‘Empire Of Light’: Read The Screenplay For Sam Mendes’ Film About The Movies And Mental Illness

Fred Topel
·2 min read
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Editors note: Deadline’s Read the Screenplay series debuts and celebrates the scripts of films that will be factors in this year’s movie awards race.

Sam Mendes has directed nine movies, but Searchlight Pictures’ Empire of Light is only the second he has written, after 2019’s 1917 which was nominated for three Oscars including for original screenplay (written with Krysty Wilson-Cairns). His latest movie reflects on Mendes’ youth growing up in England, going to the movies amid social turmoil and remembering his mother’s real struggle with mental illness.

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In 1980, the Empire Theater shows movies like All That Jazz and The Blues Brothers. Hilary (Olivia Colman) manages the theater including ushers and ticket takers; she’s also having an affair with the owner, Donald Ellis (Colin Firth). She welcomes a new employee, Stephen (Micheal Ward) and shows him how they open and operate the business.

Hilary in the meantime takes medication to control her schizophrenia, which still flares up occasionally. Mendes revealed to Deadline that he based Hilary on his own experiences dealing with his mother’s illness, and said he wrote the role for Colman simply from having watched her on The Crown.

In 1981, the Empire gets to host the UK premiere of Chariots of Fire. By this point, Hilary and Stephen have begun a romance in which they share their love of cinema. But, Hilary also witnesses the kind of racism that never touched her life before Stephen. Thugs on the street harass him, and customers get in his face.

Stephen meanwhile rises through the ranks, moving up from helping projectionist Norman (Toby Jones) carry film cans up to the booth to learning how to run the projectors himself.

Though set in the ‘80s, Mendes was writing Empire of Light during a parallel moment in modern society. He said the racial reckoning of the George Floyd protests and the uncertainty of the post-pandemic future of cinema inspired his depiction of the racial tensions of ‘80s England against the movies and cinemas of the time.

Empire of Light filmed in Margate, on the north shore of Kent. The Dreamland cinema was transformed into the Empire by production designer Mark Tildesley, and Mendes adapted the screenplay to match the location they’d found. The Dreamland was not showing movies anymore; in fact, the auditorium had become a bingo hall. Tildesley made the Empire look like a theater that had survived since the ‘30s and was still running in the ‘80s.

Empire of Light premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and went on to play Toronto, BFI London and more before opening in theaters December 2.

Read the script below.

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