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MOVIE FEATURE

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SAM MENDES BEFORE HOLLYWOOD Before shaking up Hollywood with films such as American Beauty (1999), Road to Perdition (2002), Skyfall (2012) and 1917 (2019), director Sam Mendes was renowned amongst theatre circles for telling dark and twisted reimaginings of classic musicals. His revival of Cabaret , featuring Alan Cumming as the Emcee, was especially controversial for its racy direction.

STACK caught up with director Sam Mendes and star Olivia Colman to discuss their new film, Empire of Light – a moving drama about human connection and the power of cinema. Words Gill Pringle E mpire of Light is as much an ode to director Sam Mendes’ mother, who suffered with mental illness, as it is to connection during turbulent times. Cinema made a profound impression upon Mendes from a young age, and he recalls seeing Close Encounters of the Third Kind as a boy. “I saw it at the Odeon Leicester Square in CINEMA PARADISO

and a moment that I remember clearly,” says the British writer-director who most recently helmed the acclaimed war epic 1917 . For Oscar-winning actress Olivia Colman ( The Favourite ), her own first experience at the cinema was quite different. “I remember my granny took me to Bambi , but she had to take me out of the cinema, because it was so upsetting. And that was the first time I'd ever been in a cinema. And I'd never experienced the scale of it; the event of going out, being allowed to buy chocolates, and then having to leave because I was so upset,” she tells STACK . For rising star Micheal Ward, Empire of Light created the kind of exposure that now has his name included on a list of potential successors to play the next Bond. Still finding his feet, the Jamaican-British actor was flattered when Mendes asked for his input on the character – even before he was cast. “It was good for Sam to do that,” he says. “He didn’t need to – I’m a new actor, I haven’t been doing this long. But he valued my opinion and it was exciting to know that he was willing to collaborate on the character. Sam lived through that period, but he recognises he’s not a Black man, and so while he would have seen the tension around him, he wouldn’t know what that walk was like himself.” If moviegoers see echoes of the current state of racism in Mendes’ 1980s period piece, that’s no coincidence. “In the middle of lockdown there was a racial reckoning in the world,” says the director. “We were left alone to contemplate how our own racial politics had been formed, and whether we had fallen down in our attempts to make sure the world was evolving. “When I wrote the movie there was also another common obsession: we were all worried whether the cinema was going to die, along with live performances. So, all of those things have gone into [ Empire of Light ], and in that regard, it’s quite raw.”

his enduring love of cinema. Set in and around a faded old cinema in an English coastal town in the early 1980s, the movie follows Hilary (Olivia Colman), a cinema manager struggling with her mental health, and Stephen (Micheal Ward), a new employee who longs to escape this provincial town in which he faces daily adversity. Both Hilary and Stephen find a sense of belonging through their unlikely and tender relationship and come to experience the healing power of music, cinema, and community in this moving drama about the power of human

London, and I just remember the sheer scale of it and the floor rumbling at the beginning of the movie and the darkness and the fact that I was there with all these other people and it was full. “I experienced silence and darkness in a completely different way, and

I suppose I'm still sold on that feeling. It's not a feeling that every movie can give you – that was a special movie

Sam Mendes is also a TV producer with credits including Call the Midwife , Penny Dreadful , and The Hollow Crown . DYK?

• Empire of Light is out on Apr 19

20 APRIL 2023

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