Production Notes

Synopsis

Adapted from the landmark novel by Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road is an incisive portrait of an American marriage seen through the eyes of Frank (three-time Academy Award nominee Leonardo DiCaprio) and April (five-time Academy Award nominee Kate Winslet) Wheeler. Yates’ story of 1950’s America poses a question that has been reverberating through modern relationships ever since: can two people break away from the ordinary without breaking apart?
Frank and April have always seen themselves as special, different, ready and willing to live their lives based on higher ideals. So, as soon as they move into their new house on Revolutionary Road, they proudly declare their independence from the suburban inertia that surrounds them and determine never to be trapped by the social confines of their era.
Yet for all their charm, beauty and irreverence, the Wheelers find themselves becoming exactly what they didn’t expect: a good man with a routine job whose nerve has gone missing; a less-than-happy homemaker starving for fulfillment and passion; an American family with lost dreams, like any other.
Driven to change their fates, April hatches an audacious plan to start all over again, to leave the comforts of Connecticut behind for the great unknown of Paris. But when the plan is put in motion, each spouse is pushed to extremes - one to escape whatever the cost, the other to save all that they have, no matter the compromises.
Directed by Sam Mendes (Academy Award winner American Beauty), from a screenplay by Justin Haythe, REVOLUTIONARY ROAD stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and features an accomplished supporting cast including Academy Award winner Kathy Bates, Kathryn Hahn (Boeing-Boeing) Michael Shannon (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, BUG) and David Harbour (Awake). The film’s producers are John N Hart, Scott Rudin, Sam Mendes and Bobby Cohen; and the executive producers are Marion Rosenberg, David M Thompson and Henry Fernaine.

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REVOLUTIONARY ROAD

DRAFT

Production Notes

“The book was widely read as an anti-suburban novel and that disappointed me . . . I think I meant it more as an indictment. . .of a general lust for conformity all over this country, by no means only in the suburbs - a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price . . . I meant to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the 50s.”

Richard Yates, Ploughshares Interview 1992

In 1961, Richard Yates’ emotionally charged novel, Revolutionary Road, shook the literary world. The story’s main characters - a pair of young lovers with grand dreams, Frank and April Wheeler - became indelibly real to readers; and ever since, they have sparked compelling discussion about the nature of marriage, the roles of men and women in modern society and the possibility of reconciling the realities of families, jobs and responsibility with the idealistic yearnings of youth. When Frank and April hatch a plan to reinvigorate their marriage by moving to the exhilarating freedom of Paris, it sparks a fateful conflict between her dreams and his fear of failing to make them come true.

The novel would go on to quietly become one of the most influential books of the century. The Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Richard Ford says that it became like a “secret handshake” among writers - a shared knowledge that this was one of those rare, truly eye-opening American novels every author wishes they might pen. It seemed to capture a profound moment in America, as the middle-class began a brand new life in the wake of World War II, settling into daily family existences focused on prosperity and security, yet rife with complacency and conformity. Yet even as it evoked its period, the novel simultaneously hit upon one of the most timeless and compelling dilemmas: the battle between the exhilarating passion of youthful ideals and the compromises of human relationships. Though never quite achieving mainstream popularity, the novel set off an underground current that would deeply influence many of the greatest American writers of the 20th century.

It has been an unusually long journey from the page to screen for Yates’ masterwork. Since its initial publication, a variety of filmmakers, including John Frankenheimer, flirted with adapting the book. But no viable screenplay ever came to pass. Having sold the rights to producer Albert Ruddy for a flat $15,500 - who in turn sold them to Patrick O’Neal - Richard Yates unsuccessfully tried to get the rights back so that he could write his own adaptation of the novel, but O’Neal, and later his widow, refused to give them up, not wanting to let go of their own vision of what a movie of this novel could be. Yates died in 1992.

Now, at long last REVOLUTIONARY ROAD comes to the screen as a motion picture directed by Sam Mendes, known for his incisive observation of American life, and starring an accomplished ensemble cast headed by Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Honing in on the love and friction between Frank and April, Mendes applies a filmmaker’s vision to the Wheelers’ story, bringing this unflinchingly honest portrait of a marriage to life on the screen.

“IMMEDIATELY, INTENSELY AND BRILLIANTLY ALIVE”:

THE NOVEL AND THE ADAPTATION

Revolutionary Road was Richard Yates’ debut novel, published when he was 36 years old, instantly thrusting him into the literary limelight. Soon after its release, and ever since, other writers have made breathless assessments of its power. Tennessee Williams called it “immediately, intensely and brilliantly alive. If more is needed to make a masterpiece of modern American fiction, I am sure I don’t know what it is.” Kurt Vonnegut dubbed the novel “the Great Gatsby of my time.” William Styron said it was “a deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic.”

Many compared Yates to Fitzgerald in the sense that he became the chronicler of his age - doing for the yearning, ambition and marital chaos of the “Age of Anxiety” what Fitzgerald had done for “the Jazz Age.” As time went on, the novel seemed to become even more relevant, even prescient, evoking the start of the Digital Age, the changing role and empowerment of women in American households and the increasing urge towards conformity. To this day, Revolutionary Road remains a timeless and provocative work.

Yet, even with all the attention the novel garnered, Yates himself never attained the success in his lifetime for which he ardently fought. Struggling, much like his characters, with alcoholism, depression and difficult relationships, throughout his life, he died broke of emphysema at the age of 66. Still, his work continues to stay alive in the hearts of his readers, thanks especially to the publicizing efforts of his avowed fans from the ranks of today’s literary lions, including Richard Ford, Nick Hornby, Joan Didion, David Hare, Kate Atkinson, Stewart O’Nan and Sebastian Faulks, who began talking publicly, often fervently, about the influence of Revolutionary Road.

Blake Bailey who in 2003 wrote the first biography of Yates, A Tragic Honesty, believes Revolutionary Road has endured because the storytelling illuminates so much more than one American marriage. “It’s about nothing less than the fundamental issues of what it is to be a human being,” he says, “it’s about coming to terms with yourself, being honest with yourself, facing up to your own limitations and trying to carve out a happy niche in life despite your limitations. As Yates said, “the worst thing that you can do in this life is to live a lie.”

With so many heightened feelings surrounding Revolutionary Road, finding a screenwriter willing to take a fresh crack at the adaptation was not easy. The circuitous path ended with Justin Haythe, who is not only a screenwriter (he co-wrote the thriller THE CLEARING with Pieter Jan Brugge) but equally important, an acclaimed novelist in his own right, garnering a Man Booker Prize nomination for his debut, The Honeymoon.

Haythe knew he was entering hallowed ground for writers, but felt the risk was worth it because Yates’ story still speaks so resonantly today. “Though the novel is anchored in the ‘50s, the characters are so psychologically recognizable to our own times,” he says. “I felt that this story is so relevant to our lives now, yet is set during such a seminal period in America. It was most worthy of a film.” Like Yates himself, Haythe saw the story as larger than its time and place: “I never approached it as about the suburbs,” he explains. “I think it’s a much vaster story about human frailty and longing.”

The difficulty lay in presenting Frank and April Wheeler on screen in an accessible way without romanticizing them –or satirizing them - allowing them to reveal through their words and actions their hopes, their fears and the ways in which they chafe against society’s proscriptions of how men and women should act with, and without, one another.

For Haythe, the linchpin of the story is the Wheelers’ belief that they’re special, different, destined for something grander than the life they are now leading - an illusion that circumstances will shatter. Much as they believe they are somehow beyond the influence of the developing consumer culture around them, they become more and more aware that they have fallen prey to it just as much as their friends and neighbors. “What makes Frank and April’s romance so exciting at first is the presumption that they are not like everyone around them,” he explains. “And then one day April comes to Frank and says ‘you know, we are becoming like everyone else so let’s do something to change our disappointed lives. Let’s get out. Let’s move to Paris. Let’s save ourselves.’ But their great escape never happens.”

Indeed, Paris remains an unrealized fantasy because April becomes pregnant, prompting Frank to reconsider causing the whole dynamic between them to shift. “Paris becomes this grand symbol of courage and potential,” says Haythe. “At heart I believe it is really about this question: if you get the chance to try to be the person you always wanted to be, what will it expose about who you really are?”

Haythe’s admiration and respect for all that Yates had accomplished with the book drove a desire to be as true to Yates’ tone and dialogue as possible in the adaptation, while also acknowledging that film is always a different creature than a novel. “In a novel, you have instant access to characters’ inner confessionals, whereas in film, there is an art to dramatizing that,” he notes. “I do hope the movie will lead more people to rediscover Yates, and give him the recognition he always wanted and deserved.”

SAM MENDES COMES ON BOARD

When it came to finding a director whose sensibility could work synergistically with the poetic sharpness of Yates, the quest led to Sam Mendes, the UK-based Oscar winner known for bringing an astute outsider’s eye to the fabric of American life in such films as AMERICAN BEAUTY, THE ROAD TO PERDITION and JARHEAD. An equally lauded theater director, Mendes brought a penchant for elucidating character through detail and intimate performance to the production.

Mendes had never read the book, but he learned of it when his wife, Kate Winslet, was sent Haythe’s screenplay. As soon as she read it, Winslet suggested that Sam ought to direct it. “It became one of those things that grew and grew in momentum the more we talked about it,” Mendes recalls. “When I read the book, I realized what an incredible film it could make, that it could be an exciting, modern story. There’s so much wisdom and insight in it, and it feels wonderful to finally bring it to a wider audience.”

He was especially drawn to the material as a searing, raw portrait of a marriage in both its most tender and tumultuous moments, exploring the ways in which the outcome and the dynamics of a romance can be as unfair as they are liberating. “What I saw in this story was the potential to explore a marriage laid out in detail - all the hard edges, the vulnerability, the cruelty, the rage and raw emotionality,” he says. “Sometimes a couple who want to be together, who feel they should be together, can’t make it work. The audience’s feelings about Frank and April become as conflicted and mysterious as our feelings about relationships and life in general.”

Mendes saw all the characters as mirroring the universal penchant for yearning - sometimes at its most destructive, yet also at its most sustaining - to which nearly everyone can connect. He tinged the tragedy of the love story with a sense of hope. “I never saw this is as a grim story at all,” he says. “It’s full of Yates’ wit, eccentricity, originality and characters you really like, perhaps in spite of yourself. It’s very full of details about human beings - both the bad and the wonderful - and that was what I wanted to get on screen.”

For Mendes, one of the biggest challenges would be evocatively capturing the 1950s period, while allowing his portrait to illuminate our own times. “Frank lives in a world of New York businessmen in gray flannel suits taking martini lunches and flirting with secretaries. Yet even though I think the book can be looked at, on one level, as an exploration of that period, to me, it’s not really about the ‘50s. It deals with deeper modern concerns. So while the period was as important as the background, I didn’t want it to be fetishized,” he explains. “I hope that one of the discussions the movie raises, which the book did, is about how the 20th century and the ‘50s led us to where we are now.”