Sam Mendes On Making Movie Magic With Olivia Colman And Micheal Ward In ‘Empire Of Light’, And Why A Woman Should Direct The Next James Bond Film

Sam Mendes was writing the screenplay for what would become Empire of Light and he’d hit a wall.

He knew he was writing it for Olivia Colman even though they’d never met.

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Observing her husband’s frustrations with his script, Alison Balsom, an eminent trumpet soloist, suggested he somehow get in touch with Colman in the hope that the actress could excavate him from the rubble of that darned wall.

Eventually, Mendes reached Colman (The Favourite) via her agent. They met on Zoom. “Look, I’m writing something for you,” he recalled telling her.

They had a gossip, then chatted briefly about the project. “I told her it’s a love story of sorts and I talked about how personal it is, and how much it’s drawn from my own life. The upshot of it is that I got a very powerful sense of her.”

Mendes told us that Colman reminded him a bit of Judi Dench. When he was 24, he’d directed Dench in a production of The Cherry Orchard at the Chichester Festival Theatre in West Sussex, and there was the small matter of him directing her in two James Bond films, Spectre and Skyfall, where she played M; he had her bumped off in the latter.

”Olivia’s like Judi in that she’s accessible and yet also slightly mysterious,” Mendes told Deadline during a rare one-on-one interview to discuss Empire of Light. “She’s very friendly, always delightful to see her, but there’s something held back, too. A little core is very private. She’s not an extravert, not an exhibitionist; she’s very guarded actually. Certainly since the Oscar. I think she had to recalibrate her life as people do when they become that level of famous. It’s frightening; I’ve lived through it too, to a degree, but not as a famous face.”

The conversation with Colman did the trick. “That’s all I needed, I just needed a blast of her really. When I got off the Zoom I knew which way to go with this and so I completed it.”

Empire of Light received it’s world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend. On Monday, the Neal Street Productions (founded by Mendes, Pippa Harris and Caro Newling) and Searchlight Pictures production played at the Toronto Film Festival.

Chris Chapman for Deadline

Set in Margate, a seaside resort on the north coast of Kent in the southeastern part of the UK, in the early 1980s, the film takes place in a sea-front movie theater that’s seen better days; Mendes is just as interested in what’s showing—Chariots of Fire is on its way, for starters— as he is in the lives of those who toil there; a motley crew that includes fragile Hilary (Colman), the middle-aged deputy manager, and Stephen (Micheal Ward), a handsome 19-year-old Black youth who collects ticket stubs and keeps an eye on the confectionery stand.

Mendes had the art department etch on a wall at the cinema, the Empire of the title, the line “Find Where Light In Darkness Lies,” taken from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. “That’s the thing that links all the different threads of the movie,” Mendes explained.

There are three central themes: love, race and cinema. Mendes has used the illusion of film to comment on reality. It’s a scorcher of a film, absolutely one of the year’s best, with a star-making performance by Ward and an unbelievably sublime Colman locating the fragility of a lonely woman searching for, and hoping, that the embrace of her young colleague will allow her safe passage through the tremors and terrors of mental illness.

Mendes said Colman is one of those actors who’ll be talking right up until you say “Action, and there it is,“ he marveled.

”She doesn’t love rehearsing but she wants to know everything you can possibly give her, so you tell her stories, history, memories, thoughts and it all goes in and she soaks it up. It’s like having a Ferrari …she’s like a Ferrari dressed like a Mini, you know what I mean? Then you turn the key in the engine and this engine just roars into life. She’s just got this power,” he told us.

Several years ago in a New Yorker interview, Mendes discussed the impact of mental illness on his family growing up. ”Look, I’m an only child and I grew up with my mother and my mother suffered from mental issues. So a lot of these things [in the film] are from a deep personal place,” he told Deadline.

He stressed, however, that Colman’s Hilary is not his mother. ”My mother never worked in a cinema … but her story and certain scenes from her life are scenes that I lived through,” he told us.

Several years ago, he’d written a a much more “directly autobiographical screenplay” but it was solitary, he said. “I wanted layers, I wanted there to be a sense of hope. I wanted there to be a sense of somebody pulling through both of our heroes, well, what Stephen says at the end: getting back up.” Mental illness is “tough, it’s hard for people.”

One of the most powerful parts of the illness, he told us, “is that people don’t talk about it.”

Several people who’ve seen the film have come up to Mendes and told him that there’s a Hilary in their own lives. “A mother, a husband, a father …” he said. “Many if them, the majority of them, would say, ’We never knew what it was; it was unspoken or it was brushed under the carpet.’ No one’s allowed to talk about the stigma attached to it.”

With regards to the race issues it was as if this writer had been hurled back back four decades to a time when National Front marches would erupt into bloody violence or when racist boot boys used to go hunting for Black and Brown people to attack.

Some of the young actors cast in Empire of Light as thugs who give Ward’s Stephen a kicking that lands him in hospital were aghast that they had to beat him up. Mendes confirmed that one of the thug actors broke down and couldn’t continue with the scene. “Those lads who played the skinheads are the sweetest, nicest blokes … gentle souls,” said Mendes.

He was talking to a group as he prepared to shoot a scene where a few of the yobs chant racist abuse at Stephen and one of them asked if the policemen included in the scene would be intervening. “I said, ‘I hate to tell you, mate but in those days, maybe even these days, there’s no guarantee that the police weren’t just as racist as you [the actors playing the thugs],” Mendes said. “Just because they’ve got a uniform on it doesn’t mean they’re going to do anything.”

In the middle of conceiving the film, said Mendes, “there was a racial earthquake in the world that rocked us all because it felt like nothing had changed in 50 years. It was like, ’We’re still here.’ Even now I struggle to talk about it with any kind of clarity because our generation had watched it happen. We watched the L.A. riots happen, watched people being dragged out of cars and beaten, watched the Toxteth [Liverpool] riots. You’re like, ‘We’re still in this place, this is where we are,” said a dismayed Mendes.

It did force him, he said, “to go back in some way and ask whether things were any better and if not, why not? I think we’ve all answered that question personally. Black Lives Matter is an extraordinary product of that.”

We discuss a scene in Empire of Light where Stephen’s confronted by a belligerent cinema-goer who questions why he’s being served by a Black man. ”It’s subtle, it’s tenacious,” said Mendes, “but it’s racial abuse.”

The vile patron is dismissed with ‘Oh, he’s always a d*ckhead’ kind of comment by Hilary, but Stephen is angered by her blinkered vision because she’s unaware that it’s racial abuse.

”There’s only one answer to behaviour like that,” Mendes insisted. ” ‘Excuse me, sir, please can you leave!’ That’s the only way because unless you do that, all you’re doing is being complicit in the act of racism.”

Mendes said he had a Black friend in his youth. “I remember very clearly walking down the road with him one day and he said, ’Did you see what those people were doing and saying to me?’ And I hadn’t at all, and he looked at me, I’ll never forget it, and said, ’You’re never going to see it.’ And that’s true. Your only duty is to open your eyes and listen to other people… you can’t feel it, I’m a white man.”

Because of Mendes’ family background (the paternal side of his family is descended from white Creole Trinidadians), Deadline asked him if he identifies as a white man.

”Me? My grandfather was, technically, white Creole, so yeah, but I do identify as white, and I’ve always felt that,” he said. “But, I think as I get older, I’m much more interested in where are my grandfather’s forebears from? My dad was born in Trinidad, my grandfather, my great-grandfather — all from Trinidad. At the same time , when I did The Lehman Trilogy [performed at London’s National Theatre and on Broadway], I spent a lot of time trying to reconnect, or understand, my Jewish roots on my mum’s side, which have also been airbrushed in many ways, I think, by family history, I was never brought up Jewish, but technically I am because my mother is Jewish. I’ve never been given an opportunity to choose whether I wanted to follow those religious value systems and beliefs, or not.”

At age 56, Mendes has made his most personal film with Empire of Light. “It burst out of me,” he declared. However, once it was crewed and cast, he wasn’t alone. “One of the things you realize as you get older as a director, if you’ve got eight people in a cast, fundamentally, you’ve got eight other imaginations in the room with you and it would be a good idea to ask them what they think.”

And ask away he did. “I can’t remember, but I definitely made changes after rehearsing with them, talking to them…we talked a lot,” he said.

Ward and Tanya Moodie, who plays his mother, a staff nurse, visited the set early in production and Mendes would encourage them to help dress their rooms or they’d offer suggestions. For example, Ward discussed what would Stephen’s father do for a living that’s not a cliché, ”that doesn’t have a negative connotation,” said Mendes.

”It was actually Micheal’s call,” said Mendes.

Mendes has other personal stories he’s bursting to tell. It’s unlikely that he’ll put his hand up to make a third Bond picture.

Laughing, he said, ”I don’t think they’d want me anymore. It was an incredible thing to do at that moment in my life; I couldn’t have asked for a better thing. I saw the world in a different way,” he said of making Spectre and Skyfall — especially Skyfall, he admitted.

Making the Bond films, he said, was like being an engineer as much as a director. “It’s like erecting scaffolding and building an entire  world…,” he said. “It’s exhausting, in a different way.”

But action movies are evolving and the use of CGI is evolving, and Bond has to evolve, too, Mendes said. He feels for Barbara Broccoli and Michael G. Wilson, the keepers of the Bond flame. “I don’t envy Barbara having to follow Daniel’s [Craig] five movies. He reinvigorated the franchise but the franchise is so huge that it’s very difficult for a younger actor to step into that.”

We’re you actually told they didn’t need you anymore?

”Let me rephrase that,” said Mendes. “I think that the actor playing Bond is going to evolve, the director has to evolve. I think it would be wonderful to see a woman directing Bond. I think it would be wonderful.”

DEADLINE: What did you pick up in your Empire of Light research that you didn’t expect to see?

SAM MENDES: I was doing my research and stumbled on an end-of-the-night program on BBC1. There was often a famous person who would read a poem or a story. I found Enoch Powell [an abrasive right-wing British lawmaker] reading a section of Dante; biblical weirdness. Right? That was daily … and at the same time there was The Specials. They were genuine models of multi-racial Britain who were politicized, they were together in their beliefs and it was, in a way, the best model of multi-racial Britain that there’s been, in some ways, yet both those things coexisted at the same time.

DEADLINE: What we’re some of the events going in in your life that inspired you to write Empire of Light? Geographically, where were you?

MENDES: I didn’t grow up in a coastal town. There’s are lots of things here that I experienced; lots of overlapping strands in my own life. The most powerful one was growing up in and around mental illness. Feeling both sides of that coin: The heroism and magnificence of the rage against against the dying of the light that is unmedicated mental illness to a degree, and then the awful comedown from that, the awful destruction that can wreak on their own lives and other people. That was  obviously from very personal experience.

DEADLINE: Was it Robert Altman, or someone like him, who said that great art has to be dragged out of you, and there’s no force that can stop it?

MENDES: I think it was a very lonely, solitary process in many ways. Normally I have a writer to knock ideas around with, or to, you know, get me out of a hole. But now I can only blame myself and get myself out of the hole.
And it’s quite a lonely place to be in Margate in the winter. It’s quite bleak. Then I had my partners in the cast, all of whom are so brilliant, pitch perfect — and it was just a joy, and I think that’s what really was the main pleasure of this movie. Knowing that you’ve written something and perhaps only half-imagined certain characters and then watching your Toby Joneses and Tom Brookeses and your Tanya Moodies, and indeed Micheal Ward, create fully fledged human beings from something that wasn’t entirely there through rehearsals, through discussion and through shooting. … And I have to say, I can’t say enough about Micheal. I think Micheal is an extraordinary actor. In addition to being extraordinarily charismatic and handsome, I think he has an inner world. And like a lot of movie stars you only really see that when you watch it on screen. You’re not quite sure you’ve caught in the take and then you watch it on screen and you go “Wow, look what he was doing?” Which is unusual for a young actor to be doing things that are so small that they don’t even catch the eye.

DEADLINE: How did you know about those very deep issues about race?

MENDES: Well, first of all, friends. A couple of things happened, didn’t they, in the middle of conceiving this movie. There was a racial earthquake in the world that shocked us all because it felt like nothing had changed in 50 years. It was like, “We’re still here. This is where we are.” Even know I struggle to talk about it with any kind of clarity because our generation had watched it happen.

I was trying to write what I felt had happened in the last 40 years of my lifetime in the UK which is: Let’s just make everyone friends as opposed to calling people on racism and saying “No, actually, you are in the wrong there, you cannot behave like that.” And in that one moment [in the film] he’s [Stephen] not just angry is he? It’s like a penny dropping for Hilary who’s like “I don’t know what I was doing, I was trying to make it OK,” because that’s also the English way, brush it under the carpet.

I don’t know the Black experience. I had to talk a lot to Micheal Ward, Tanya Moodie, Crystal Clarke. I wanted to talk a lot to them. I wanted to test everything and I wanted to say, is there anything clichéd here? When we created their flat … I wanted their input into the production as well as to the roles. I wanted them to create their own environment and come in early and see their set. … For me, I think the only test … the proof of the pudding is the audience has to see it: Do they feel true to you Whether it’s a 19-year-old Black man, a middle-aged woman … do they feel true to you? And if they do, then something’s worked. And if they don’t, it’s people’s absolute prerogative to reject it. It’s a risk and you have to be brave to take the risk.

DEADLINE: You wrote and directed this film — it’s your most personal work to date. What about the pictures that you haven’t written, just directed? Aren’t they imbued with aspects of your life, too?

MENDES: For me the most important thing in the film is that I think, as a director coming out of theater, you know this because you’ve been watching my work since I was a baby, and you were a baby, animating other people’s words, you could say it’s a springboard for you as a director. You’re also hiding behind the play a little bit, yeah … it’s also partly a commentary on ways that the play had been done up to that point … and then you graduate to screenplays and you get a little closer to the things that are you. Maybe I identified as a couple of the kids in American Beauty; maybe I was the boy in Road to Perdition; when I made Skyfall, there’s no question that I pushed that movie into being something about someone coming back to England who’d been away for a long time  to realize that everything had changed, and that’s what I was going through myself. I’d been living in New York for eight years and I’d comes back to make Skyfall and that was the time, we now only dimly recollect, where we were feeling pretty good about being British because it was the Olympic year and Bond jumped out of a helicopter … in many ways you feel it seeps into the film. Then I found my way into the writers room on Bond, then I wrote 1917 with Krysty [Wilson-Cairns].

What I feel has bubbled closer and closer to the surface, and the thing I find that I hide behind, which is other people’ words, is becoming more and more diminished and suddenly I find myself feeling like — I’m not saying all my other films aren’t personal in some way because clearly they have relevance to me, but almost as if it’s the first time I’ve ever named something this personal because I’ve approached it in my own weird route. To be writing my own screenplay for the first time at 56 having made nine other movies is an odd thing to do, but I just felt compelled to write this. I think everyone’s experience of lockdown was, your head was held in a vice, you had to look only at your life, you’re living here. … So what is your life, what is there, what do you value?

DEADLINE: You mentioned that you never thought we’d be able to sit and watch movies in the dark again because of Covid.

MENDES: I honesty thought it was done… if it takes five years to develop a vaccine. I spent a large part of my lockdown trying to create the Theatre Artists Fund to look after freelance artists who make the f*cking thing work. Not the buildings, or the staff, but the actors, directors, costume designers, etc. I  thought if I don’t do something about this we’re literally all going to wake up one morning and there will be no more cinema and no more theatre. This was before the vaccine breakthrough.

We previewed [Empire of Light] in America last month, it wasn’t finished, and I said, innocently, could we take it to the ArcLight on Sunset Boulevard  please, and they were like, “It doesn’t exist anymore.” I’m like, “You’re f*cking kidding me! The best cinema I’ve ever been in is gone?” These are the palaces we make for ourselves …

Everyone got Covid during the shoot. I got Covid just before we started shooting. And it’s still with us.

DEADLINE: Talk to me about those scenes where Toby Jones’ character, Norman the projectionist, talks about the essence of movies – cinema is the illusion of life.

MENDES: The thing about the projectionist … you’d look back and there was movement in that booth, someone was up there showing your film and that person felt themselves not to be a member of staff, they were the last link in the chain that goes back to the filmmaker. If they were screening Lawrence of Arabia they felt they were here for David Lean and not for the manager of the cinema. So for me, Norman is really one of those people who lives his life’s in that booth, he’s lived his life vicariously through movies … they are craftsmen. They had to not only project the film, change the reels, mend the reels. There was this custodian up there. The booths were tiny and smelt horrible — partly the smell of the film and the fact that someone was up there for 15 hours. 

If you worked in a cinema, and I did for about two weeks, probably about in 1979 — it was the Phoenix Cinema in Oxford, doing ticket stubs — it was as boring as hell, but I loved it. My experience of the strange dysfunctional families that grow up  around these places, it’s drawn from my experiences in the theatre. I did run a theatre [founding artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse]. … I liked the little hubs where people would meet … the stage management room, the green room and, for me in this movie, it’s the locker room.

DEADLINE: I know you have a new play to direct because Deadline broke the story. What else are you up to?

MENDES: Steven Soderbergh always used to call smaller movies the palette-cleanser movie, but palette cleanser for me is to go and do a play. The next thing is The Motive and the Cue [by Jack Thorne] at the National Theatre.

There’s the HBO pilot which is a half-hour comedy set behind the scenes of a franchise picture, say no more. No, it’s not Bond, it’s more of a superhero franchise world than a super spy.

DEADLINE: Talk to me about Conrad Hall and Roger Deakins, the cinematographers you’ve worked the closest with. 

MENDES: Apart from my relationship with actors it’s obviously my chief relationship on set, more even than with the writers — the writers’ work is mostly done when you start shooting. On set the cinematographer is my number one relationship. I worked with Connie [Conrad Hall] on American Beauty. Connie knew Roger and when we were making American Beauty he talked me up to Roger and said, “You’ve got to work with this young guy.” Roger for me has been an absolutely central part of the last five movies. He’s a master. He’s Sir Roger, dear us, we’re  both knights. That’s a joke isn’t it?

DEADLINE: How can you tell when Roger’s pissed off with you?

He’s not a fan of doing major changes at the last minute. Roger is happy when we have really talked it through; when we have got on set on a good day we barely talk to each other. We know what we’re going for. We look at each other and go, “I like that.” The language is clear between us. There’s not a lot of debate because we would have already talk it through in pre-production.

He’s not a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants guy. You also know that there’s going to be a coherent visual style. If you look at his work with the Coen brothers, very few of the movies are similar in style but they’re all crisp, all considered, composed; they all have a clarity of thought —we want you to look at that. There’s a reason he’s a master.

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