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They don't have an iceberg to worry about this time, but it's not exactly smooth sailing for Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in their first on-screen pairing since the 1997 blockbuster Titanic.
"We've been actively looking for the right project to do but we didn't want to
tread on similar territory because we knew that would be a set-up for disaster," says DiCaprio. "We knew we needed to try something completely unique."
Enter Revolutionary Road, out this Thursday, a scalding drama that's almost the antithesis of the couple's original love match. Based on a novel by Richard Yates, the film tracks the relationship of Frank and April Wheeler, 1950s bohemians who make the mistake of marrying, having kids and moving to the suburbs.
Get ready for botched abortions, drunken brawls and infidelities of all shapes and sizes. In a last-ditch attempt to inject some magic into their marriage, April hatches a plan to move to Paris. But is this scheme too much, too little, too late?
Winslet who last week won a Golden Globe award for best actress in the film says April's determination to thrash against convention makes her a heroic character, no matter the consequences of her actions. "April is ultimately so determined to find happiness, to feel something again, that she's prepared to risk everything in order to get that," Winslet notes. "That's a very heroic act not a cowardly one." DiCaprio laughs.
"My character, on the other hand, is very un-heroic and cowardly," he says. "And that was the fun of playing Frank. I just loved playing a character that just slightly fell short of his ambitions. "To me, the movie is about two people being forced apart who are desperately trying to salvage their marriage and stay together. It's just that their trains are on different tracks."
Getting Revolutionary Road fuelled and ready to go was no easy task. Since the book's appearance in 1961, a number of filmmakers, including John Frankenheimer (The Manchurian Candidate) and Albert S. Ruddy (The Godfather), have tried and failed to get financing for the film. The project languished until about two years ago when Winslet received the screenplay and set about convincing her director-husband Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Jarhead) and best pal DiCaprio to jump on board.
Unlike Titanic, the new film offered Leo, 34, and Kate, 33, the chance to engage in fierce emotional battles. The experience was so gruelling that DiCaprio lost 4kg and Winslet came away feeling "completely shattered". Still, says DiCaprio, being able to go head to toe with Winslet was part of what attracted him to the project. "Kate and I have the best intentions for each other," he explains. "So we can be brutally honest offscreen and brutally savage with each other onscreen. [The fight scenes] were what I was looking most forward to shooting and what turned out to be the most fun, ultimately."
As for the film's love scenes, Winslet notes that she and DiCaprio share a level of trust that made the intimacy easy to achieve. Asked if Mendes ever gets jealous of watching his wife make out with another actor, Winslet laughs and says, "Of course he doesn't get jealous. I'm not a porn star." Shooting in sequence helped the actors peel back layers of a relationship that starts strongly and then quickly degenerates.
"There was so much unsaid throughout the first two thirds of the film, so much pent up within these characters, that the kettle sort of explodes at the end of the movie," says DiCaprio. "This was the era when people started becoming alcoholics, moving out to the suburbs and trying to have that symbolic American iconic family existence. It drove a lot of people nuts."
The American Dream remains out of reach for Frank and April Wheeler, but the film's stars are doing quite nicely for themselves. Since the record-shattering success of Titanic, DiCaprio has become a major Hollywood player with performances in The Kings of New York, Catch Me If You Can and The Departed. Winslet has remained just as busy, logging three more Oscar nods for edgy flicks Iris, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Little Children.
While DiCaprio is single, Winslet has been married twice and has two children from each of her marriages. With Jim Threapleton, an assistant director she met while making Hideous Kinky in 1997, she has daughter Mia, 8. And with Mendes, her second husband of five years, she has a 5-year-old son named Joe.
In the past year, DiCaprio appeared alongside Russell Crowe in the spy film Body of Lies while Winslet starred as a Nazi in The Reader, (for which she also received another Golden Globe as best supporting actress). Winslet says playing an SS guard was one of the strangest assignments of her career.
"No one wants to allow themselves to feel sympathy for an SS guard but I did understand her," says Winslet. "I knew that it would be wrong to humanise her. I knew that it would be wrong to give her a very warm centre. But I did have to make her a real person. The truth is that the Holocaust was started by real people, husbands, uncles and brothers." In the 11 years since Titanic, Winslet and DiCaprio have never fallen out of touch.
Still, there were some differences in their working relationship this time around. "I think that he's nicer and funnier than he was, if that's possible," says Winslet. "And he's a better actor than he was, if that's possible." DiCaprio is happy to repay the compliment.
"As far as how Kate has changed, I think the truth of the matter is that she's always pursued excellence. She's got an unbelievable work ethic that she's retained ever since I knew her in her early 20s. "But we don't look at the director or the producers involved in our films as parental figures any more. We were constantly looking for that guidance before. I think we come into movies now as equal pieces to the puzzle. For lack of a better term, we're more like adults, whatever that means."
* Revolutionary Road is out in cinemas this Thursday.