The director Sam Mendes has always preferred to leave his work behind at the end of the day, convinced that he operates best when “I’m being instinctive and not thinking about what I’ve just done.” But while making his new movie, Revolutionary Road, about the dissolution of a marriage, Mendes had no choice but to bring the project home. “I would open my eyes in the morning and there Kate would be, going, ‘Great! You’re awake! Now let’s talk about the second scene,’” Mendes recalls with a great gutsy laugh, of his tête-à-têtes with the film’s star, his wife, Kate Winslet. “She loves to bring home work. She wants to talk about literally every full stop and comma, and so I realized that for 24 hours a day I had to basically treat her like my leading actress.”
Mendes and his wife, Kate Winslet, consult on the set of Revolutionary Road.
The pair met in 2001, when Mendes approached Winslet about appearing at London’s Donmar Warehouse theater, where he was then artistic director. He had already won an Oscar for his debut film, American Beauty (1999), and had taken two award-winning plays to Broadway, his revival of Cabaret (1998) and The Blue Room (1998), featuring a briefly naked Nicole Kidman. Winslet turned him down due to scheduling conflicts, but a romance quickly bloomed, and they married in 2003. Since the beginning, says Mendes, they’ve had numerous “Is this the one?” discussions about ways they might collaborate. At the same time, Winslet had long been hoping to reunite with close friend Leonardo DiCaprio, her costar in the megahit Titanic (1997). Revolutionary Road brought them together, into a ménage à trois of sorts that Mendes orchestrated with typical savvy. “You can’t underestimate his shrewdness,” says friend Simon Russell Beale, the formidable British stage actor who has appeared in six Mendes productions. “He’s got a producer’s eye. He can sniff the zeitgeist.”
Based on the cult novel by Richard Yates, the film, set in 1950s suburban Connecticut, tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a young, sparkling couple forced to take stock of their faltering dreams and marriage. Despite wanting to partner with his wife, Mendes was not without trepidation. He wondered, he says, “Can we get through this without any major rows? But I’m not a confrontationist as a director, so I didn’t feel like it would be a festival of tantrums and raging egos, because neither of us is like that.” His primary concern, he recalls, was that DiCaprio not feel sidelined: “Leo was in the most difficult position because he was trying to be married to the director’s wife, and I didn’t want him feeling there was pillow talk between Kate and me about what he was doing.”
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