Raised by a mother with mental problems, British film director Sam Mendes claims that theater and cinema were his true family during his youth.
A complex reality that he shows in his new film “The Empire of Light”.
“I didn’t grow up in a functional family. So the families I experienced during my youth were theater and cinema, and sports, the teams I played for,” recalls the 57-year-old director in an interview with AFP.
“Empire of Light”, which opens in early March, tells the story of a bipolar middle-aged woman who manages as best she can a cinema in a small British seaside town in the late 1970s.
Her boss has a sordid extramarital affair with her. Only the movie crew supports her, until the arrival of a new employee, a young black man, turns her life upside down.
“In this film, cinema is a kind of crossroads for people, generations, who otherwise would never see each other. And I love that. That’s definitely my experience,” he explains.
– A strategic decision –
Trained in the theater, to which he always returns after shooting a movie, Mendes rose to popularity with “American Beauty” in 1999 (Oscar for best director).
“Revolutionary Road” (2008) was another stark description of the American middle class.
Then came two films from the 007 saga (“Skyfall” and “Spectre”) and in 2019, a feature film that earned him great reviews and a shower of awards: “1917”, an imposing fresco on World War I.
For “The Empire of Light” he takes a much slower pace, an intimate tone.
“Shooting a movie is not always a strategic decision. Sometimes you feel compelled to tell” the story, he explains.
Mendes acknowledges that the time had come to address that decisive part of his past.
– A mother full of life –
“She was a good mother, full of energy, full of life. But she had that disease…she became manic, wildly happy,” she explains.
“She couldn’t fall asleep, she began to practically hallucinate. They took her to the hospital, they medicated her. And when she returned she had gained weight, she had lost self-esteem. And the cycle began again,” she narrates.
The son of divorced parents, Mendes spent his childhood between his mother’s and his father’s homes.
“I began to understand that I was sick, that it was a cycle, when I reached adolescence. But when you are a child, everything collapses” with each crisis, he confesses.
These experiences “turned me into an observer, someone reserved and who cares for others,” he adds.
Mendes began directing his first works as a student, writing scripts. Running a film crew, or a theater company, isn’t much different from taking care of someone with problems, he says, laughing.
“It’s all about observing and controlling, you know? You build an alternate universe, which unlike your life, you can control,” he explains with a smile.
“When I was a young director, I would talk a lot before an actor even started doing anything,” he recalls.
Over the years, he has learned that “there are different ways to talk to everyone.”
Personally, Mendes says, “I like actors who don’t talk a lot. I think I prefer actors who are intuitive, but at the same time who aren’t afraid of failure. Who don’t think too much about themselves, about their image.”
In an actor, he says, “that can ruin you.”
For “Empire of Light,” Sam Mendes turned to Olivia Colman, the multi-award-winning British actress (including an Oscar), known worldwide for her role as Queen Elizabeth II on the television series “The Crown.”
“It’s like a Ferrari in the body of a mini,” he says with a smile.
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