Sam Mendes
Sam Mendes
Samuel Alexander "Sam" Mendes, CBE is an English stage and film director. He is best known for directing the comedy-drama film American Beauty, which earned him the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Director, the crime film Road to Perdition, and the James Bond films Skyfalland Spectre. He also is known for dark re-inventions of the stage musicals Cabaret, Oliver!, Company, and Gypsy. He directed an original stage musical for the first time with Charlie and the Chocolate...
NationalityBritish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth1 August 1965
There'll always be a section of a war movie that gets people pumped up in the same way there will always be men who will want to go to war, ... There is something that entices them there, that can be found in no other walk of life.
People are capable of good and bad. As long as we continue perpetrating these absurd two-dimensional stories that everything is black and white - you're either good or bad - then the longer we'll misunderstand how many interesting stories you can tell in the space that exists between the two.
I don't want to tell people what to think about war, ... I just want them to think about it.
You're in the lap of the gods. If people go, they go, and if they don't.
One of the reasons I loved working with Tom is people feel they know who he is... I think working with an actor who the audience already has a relationship with actually helps you in a film like this.
Actors get pigeonholed very quickly, particularly movie actors. In the theater, one is more used to casting people against type and trusting that their talent and skill will get them through.
The perceived wisdom is that people do not go in large numbers to black-and-white movies anymore - which is a great shame, but I'd love to make a black-and-white movie one day.
I think with Blair Witch and The Sixth Sense, people are much more open to something that is different.
The joy of a road movie is its very simple narrative nature, which is that you know you're going to go through different places and you're going to meet new people. At the same time, you have to not make it feel too obvious and too crudely episodic.
I suppose once in a while, a filmmaker makes a movie that's more than just a sum of its parts, more than good acting or good filmmaking. It's something else that has nothing to do with what you've done. This is in 1999, made by people in 1999 for people in 1999 about people in 1999.
As I got everything wrong at the same time-costume, design and performance-it made it easier in a way, because I could see the film I didn't want to make.
Everything about that war seemed so far away, ... The media never really was allowed in. All you'd see were these tiny little bombs like they were hitting toy towns. There was no sense that this was actually a war, that there was a human toll.
You do things bit by bit. That's the only way to play something really original, where the details stand out. You're not just showing us a cliched, generic character that you've seen before.
Violence is something that's very deliberately chosen - who sees it, the effect it has on the person watching, and the person performing the act of violence is more important than the violence itself. It's not about a gore-fest or how much blood you can show.