"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 20^th 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."

ABOUT RICHARD YATES
The acclaimed American novelist and short story writer Richard Yates is ranked with the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Cheever and Raymond Carver as among those whose work has illuminated the inner core of American life.
Yates was born in 1926 in Yonkers, New York and his parents divorced when he was three years old. He lived with his mother, a seminal figure in his life, bouncing from one apartment to the next, throughout his childhood.  Like most men of his generation, he joined the Army in 1944 and shipped off to France where he saw combat and contracted pleurisy and pneumonia, commencing a lifetime of lung trouble.  Upon his return to New York, he worked at trade publications and did freelance copywriting for the Remington Rand Corporation. After a year in a TB sanitorium on Staten Island, Yates and his first wife Sheila, went to Paris and the south of France, where they lived on his Army disability pension. There he began writing in earnest, selling some of the short stories that were later collected in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.
It wasn't until 1961, at the relatively late age of 35, that he published his first novel, Revolutionary Road. Winning extraordinary acclaim, the book was nominated that year for a National Book Award along with such classics as Joseph Heller's Catch-22, but lost to Walker Percy's equally seminal The Moviegoer. The book's disappointing sales necessitated other employment, and he was hired, on William Styron's recommendation, to write speeches for Robert F. Kennedy, who was Attorney General during his brother's presidency. After John F. Kennedy's assassination, Yates became a respected teacher of writing at Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, Boston University, USC and the University of Iowa's renowned Writer's Workshop. He also dabbled in Hollywood, most notably writing the screenplay adaptation for William Styron's Lie Down In Darkness, and later attempting to wrangle back the rights to Revolutionary Road so he could adapt it himself.
He would go on to publish an additional 8 books, including the beloved novel The Easter Parade and two books of short stories that are considered classic models of the form.
Yates died at the age of 66 of emphysema. Despite considerable critical celebration, his work never garnered the universal acclaim and wide readership of which he dreamed. Struggling with his own internal conflicts, including two rocky marriages and a drinking habit that was a life-long struggle, Yates would die broke and still quite obscure for a writer so admired by his peers.
But other writers would not let his memory fade. Sam Lawrence and Kurt Vonnegut arranged a memorial service for Yates in New York, while Andre Dubus held another one in Cambridge. Since then, popular writers ranging from Richard Ford to Michael Chabon to Nick Hornby have talked in the most passionate terms about Yates' influence on American literature. In 2005, Time Magazine named Revolutionary Road one of the Top 100 Best English Language Books, with critic Richard Lacayo noting: "If Revolutionary Road doesn't make [Yates] immortal, immortality isn't worth having."

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 20^th century and the '50s led us to where we are now." 
Mendes also had in mind his key cast early on - envisioning Leonardo DiCaprio to join Kate Winslet in the roles of Frank and April, believing they could evoke at once the tenderness of the couple's love and the toxicity of their illusions about one another.  "Leo and Kate have known each other since they were 20 years old. They know each other's foibles and they can't pretend to be something they're not with each other," explains Mendes.  "There's a level of honesty with them, a sense of mutual support and also a kind of testing of each other.  Above and beyond that, they have that quality where two plus two equals five - when you put the two of them together, there's another thing that emerges."   

SAM MENDES' (Director/Producer) work directing theater and film spans almost twenty years.   He began his career in the theater as Assistant Director at the Studio Theatre in Chichester in 1987 and was the first Artistic Director of the Minerva Theatre in 1989. By 1990, he was directing for the RSC. His work for them since included highly acclaimed versions of "Troilus and Cressida," "The Alchemist," "The Tempest" and "Richard III." 
In 1992 Sam founded the Donmar Warehouse in London, which he ran in the capacity of Artistic Director until 2002.  Within this time Sam helped establish the theater as one of the most dynamic and successful playhouses in the country.  His productions there included "Assassins," "Translations," "Cabaret," "Glengarry Glen Ross," "The Glass Menagerie," "Company," "Habeas Corpus," "The Front Page," "The Blue Room," "To The Green Fields Beyond," "Uncle Vanya" and "Twelfth Night," both of which transferred to The Brooklyn Academy of Music in 2004.  Sam won a number of Olivier awards during this period including an unprecedented three awards in 2003, two for his work on "Uncle Vanya" and "Twelfth Night," and one in recognition of the Donmar's decade- long period of success under his guidance. Several productions transferred to Broadway, and Sam won Tony awards as a producer for both "The Real Thing" and "Take Me Out."
Other work outside of The Donmar has included directing West End productions of "The Cherry Orchard," "The Plough and the Stars" (both starring Judi Dench), "Kean," "London Assurance" and "Oliver!," which ran for 4 years at the London Palladium. He also directed the National Theatre productions "The Sea," "The Rise and Fall of Little Voice," "The Birthday Party" and "Othello."  On Broadway, Sam directed "The Blue Room," "Gypsy," "The Vertical Hour" and his long-running production of "Cabaret," which received four Tony Awards including Best Musical Revival. 
Sam is about to embark on The Bridge Project: the first project of a three-year venture co-produced by Neal Street, the Brooklyn Academy of Music and the Old Vic, London.  In this unique collaboration, Sam will direct a transatlantic company in a double-bill of classic plays beginning in Spring '09 with "The Winter's Tale" and "The Cherry Orchard" led by long-time collaborator Simon Russell Beale as Leontes and Lopakhin. 
Sam's film work began in 1999 with his film directorial debut, AMERICAN BEAUTY, for which he received the Academy Award for best Director as well as a Golden Globe and the DGA award for outstanding direction. The film garnered a further four Academy Awards®, including Best Picture.   This was followed in 2002 by the movie adaptation of the graphic novel ROAD TO PERDITION, starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman.  The film earned seven Academy Award® nominations. Mendes then returned to the screen in 2006 directing JARHEAD®, an adaptation of Anthony Swofford's book of the same name, starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Jamie Foxx and Peter Sarsgaard. 
Sam's work in theater and film brought him a CBE in 2000, for services to the arts, and the Director's Guild Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005. 
As well as working as a director, Sam acts as Executive Producer on all Neal Street projects and has also produced a number of films, most recently THINGS WE LOST IN THE FIRE, directed by Susanne Bier, starring Halle Berry and Benicio Del Toro.  Additionally Sam also acted as executive producer on STARTER FOR TEN, STUART-A LIFE BACKWARDS and THE KITE RUNNER, which was released in 2007. 
Sam will next direct a currently untitled project, an original screenplay written by novelists David Eggers and Vendela Vida.  

JUSTIN HAYTHE (Screenwriter) wrote THE CLEARING starring Helen Mirren, Robert Redford and Willem Dafoe. His short fiction has appeared in Harper's Magazine and his novel, The Honeymoon, was long-listed for the 2004 Man Booker Prize.  He is currently working on a contemporary adaptation of Jekyll and Hyde.

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