As many know, actor Kate Winslet was once married to American Beauty director Sam Mendes. It was a relationship that lasted a decade before the pair went their separate ways. Within that time, Mendes and Winslet only worked on one film. Revolutionary Road, which co-starred Leonardo DiCaprio, had Winslet collaborating with her husband for the first time.
Although it wasn’t a particularly difficult shoot for Winslet, she likened working with her husband to a car crash.
Kate Winslet really wanted to work with her husband on ‘Revolutionary Road,’ but later had her doubts
Although Winslet was married to a filmmaker, the Titanic star only worked with Mendes on Revolutionary Road. But when the opportunity arose for Winslet to work with her husband, she started getting cold feet.
“Going into it, I did have several moments where I would say ‘Oh my God, what if we have a row? What will we do?’ And Sam would say, ‘Oh, don’t be silly, of course we won’t.’ And I was thinking, ‘Oh, well, I’m sure we won’t – I hope we don’t,” Winslet once told The Guardian.
Winslet wanted to work with her husband to see a side a different side of him. But she was also encouraged by her contemporaries to give the collaboration a chance.
“I’d have Jake Gyllenhaal and Tom Hanks and even Paul Newman, when he was alive, say to me ‘you’ve got to work with him sometime’ and I was saying ‘I know, I really want to, stop going on about it!’ I did see other sides to Sam and that’s a great thing, to learn more about the person you’re sharing your life with,” she confided to News Shopper.
Kate Winslet compared working with Sam Mendes to coming out of a car wreck
Working with her husband, Winslet noticed there was a difference in the way they approached their craft. Whereas Mendes preferred to unwind after a long day of work, Winslet wanted to take her work home with her.
“I actually don’t like switching off because I worry that I might lose my thread. I fall asleep and hope to God I’m going to dream about it, because then I don’t have to put it down,” she said. “Sam and I decided early on that we couldn’t have any rules about this stuff otherwise it would be way too confusing. So with Revolutionary Road, I was able to indulge in that and I kind of abused the fact that I was living with the director – I would pick his brains constantly.”
Despite their different ways of working, Winslet asserted that Revolutionary Road only brought the pair closer. She described the process as getting into a car accident, but without being harmed.
“We walked away as a couple unscathed, you know,” she added.“It was a bit like walking away from a car crash with no cuts or bruises and going ‘wow, how did that happen?’ So we survived it, we really did.”
How Kate Winslet surprised Sam Mendes while working on ‘Revolutionary Road’
Mendes also discovered something about Winslet that he hadn’t noticed before. Namely her attention to detail.
“She’s very, very dogged and she wants to make very, very precise decisions before she starts. And then, when she does a couple of takes and she’s got what she wanted to get on film, then she’s very, very free and basically will go any direction you push her,” Mendes once opened up to Reuters.
Apart from that, the Skyfall director was also surprised with how much fun Winslet turned out to be.
“She’s very warm with the crew, a very good company leader, and I found myself actually a bit in awe of that sometimes,” he said.
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