Notes from the Production

Writer/director Terry George was looking for a film to be able to follow his Hotel Rwanda, which had received three Academy Award nominations. George says, "I pursued Reservation Road in part because it investigated the motives of revenge and hatred and fear, and where those lead people. In this post-9/11 world, 'an eye for an eye' needs to be examined through drama. What happens when that thing we see on television – 'revenge' – comes home to you on a very personal level? I saw this story as realistic and important.

Producer Nick Wechsler states, "The narrative is so suspenseful, as the lives of these two men are being propelled on a collision course. It's such a tense and powerful story; you can't help but think, 'What would I do in either of these fathers' situations?'"

"Dwight has done something that he can never take back," adds author and screenwriter John Burnham Schwartz. "Ethan begins to weigh doing something that he will never be able to take back."

The story and the characters originated in Schwartz' novel Reservation Road. First published in 1998, the novel was selected as a New York Times Notable Book of the Year, and was praised by The Los Angeles Times as "a dark and irresistible miracle: a heartbreaking thriller."

Schwartz comments, "Like many storytellers, I suppose I'm naturally drawn to extreme situations. I wanted to see who the characters would become under great and difficult pressure. It was when I imagined the character of Dwight that I realized he was a father, too. That's when the full scope of the narrative came into view."

"Great tragedy encompasses life and death and family, and I think Reservation Road is a classic example of that," says George. "What these people go through is tragic, and all too human. Those emotions, plus the suspense of the hunt for Dwight, made this a perfect story to tell on-screen."

The author worked on the book for several years. It would be several more years before the novel became a motion picture. Schwartz reveals, "It was optioned for five years to two production companies. Ultimately, my wife, Aleksandra Crapanzano, who is herself a screenwriter, encouraged me to adapt it myself. I did so on spec, over a six-month period. It went out again and there was renewed interest.

"But Nick Wechsler was the first producer who called me. He'd read the book in an afternoon and phoned me right away. What he had to say about what it was in the story that spoke to him, and why he thought it would be a good movie, gave me a sense of shared perspective. That was important, since novelists by nature sit in a room alone and are not collaborators. The process became a great education for me; Nick optioned it in February 2005."

While developing the project, Wechsler was also producing We Own the Night, his third movie starring Joaquin Phoenix. The producer got the Reservation Road script to Phoenix, who responded to it immediately.

Two-time Academy Award-nominated producer A. Kitman Ho had produced Hotel Rwanda with George, who had directed Phoenix in a small but pivotal role in the movie. Fortuitously, "Joaquin loved the script and suggested showing it to Terry," says Ho. "Terry and I were developing another project when this one came to our attention."

George immediately switched to working on Reservation Road. He explains, "I took the script and read the book, then made a compression and distillation of both. I wanted to find the immediacy of it, and lock the audience into these characters' lives to see how they interact. They all live in a small town, and by the nature of small towns throughout America and the world, people's paths will cross."

From the actor's standpoint, Phoenix offers that he "had a visceral reaction to the script. I liked that was a thriller, but most interesting to me was its successfully telling two sides of the same story; both Ethan and Mark are fully realized, completely different and unique. Terry George understands deep emotions, yet he is unsentimental; I knew he would find the right balance."

George notes, "It was important to investigate all the characters and really get inside their heads to see what they were going through. Ethan has an almost idyllic life, and suddenly the world falls apart for him and his wife. In Dwight's case, the accident follows a life of procrastination and bad decisions. Is he finally going to come to terms with who he is and what he will become?"

Reservation Road soon came together as the first movie to be made in the unique filmmaking partnership between Focus Features and Random House Films. The multi-year deal, announced in November 2005, has the companies developing movies together and co-financing and co-producing them. Reservation Road was published in 1998 by Random House, Inc.'s Alfred A. Knopf hardcover imprint. To coincide with the film's release, Random House's Vintage Books imprint is reissuing the book in both mass market and trade paperback as movie tie-in editions.

With a safe haven for the project, casting quickly progressed. George reports, "Joaquin and I talked about who could play Dwight, and Mark Ruffalo was the first person that we both talked about. We'd both met him and wanted to work with him."

Ruffalo was drawn to not only "the cat-and-mouse thriller aspect, but how these two men's paths crossing in this horrible situation makes for intense drama that shows you something about aspects of humanity. The character of Dwight intrigued me because he's the sort of person that we write off, get a little righteous about and just say, 'What a scumbag.' I liked the challenge of finding what was human about what Dwight does and how he reacts. This kind of thing happens to people all the time, in a split second. I tried not to judge him too hard.