Sam Mendes: ‘Who would make a great Bond villain? José Mourinho’
The office of Sir Sam Mendes in Covent Garden is generously and chaotically decorated, even cluttered, with mementoes from more than 25 years as Britain’s pre-eminent theatre and film director. On one wall is the envelope first opened and read by Steven Spielberg revealing Mendes had won the Oscar in 2000 for best director for his debut film American Beauty. On the floor is a poster for The Blue Room, the 1998 play he staged at the Donmar Warehouse, with Nicole Kidman in the lead, which made headlines around the world and kick-started a revival in British theatre. There are photos, with gushing dedications, from many of the actors he has worked with. One from Judi Dench, dressed as M on the set of the 2012 James Bond movie Skyfall, reads: “Well, you can try it, but it won’t work” – a line Mendes said to her in 1989, when he was 24 and they were working on a production of Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, and has never been allowed to forget.
Mendes, dressed head to toe in black with a jaunty scarf round his throat, walks in and catches me looking at an incongruous photo: the famous one of Vinnie Jones grabbing Paul by the Gascoignes during a match in 1988, signed by both players. It’s just gone 4pm and I ask the 57-year-old Mendes how his day of publicity has been. He gestures at the picture and smiles: “That is subtitled: ‘Releasing a movie.’ That’s how it’s been.” The parallel is clear: the thuggish press squeezing the balls of the delicate creative.
For the most part, Mendes has been treated pretty well by critics over the years, but he is aware that the pressure to flog your new project is greater than ever before. “The truth is that at least half the movies I made would now be going straight to streaming, including probably American Beauty,” says Mendes, of the film that went on to win six Oscars, including best picture. “And it makes me sad that one has to question the nature of the film before you make it and you have to work doubly hard – which is why I’m here – to sell a movie when it doesn’t have an obvious big-screen commercial upside. When you make a smaller-scale movie, something more contemplative, a stiller, more character-based drama, you have to work triply hard to just get people to come out and see this rather than wait for it to appear on their television.”
Mendes is talking about , a tender, subtly powerful film that he has written and directed. Set in the early 1980s, it follows Hilary (the by now almost inevitably brilliant Olivia Colman), who manages a grand old cinema, the’s Micheal Ward) and projectionist Norman (Toby Jones) – even during the furious upheavals and racism of Thatcher’s Britain.
