In last year's downbeat Revolutionary Road, director Sam Mendes explored the implosion of a marriage between people who, through no fault of theirs, had grown terminally apart. Six months later, he is back with another movie about marriage, but this time he's in a much more optimistic mood.

Based on a screenplay by the married Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, Away We Go centers on a couple (The Office's John Krasinski and Saturday Night Live's Maya Rudolph) awaiting the birth of their first child and embarking on a road trip to find the perfect place to settle down and raise a family.

The movie marks a series of firsts for Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Jarhead): first comedy, first road picture, first movie made on the modest budget and within the loose confines of what passes for independent-studio filmmaking in Hollywood (the film was produced by Focus Features).

From Chicago, Mendes talks about the ineffable melancholy that permeates Away We Go, why it doesn't really qualify as a romantic comedy, and his surprise casting of Rudolph in a semi-dramatic role.

Q: Ever since I saw Away We Go, I've been struggling to find just the right word to describe the tone of the film. Does that make any sense to you?

A: [Laughs] It makes perfect sense. I can't find the word either. In a way, it's a mixture of tones. But there's a wistful, lyrical something coursing through the film that is difficult to hold in your hands. Normally at this stage of the game, when I've had to watch my own film 70 times, I'm ready to kill myself. But for some reason, with this one, I'm really enjoying watching it with audiences, because I find it plays differently with different people. There's a certain atmosphere that settles over the audience that is quite pleasing.

Q: Were you familiar with Dave Eggers' work before you read the script?

A: I sought out the script because I'm a huge Dave Eggers fan. I was aware of McSweeney's and The Believer and all his endeavors. At that stage, I hadn't read any of Vendela's work, but now I'm a huge fan of hers as well. They wrote the script while she was pregnant with their first child, especially during the last month when she was confined to their home. They're writers, and they need to write, so they wrote it on the sofa to make each other laugh.

They started off with scenes, and then the scenes became a story. There's a certain sense of expectation in the film, because it was written at that stage in life when you're about to become a parent for the first time, and you're on the edge of the precipice, and it's a wonderful feeling to be made vulnerable again. Maybe that's the quality we were talking about earlier. They accomplished that with such delicacy and lightness of touch. That's when you see they are real writers. I had to find a way of making the film that had that same lightness of touch.

Q: It's also a hard movie to categorize.

A: It's a very romantic film, and it is a comedy, but it's not a romantic comedy. The tradition with romantic comedies is that the two characters meet, fall in love, get separated by some crisis, and then it's all right in the end. But here, you have a story about two characters who are treated as a unit, almost as if they were one person. They are in love in the beginning, they remain in love in the end, and there is no crisis. You would think that would be devoid of drama, but weirdly, it isn't.

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