DREAM PALACE
Sam Mendes takes on movies, mental health, and the mighty Margate…
Sam Mendes is talking sweets. Specifically, 1980s cinema confectionary. “I was never a big fan of Dolly Mixtures or Sherbet Lemons,” he grins. “I did love those toffees that you could get, Liquorice Allsorts and the boxes of Maltesers.” The reason for all this retro sweetie talk is simple: the 1917 director’s latest film, Empire Of Light, is set in a British seaside movie palace, run by Colin Firth’s slightly sleezy manager and Olivia Colman’s troubled deputy.
From popcorn machines to the Pearl & Dean tune, it’s all present. “There was an element of me that was trying to recreate some of the feeling of going to those big independent cinemas in my teenage years,” says Mendes, who lived in Oxford at the time. While there is nostalgia, particularly for the art of old-school film projection, with the booth run by Toby Jones’ Norman, Mendes never designed the film as the British answer to Cinema Paradiso.
“It’s not Cinema Paradiso,” he says, firmly. “I mean, hey, I wish! Cinema Paradiso’s a masterpiece! But that’s not what I was going for. It’s a movie about mental illness. It’s a movie about outcasts – two people who are ostracised for different reasons, who find each other. And it’s about how if you are broken, that movies can help put you back together again, along with music and art. And I do believe that.”
Colman’s Hilary is on lithium to control her moods but finds solace in Stephen (Top Boy’s Micheal Ward), an aspiring architect who joins the cinema staff. “It’s inspired by childhood memories of growing up around someone – my mother – who was disintegrating mentally, and then trying to put herself back together again,” admits Mendes, who penned the script himself. “I’ve been looking for a way of expressing that very deeply formative period of my life.”
Set in 1981, with skinhead gangs on the rise, race riots and high unemployment, Mendes felt “the social unrest and upheaval in the Thatcher years” mirrored his mother’s internal conflicts. “That was what the ’80s felt like to me.” He saw much of the same during the pandemic. “There was a huge rise in domestic violence and mental illness and at the same time outside the window, metaphorically, was Black Lives Matter, Trump and a different level of social chaos.”
To capture the era, Mendes went to Margate, with Dreamland, the town’s famous entertainment complex, doubling for the film’s grand old movie palace. “I wanted to sort of create a mythic landscape which sometimes is difficult in the UK. You want the scale of the skies there. And the vast empty beaches and the beautiful, desolate, empty spaces in the winter.” Even amid breakdowns and broken lives, Margate has never looked more magical.