a sort of tired slug.” He adds, “I think there’s quite a lot of talented people and there’s very few gifted people, and I think that she genuinely has a gift. I can’t tell you where it comes from, and I’m not sure she can either—and I think that’s probably a good thing—but when she goes into that place, those strange secret rooms that she unlocks to explore these people that she’s playing, it’s sobering for those of us who don’t possess that kind of pure gift.”