Sam Mendes--The Hollywood Interview

Director Sam Mendes.


SAM MENDES HITS THE ROAD WITH AWAY WE GO
By
Alex Simon


Sam Mendes is one of the rare hyphenates who remains active directing on the stage and in film, in a time when the two worlds have become largely segregated from one another. Having been lauded with virtually every prestigious award for stage and screen by time he was in his mid-30s, Sam Medes was a wunderkind almost from the start.

Born August 1, 1965 in Reading, Berkshire, England to a university lecturer father and a mother who authored children’s books, Mendes’ parents divorced when he was five. Upon reaching Cambridge University, he quickly fell in love with theater and film, joining the Chichester Festival Theater after graduation in 1987. Soon, he was directing Dame Judi Dench in Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard, winning the Critics Circle Award for Best Newcomer. Following work with the Royal Shakespeare Company, Mendes became artistic director of the reopened Donmar Warehouse in London, and later directed the Broadway revival of Cabaret, which won four Tony Awards, including Best Actress for the late Natasha Richardson.

Sam Mendes hit pay dirt with his first feature film, American Beauty, which swept the 1999 Academy Awards, taking home five statuettes, including Best Director for Mendes who, at the tender age of 34, was now a major player in Hollywood. Mendes followed Beauty with a stellar body of work: the Depression-era drama Road to Perdition, the Gulf War epic Jarhead, and last year’s adaptation of Richard Yates’ iconic novel Revolutionary Road, which starred Mendes’ wife, 2008’s Oscar-winner for The Reader, Kate Winslet.

Sam Mendes’ latest feature film is a departure for the director, whose previous cinematic efforts have been painted on broad canvases. Away We Go tells the story of a happily married couple (Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski) who, upon discovering their first child is on the way, travel cross-country to find the perfect place to settle down, encountering friends, family and some new perspective on the way. Reminiscent of some of the ‘70s’ greatest road pictures, Away We Go was written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, and features stellar support from a dream cast, including Allison Janney, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Jeff Daniels, Catherine O’Hara, Chris Messina and Melanie Lynskey, to name but a few. The Focus Features release hits theaters June 5.

Sam Mendes sat down with us recently during an LA stopover to discuss his latest film and remarkable career. Here’s what followed:

This film reminded me of some of my favorite road pictures from the ‘70s, like Harry & Tonto and The Last Detail. Is that what struck you when you initially read the script?
No, what struck me was the script itself, and it actually felt very contemporary to me, as opposed to something that was a throwback. It’s a very “generation Y” story. It reminded me of the period, in our thirties, when my friends and I really made the decisions that informed the rest of our lives: we got married, had kids. Very few of us got married in our twenties and started families. That doesn’t happen as much anymore. So I thought it captured that very well, and I love the road movie genre and the road movie format. I like the simplicity of it: Start at A. Got to get to B. And the audience knows where you’re heading because they’ve got the itinerary. It’s like chapters in a book. The other thing I loved about this movie is that people keep trying to label it a “romantic comedy,” which it isn’t. A romantic comedy is “boy meets girl, boy loses girl,” and so on. This is not that at all. This establishes very quickly that this couple is in love and they’re going to remain in love. There’s no crisis in their relationship like there would be in a classic romantic comedy. Throughout the movie they’re like a unit, almost like one character. The movie is about what they see, and what they learn. So I saw it much more as a road movie, first and foremost.

John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph in Away We Go.

What movies did you study before you shot it?
I immediately thought of all the great Hal Ashby movies, The Last Detail being the primary one. There was a simplicity in his work stylistically, and also the way he used music, was years ahead of its time. His films are almost more inspiring now than they were when they came out, or even 10-15 years ago. Now you’ve got all these great directors like Spike Jonze, Judd Apatow, Cameron Crowe, all saying that one of their biggest influences was “the master, Hal Ashby.” So I watched The Last Detail several times, and thought ‘It’s so simple in its presentation, yet so complex in the way the characters are presented, and the people that they meet,’ and how unafraid he is to meet someone and move on. There’s no tying up “loose ends” and having the characters come back in the end for some kind of payoff. The whole idea of an “arc” that every character has to have is just absurd. The Last Detail presented human encounters as they usually happen in life: you meet someone, you have the encounter, and you move on.

Like The Last Detail, Away We Go also has the characters encountering very specific cultural archetypes, that could only exist in the time and place that the film takes place. There are very contemporary characters in this film, as you said, just as there are characters in The Last Detail that you would only meet in 1973.
Right, right, and yet they stay with you, don’t they? And the sign of a great writer is to make all the characters familiar to you, archetypes as you said, but unique and sometimes strange in their own way. When I was reading the script, every character there reminded me of someone that I knew, yet they weren’t exactly like them because we’re all unique. That really was my way into the movie, and it didn’t change from that moment to now. I love the characters of that couple, and I feel that I really cast them right, and when that happens, two plus two equals five. When we did the first preview of the movie, there were about 25 people in the focus group, and literally everyone in the room loved the leading couple. If they hadn’t, I knew that we’d be in big trouble.

Mendes on the set of Away We Go.

The focus group experience must be like going for a dental checkup to the Laurence Olivier character in Marathon Man for any director. Is that true? Do you just dread it?
(laughs) That’s very good—like your teeth being pulled. You know, since I’ve done so much theater, I really like sitting with an audience watching my work. I like the feeling of being able to watch where they switch on, where they switch off, where they laugh, where they cry. The focus group, though, once you’ve gone through the first two or three questions and you’ve established that they like it, that’s when you want to leave, because then they’ll start trying to fish for all the reasons they don’t like it.

Kevin Spacey and Mena Suvari in American Beauty, 1999's Best Picture.

Wasn’t something like twenty minutes of American Beauty cut after a focus group screening—the sequence involving the back-story of Chris Cooper’s character?
No, that was me that cut that. It had nothing to do with a focus group. The movie never changed really after the first preview, aside from about a minute that I cut from the cheerleader sequence. The changes I made to that movie were long before an audience ever saw it. The only other person that ever saw it in a longer form was (screenwriter) Alan Ball, and the two producers.

And we’ll never see a “Director’s Cut” DVD release that restores that sequence?
No, the director’s cut is what’s out on DVD. I’d like to do a director’s cut of Jarhead, though.

Jake Gyllenhaal and Peter Sarsgaard in Jarhead.

How was that film compromised?
I took the politics out of it.

Why?
I don’t know. Because it felt wrong at the time, I think. I was too close to it, and I couldn’t give it a context. We were in the middle of the height of the Gulf War, and people were determined to make the film into something that was political, and I felt that I wanted it to stand on its own, and be timeless. The thing I regret, which I didn’t have to do on Away We Go, was that I didn’t have a chance to be away from it for a while. I shot Away We Go, then did a play, then came back to the film and did post. So that gave me some objectivity with it, whereas with Jarhead, I was working on it right up until its release date. I had a strange experience during the premiere of Jarhead, I was watching it and thinking ‘Wait a minute, they’ve skipped a scene! Where did that scene go?’ Then I realized, I’d cut the fucking thing! (laughs) And that shouldn’t happen to you as a filmmaker. You should know the landscape of your movie intimately. That just shows you that sometimes when you don’t have the time, you can really compromise your own material without meaning to.

You were in post on Revolutionary Road when you started Away We Go, right?
Yes, I was. Revolutionary Road was long. We were supposed to release it the previous year, but we couldn’t get it together in time. In this case it was good for me to go from one to the other because I was able to work much more instinctively on this. Usually I’ve gone from movie-play-movie-play. And sometimes a year or two will go by between the play and the movie, which causes you to sort of lose your “movie muscles,” and you have to take a couple weeks to build them back up, so to speak. So I was really in the groove when I started this, and was making decisions very instinctively, from my gut. I think the movie really benefited from the fact that I didn’t over think, and over plan it.Revolutionary Road was threading a needle, whereas this was painting a canvas with warm colors.

This is a completely different kind of film for you. You usually paint on a huge canvas, whereas this was a small canvas, painted with what felt like watercolors. Was that your intention?
Yeah, absolutely. I’m glad you got that, and it was a great feeling to be working on a smaller canvas, so to speak.

Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road.

Speaking of Revolutionary Road, I was very happy to see one of Richard Yates’ stories finally adapted for the screen. Are you familiar with his short story anthology, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness?
Yeah, wonderful stories. John Frankenheimer actually had wanted to film Revolutionary Road in the early ‘60s, but wasn't able to, because the subject matter was a bit too frank to be filmable in that time. There’s a story in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness called “Saying Goodbye to Sally,” I think, which was about Yates going to Hollywood. It was nakedly autobiographical, and the character of the young director was based on Frankenheimer.

You mentioned the theater earlier. You’re one of the few directors today, Mike Nichols being the other, who goes back and forth between film and theater, whereas years ago, it was more commonplace. Talk to us about the different processes between working with actors in theater versus working with them in film.
Well, I used to think it was completely different, and when you’re shooting it is very different from doing a play. But I’m finding increasingly that the two are much closer together. I find that as I get more comfortable with film, I find myself working very much the same way and in the same atmosphere as when I’m in rehearsals for a play. The difference is that rehearsals for a play are everything, and rehearsals for a movie are not. You rehearse a play to the very end, and then when you put it up, it’s either going to work, or it’s not. With film, every day is a challenge which can make or break the film. Then you have to remake it again in the editing room. I’d say rehearsals for a play and the editing room for a movie are my favorite places to be.

Do you like to rehearse before you shoot?
Oh yeah. I like to rehearse every movie, sometimes for quite a long time. We rehearsed this for a total of about three weeks over a couple of months: five days here, three days there, just to keep the energy going and also because I knew the center of the film was John and Maya, and if they didn’t have an easy relationship with each other, and their chemistry wasn’t perfect by the time we shot, the film wouldn’t work.

Allison Janney and Maya Rudolph in Away We Go.

The other thing I noticed was you used different color palates for the different locations they traveled to.
Yeah, that was all intentional, and the other thing we did was allow a lot of improvisation in the movie. The scene with Allison Janney in Phoenix, where she’s calling her child over and over again, and he ignores her, that was all improvised. Allison did it during one take and I said ‘That’s great, just keep doing that.’ She thought I was being funny, and I said ‘No, I’m serious, just keep doing that.’ And then I told the kid to just ignore her. To be able to be that loose was great. I like to be able to get to the point with the actors where I can just throw stuff back and forth like that.

L to R: Maya Rudolph, John Krasinski and Maggie Gyllenhaal in Away We Go.

Maggie Gyllenhaal, I think, should be nominated for Best Supporting Actress. Living in Southern California you encounter so many pretentious, overbearing New Agers like her character.
(laughs) I know, wasn’t she great? She’s channeling something there, to be sure. That character is a great creation by David and Vendella, but taken to another level by a great actor.

Paul Newman and Tom Hanks in Road to Perdition.

My favorite film of yours is Road to Perdition. I was a fan of the graphic novel, but I loved the way you reinvented what was basically a John Woo Hong Kong film set during the Great Depression, and turned it into something completely different, basically an original work. We also need to talk about two people you worked with in the film: Paul Newman and Conrad Hall, two of my heroes.
They’re both very easy people to talk about. I suppose they were two of the biggest pleasures of my professional life, the more important relationship of the two being Conrad. We were really close friends, and he influenced everything about how I make movies. There isn’t a day that goes by on a set when I don’t think to myself ‘What would Connie do here?’ or just about the fact that I miss him. He was just a wonderful human being. They both were just great people who transcended their skills as artists and went into that very rare realm of just being great human beings. They were both able to keep their lives separate from their work. Conrad was the greatest lighting cameraman of the last 30-40 years, along with a handful of people like Gordon Willis, Haskell Wexler, Sven Nykvist, and just set the agenda for all the cinematographers that followed him.

They’re like a school of painters almost, aren’t they?
Yeah, they are. That’s exactly what you become a part of when you have that level of skill, and when you see the work, you realize what goes into it and that it’s very special. Newman was that way, too. I wrote an article about him after he died, and I knew him for such a small period of his life, but I think he influenced future generations of actors just as Connie did cinematographers. Plus, you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who lived a better life than Paul did. He committed so much of himself to things outside of acting and set the standard in them all: charity, auto racing, entrepreneurship. Then, when he’d lost his leading man/movie star status, he was perfectly comfortable just being a great actor, doing character roles, and never lost his dignity. He wasn’t one of these people who clung onto fame with his fingertips, because I don’t think he cared.

Mendes and cinematographer Conrad L. Hall on the set of Road to Perdition.

Having Conrad Hall as your D.P. on your first feature must have been akin to being schooled by Yoda.
(laughs) Yes, it was. That’s exactly right. I was so in the dark as a filmmaker, I had to ask him ‘When do I say “action”?’ (laughs)

Was it less-daunting to have someone like that in your corner when you were starting out?
Yes, but on the other hand, it was also more daunting, because you’ve got someone who’s worked with John Huston, and shot Cool Hand Luke and In Cold Blood. It was like ‘Jesus Christ! What the fuck am I doing with this guy in the room with me?’ (laughs) And he also always wanted to direct, so I always had this voice in the back of my head with him saying ‘This kid’s got this job that I’d really like to be doing. Can he do it?’ And for the first couple weeks, he was probably wondering if I could, as I was finding my feet. But then we found a way of talking and being together that really worked. I miss him, still.

Let’s talk about your background. You were born and raised in and around London?
Yeah, London and Oxford.

Then you went to Cambridge.
Right, went from one university town to another.

Was your father a professor?
No, he was a lecturer at a university in London.

Did you discover the arts through him?
Both my parents, actually. I was always surrounded by books, so I’d say it was a combination of books and TV that fueled my interest, movies not so much then.

British TV was great then, with the Play of the Week series, and the like.
Yeah, exactly, plus the comedy was great: Monty Python, Fawlty Towers. So those were my major influences. Movies and theater didn’t really enter my life until university.

Was there one epiphanous moment where you knew that this was your calling?
Yeah, seeing Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas. It was a real epiphany. The further I get away from it, the bigger I think it was, actually. The main epiphany was the realization that you could make a movie in contemporary America that had a mythic scale, that dealt with big themes, and did so almost wordlessly. Everything about it was just perfect. I watched it three nights in succession. So that was a big moment for me, and might explain why I ended up making American films, as a Brit. And I still don’t quite know why I continue to do that. It’s just worked out that way.

Fate stepping in, perhaps.
Yeah, and now we live in New York because both Kate and myself are working so much in the States, we didn’t want to leave the kids behind in England. But we both love America, so it’s great.

Natasha Richardson as Sally Bowles in Mendes' Tony-winning production of Cabaret.

I interviewed Natasha Richardson five years ago and, like everyone who knew or got to meet her, was saddened by her passing. You directed her in her Tony-winning performance of the Cabaret revival. What are some of your memories of Natasha?
Yeah…you know it’s a terrible irony that so many of the things she wanted in her life were things that were given to her after she died, speaking professionally. Her fame rocketed after she died, and I remember thinking to myself ‘Why the fuck didn’t you all write these things about her while she was still alive?’ It was very frustrating in that respect, because she was such a wonderful person with a large, large heart and an amazing presence. She had a “force of nature” quality about her, and was just massively intelligent, as well. She had her dad’s theater instinct, with very precise taste and was very observant, which she also inherited from her mum. It’s just tragic that she won’t be here to contribute all that she was blessed with any longer, and worse, that she won’t be able to see her kids grow up.

Did you ever read her father, Tony Richardson’s, autobiography, The Long Distance Runner?
Yeah, great book, brilliant book. He was such an amazing, acerbic, intellectual man.

I saw your production of Cabaret in New York, and I imagine it must’ve been rather intimidating to step into the giant shoes that had interpreted it previously. But, as you did with Road to Perdition, you really reimagined and reinvented it to a large extent.
Yeah, someone said to me at the time “We’ve invented a new word for what you’ve done with Cabaret. We’re calling it ‘a revisal.’” (laughs) That is what it was, because it wasn’t really a revival of the original script. We included two songs from the movie, and one from the ’85 stage revival. It was a real patchwork of the different versions of the show. It was a very happy experience, that, and ran for a long time, for five years.

What are you working on now?
I’m doing two more plays with my company, The Bridge Project, and we’ll start rehearsing in the Fall, so I’ve got Summer off, which is great. And I’ll try to do a movie next year. I’m developing various things, so we’ll see what emerges. I’m always asked that, at this stage of the game after I’ve just finished a film. I always very foolishly say ‘Next I’m going to make this kind of movie,’ sounding very determined, and I always do the opposite. (laughs) I literally have no idea, and that’s part of the fun: flying blind for a while.