Sam Mendes is a British film director, producer, screenwriter, and – since the 2020 Honours List in the UK – a knight.
As a stage director, he has won several Tony and Olivier Awards. In 1990, three years after he graduated from Cambridge – with first-class honours –, he began reinventing the West End musical as the artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse; by the end of that decade, he became only the sixth filmmaker to earn the Academy Award for direction with a debut feature. As we meet, he’s preparing to direct Johnny Flynn and Mark Gatiss – as Richard Burton and John Gielgud, respectively – in The Motive and the Cue, a play inspired by Burton’s 1963 turn as Hamlet on Broadway.
“I’ve never wanted to repeat myself,” says Mendes. “I try to challenge myself each time. There’s no question that the most uncomfortable I’ve ever been is when I find myself doing something I’ve done before. Beckett said habit is a great deadener. So every time I finish a movie, the first thing I tend to do is a play. But then, when I’ve done a play, I tend to feel a little bit claustrophobic. I want to go out into the world again and make a film.”
Mendes is the only Oscar-winning director to successfully play schoolboy cricket at Lord’s, although he remains best known for his work on American Beauty, Road to Perdition, 1917 and, oh, the most financially successful James Bond films of all time: Skyfall and Spectre.
“Go on,” he grins. “Ask me who I think the next James Bond should be.”
He is obviously not serious, although he’s perfectly happy to discuss his tenure at Britain’s biggest franchise.
“It was an amazing event in my life,” he notes. “It was basically five years of working on these enormous things and a great adventure. There was a brief moment when I was described as Bond director. I mean, I thought I had done enough to not just be Bond director. But I don’t feel that has lingered. After I’d finished 1917 I felt I was back to being, you know, director.”
1917, Mendes’ impressive “one-shot” first World War drama rivalled the director’s Bond pictures for scale and ambition. While co-writing that film, he was always a director, he says, overseeing “the coexistence of form and content”, and writing how the film would be made from its very inception. Empire of Light, his most intimate film to date, was a very different prospect. The script – Mendes’ only solo writing credit – was inspired by his mother’s mental health issues while he was growing up.
“I wanted to discuss her struggles with mental illness and the complexities of mental illness,” says Mendes. “And the fact that I still find it very strange that people don’t understand mental illness on a deeper level.”
Empire of Light stars Olivia Colman, in an Oscar-tipped performance, as Hilary Small, an efficient middle manager in an early 1980s seaside cinema. During opening hours, she has meaningful conversations with the sage projectionist (Toby Jones), performs demeaning sexual favours for the smarmy owner (Colin Firth) and keeps the place ticking along. An unexpected romance with Stephen, a young and handsome new hire (Top Boy’s Michael Ward), introduces Hilary to the terrifying, everyday racism of Thatcher’s Britain. He, in turn, is shocked by Hilary’s descent after she, a diagnosed schizophrenic, stops taking her medication. One particular scene, in which skinheads arrive en masse in Margate, is emblematic of the violence and uncertainties of contemporaneous Britain.
“I mean, the funny thing is, you know, people talk about terrorism and being in America post 9/11,” recalls Mendes. “When I started running the Donmar, I was sitting in my office when the Soho bombing happened. And everyone looked at each other: that’s a bomb. And then they carried on working. That’s not to say we didn’t care about it, but we were relatively used to terrorist attacks. It’s shocking to think about that now. I think people have forgotten the level of violence and racial tension. They forget the Brixton riots, the Toxteth Riots and the New Cross Fire; all of those things that the movie tries to touch on lightly. People have quite short memories.”
As part of the press tour for Empire of Light, Colman talked about relying on the director’s personal recollections of impetuously destroyed sandcastles and upside down milk bottles for research: “Hilary was based on Sam’s mum and so, at any point, I had the best research material I could ask for,” explained Colman. “I could ask Sam what something was like in this moment. What’s it like on lithium or off lithium? That might sound sloppy and I feel a bit ashamed to have done so little research but I did at least have someone who knew everything about it.”
Arriving in the same wave of films as Kenneth Branagh’s Belfast and Steven Spielberg’s The Fabelmans, Empire of Light is not quite like the others. Where the ET director turns the camera to unsparing effect on a barely fictionalised version of his younger self and family, Mendes draws on his mother but makes her childless, a narrative decision that leaves him out of the picture.
“There’s a Margo Jefferson quote, which I really like, which is ‘how do you reveal yourself without asking for love or pity?’” says Mendes. “And I didn’t really want to ask. I was never in the writing. What got me writing was the idea of this woman – who was loosely based on my mum – in a cinema alone at Christmas in the early 1980s. I was never in the story as a character. It’s autobiographical in that I wrote and directed it. I’m there as the camera.”
Any similarities with the current vogue for self-reflection and childhood recollections as expressed by Belfast, Roma, The Fabelmans and Bardo, is, insists Mendes, a happy accident. Indeed, Empire of Light fits more neatly alongside 1917, which was partly based on the experiences of Mendes’ grandfather Alfred Mendes – the late Trinidadian and Tobagonian novelist – as a 19-year-old soldier during the first World War.
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“There is a sudden slew of it,” says the filmmaker. “And any film you make is revealing on some level, whether it’s directly autobiographical or not. For me, American Beauty was very personal even though I didn’t write it and I don’t live in American suburbia, I felt like my heart was in that film. Same with Revolutionary Road. In an odd way, Skyfall had a very direct relevance to me personally. I wasn’t aware I was part of a wave. I didn’t know that Steven was doing The Fabelmans. I didn’t know that James Gray was making Armageddon Time. I didn’t know that Alejandro was making Bardo. But compared to all these movies, mine is positively unautobiographical! You watch Bardo – which I loved – and even though it’s very, very 8½, there’s no distance between the film and Alejandro. It’s just ... wow.”
This movie has to be a masterpiece to get people out to see it
Mendes’s first, profound experience with cinema, he recalls, was at a screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, at the Odeon Leicester Square in London, replete with a “rumbling floor” and silent awe.
“The meaning of cinema for me, in those days, was an escape,” he recalls. “I was an only child. You couldn’t see a movie unless you went to the cinema. There was no other way to see a movie. I say this to my kids now, and they say: yeah, but you could get a video? But you couldn’t. There were no video recorders. Movies came on television maybe at Christmas. But otherwise, if you wanted to see a movie, you had to go to the cinema. That’s what this movie is about in a way. There is something magnificent about these temples that we built for ourselves to watch movies. But that doesn’t mean it was better. I mean, the fact that is now that you have pretty much every movie ever made in your pocket. That’s an amazing thing and a wonderful thing. And I couldn’t pretend that I regret that.”
A quick internet search for Empire of Light yields dozens of reviews headlined by the phrase “ode to cinema”. Mendes, however, is keen to avoid the idea that his ninth feature is out to proselytise.
“I think that’s what happens these days, isn’t it?” says the director. “Having an opinion of any sort is read as an attempt to change other people’s minds or something. In other words, you can’t have an opinion and it be simply an opinion; an opinion becomes a crusade. It means you’re pro this or anti that. When this is how I feel about my world. I think the difficulty with promoting a film at the moment is that. You’re not expected only to promote the film. You’re supposed to promote the whole idea of the cinema.”
Cinema, he notes, is a tricky place to be, unless you’re in the business of making films featuring “blue people”. Recent box-office statistics make for grim reading. Among the supposed big Oscar contenders, Tár has taken $5.6 million against a production and marketing budget of $35 million; Spielberg’s The Fabelmans has clawed back just $15 million from a $40 million shoot; despite an unprecedented Tik Tok publicity campaign, Babylon has made a paltry $5.3 million from an estimated budget of $80 million.
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“The impact of Covid on cinemas has been profoundly negative, and has accelerated the abandonment of cinemas by older audiences,” says Mendes. “Films by Spielberg and Damien Chazelle and James Gray aren’t making money. What hope is there? People are staying home. If I made American Beauty now it would be for a streamer. I’m okay with that. You have to be much more targeted. 1917 was a non-franchised event movie, but I wanted it to be an immersive event. It was made for cinema so I could use all the bells and whistles of that space. But there is a question for the distributor and the theatrical exhibitor. Every movie costs the same amount of money to see, whether that movie costs $400 million or $4 million. There needs to be some acknowledgment of that price differential. I’ve made movies in all spheres. I’ve made a Bond movie. I make a small movie like Empire of Light. This movie is 10 times harder to publicise. And it’s criticised 10 times more than a Bond movie because it has to be a masterpiece to get people out to see it.”
Empire of Light is on general release
