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
You think about taking audiences on a journey.
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.
I don't think good and evil are polarized.
Children make you confront your own childhood. Which I think is common. Suddenly you're remembering your own parents as parents, not to mention the fact that you're confronted by them as grandparents. So you also have that terrible shock, a mirror image of your own. You suddenly seem to be so helpless in the face of young children. And you think, "How did you ever bring up me?"
Thank God I don't live in Los Angeles. I think if you're there the whole time it just gets out of proportion and you lose touch completely with reality.
I think with Blair Witch and The Sixth Sense, people are much more open to something that is different.
I don't think of it as a competition - which might surprise you, given the way movies are reported constantly.
I think movies are a director's medium in the end. Theater is the actor's medium. Theater is fast, and enjoyable, and truly rewarding. I believe in great live performance.
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.
There's no such thing as speech that is free.
He really went from being a boy to being a man. It happened to him during the shooting of the movie, so a lot of it surprised me and I was really thrilled with what he came up with.