GALLERY LINKS:
• Movie Premieres and Screenings: Revolutionary Road Premiere
VIDEO LINKS:
• Revolutionary Road: ET Premiere Interview
Month: December 2008
2008 Dec 18
“Revolutionary Road” Premiere pics and videos
2008 Dec 18
Kate joins Stephen Daldry and Marion Cotillard
GALLERY LINKS:
• Movie Premieres and Screenings: The Reader Private Screening
2008 Dec 17
5 Questions With: Kate Winslet
Kate Winslet is one of Oscar’s most nominated actresses … who’s never won. As it stands, the British beauty’s scored five noms, for Best Actress and Best Supporting, but has yet to be called to the podium.
Maybe this is the year her luck will change — she has not one but two award-caliber performances coming up, in Revolutionary Road, directed by her husband, Sam Mendes, and reuniting her with her Titanic leading man Leonardo DiCaprio, and in the Holocaust drama The Reader, directed by Oscar nominee Stephen Daldry and co-starring Ralph Fiennes and German actor David Kross as his younger incarnation.
In the latter, based on a semiautobiographical best-seller, she’s Hanna Schmitz, a former concentration camp guard who takes up with a high schooler to form a bond that turns out to be life-changing for both of them. Moviefone talked with Winslet about how she prepped her co-star for sex scenes, what she thinks of her Nazi character … and that ever-elusive Oscar.
1. There’s a lot of nudity in this film; you’re known for being comfortable with nudity in your movies. How do you actually prepare to do a scene like that?
Honestly, you exfoliate your ass; you starve yourself; you work out like a demon … Obviously, none of that’s true [laughs]. How do you prepare? You don’t really, you know, you don’t really prepare. How can you? I don’t know even what that means. For someone like [my character] Hanna, it was very important to me that she looked real, that she looked absolutely real. And so in fact, quite the opposite; I sort of unprepared, you know, I didn’t go working out like a lunatic or anything like that.
2008 Dec 14
Kate Winslet: girl interrupted
Like many actors, Kate Winslet likes to draw on her own experiences. Unlike most, she has some serious baggage to dip into.
A summer’s day in 2007, on a film-set in suburban Connecticut, an hour outside Manhattan. Surrounded by a film crew, Kate Winslet is about to act a sex scene with Leonardo DiCaprio. Directing the scene is Sam Mendes – who also happens to be Winslet’s husband. It is the first time they have worked together, and she has been worrying about the scene since they began filming several weeks ago.
Winslet wanted to play this part – April Wheeler in a film of Richard Yates’s 1961 suburban-hell novel, Revolutionary Road – so much that she spent two years persuading Mendes, and then DiCaprio, to do the film. Being driven to the set this morning, she kept thinking, would Leo be put off by Sam? Or would he not care? They are old friends, after all. OK, but if Leo’s relaxed, will Sam feel threatened?
She is still thinking about it as they begin the scene. She asks DiCaprio how he feels. ‘Come on, Kate,’ he says. ‘We’re all grown-ups!’
Mendes is watching them impassively, and says, ‘OK, Leo, press your fingers right into her back, hard!’ Winslet thinks, ‘This is too weird,’ but then DiCaprio digs in his fingers, and she grabs him, and she realises: they are not bothered. The only anxious one is her. But is Sam really OK? ‘Grab her bum, Leo!’ Please let this be over soon, she thinks.
2008 Dec 13
Kate! Leo! Gloom! Doom! Can It Work?
RICHARD YATES’S 1961 novel, “Revolutionary Road,†is far from the kind of property that typically becomes a big Hollywood movie, especially one starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio in their first post-“Titanic†outing together.
For one thing, the book is set back in the mid-20th century — an era that, until “Mad Men†came along to exhume it, was thought to have about as much entertainment potential as the Bronze Age. The story requires armies of boring fedora-wearing commuters to disembark from Grand Central every morning. The characters wear dopey clothes and drive boatlike cars, and everyone drinks and smokes too much — even pregnant women.
Nor does it help that “Revolutionary Road†is among the bleakest books ever written. It ends unhappily, with a gruesome death, and neither of the main characters is entirely likable to begin with. Partly autobiographical, the novel tells the story of Frank and April Wheeler, who in the mid-1950s move with their two children to the ’burbs (the movie was shot on location in Darien, Conn., a good deal more upscale than the Wheelers’ town) and from the minute they get there hold themselves apart.
2008 Dec 13
Come on, Kate, he says. We’re all grown-ups …
A summer’s day in 2007, on a film-set in suburban Connecticut, an hour outside Manhattan. Surrounded by a film crew, Kate Winslet is about to act a sex scene with Leonardo DiCaprio. Directing the scene is Sam Mendes – who also happens to be Winslet’s husband. It is the first time they have worked together, and she has been worrying about the scene since they began filming several weeks ago.
Winslet wanted to play this part – April Wheeler in a film of Richard Yates’s 1961 suburban-hell novel, Revolutionary Road – so much that she spent two years persuading Mendes, and then DiCaprio, to do the film. Being driven to the set this morning, she kept thinking, would Leo be put off by Sam? Or would he not care? They are old friends, after all. OK, but if Leo’s relaxed, will Sam feel threatened?
She is still thinking about it as they begin the scene. She asks DiCaprio how he feels. ‘Come on, Kate,’ he says. ‘We’re all grown-ups!’
Mendes is watching them impassively, and says, ‘OK, Leo, press your fingers right into her back, hard!’ Winslet thinks, ‘This is too weird,’ but then DiCaprio digs in his fingers, and she grabs him, and she realises: they are not bothered. The only anxious one is her. But is Sam really OK? ‘Grab her bum, Leo!’ Please let this be over soon, she thinks.
Continue reading Come on, Kate, he says. We’re all grown-ups …
The Palm Springs International Film Festival ratcheted up its squeal factor Thursday morning by adding Kate and Leo to its awards gala.
Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio are teaming up for the first time since 1997’s “Titanic,” still the top box office moneymaker. Their “Revolutionary Road” is set to open in Los Angeles on Dec. 26. It is a drama about a young couple on the rocks in the 1950s, directed by Winslet’s husband Sam Mendes (“American Beauty”).
The same morning it was announced that Winslet and DiCaprio are nominated for Golden Globe awards as best actor and actress in the motion picture drama category. “Revolutionary Road” was also nominated for best film and director.
The film festival is honoring “Revolutionary Road” for its ensemble cast. Also expected to attend the awards ceremony on Jan. 6 are Kathy Bates, also of “Titanic,” Michael Shannon, Kathryn Hahn, David Harbour and Zoe Kazan, according to a film festival press release.
This is a return trip for Winslet, who attended the 2007 awards ceremony in support of her film “Little Children.”
Continue reading Kate and Leo reunited for Palm Springs Film Festival
