“THE STORY COMES FIRST”

SAM MENDES IS A FILM AND THEATER DIRECTOR, A PRODUCER, AND SCREENWRITER WHO IS KNOWN FOR HIS INNOVATIVE TREATMENTS OF CLASSIC STAGE PRODUCTIONS AS WELL AS FOR HIS FILMS. HE IS BEST KNOWN FOR AMERICAN BEAUTY (1999) AND JAMES BOND FILMS. AT THE 77TH GOLDEN GLOBES AWARD CEREMONY, HIS LATEST FILM 1917

EARNED HIM FOR BEST DIRECTOR AND BEST PICTURE.

A few months ago I heard Francis Coppola at a festival. Students were asking him how he saw the future of filmmaking and when pressed he came up with a scenario where you can have a stadium with crews set up in different places and the actors go from one set to the other and a movie is performed live. Are you trying to turn cinema into theater?

You’ve got to always take your hat off to Francis because he’s never ever sat still. He’s always been in the vanguard. If you look across the great filmmakers, Francis, and Spielberg, and Scorsese, you see that restlessness of wanting to push forward into new forms, new ways of seeing, new ways of doing. As for a sort of live films, for me that’s the theater. You can see somebody do a 2.5-hour play with noone saying cut, and you can see them in real life. I think the way that has developed in the last 10 years is with live performances put onto cinema screens. It is actually a wonderful development that not many people talk about as cinema, but, whenever I’ve been to those things they’ve been packed. They’re very well done, and the two or three of my shows I’ve done that with, I’ve really enjoyed the process. To put it this way, I used all my own theater experience in making 1917.

Do you think there is a future in doing even more experimental things?

It’s not unusual in my profession as a theater director to say to a cast of actors “okay, you’ve spent 8 weeks preparing, this is the first preview, I’ll see you in 2.5 hours.” My job is to give them the courage and the confidence to lift this, and make it feel like it’s theirs and not mine. That was very much the case here, it was very much me saying to my actors, “it’s yours, you’ve got to take it.” I could push them, cajole them, and remind them of technical details. But basically my job was to encourage them to live it rather than to act it. That’s sort of what you’re also doing in the theater. So, I definitely use all those staging tools, a sense of what the rhythm is without recourse to editing and the pace. How much an audience can take, how the evening can breathe in and breathe out… Without just being an incessant, one pace thing, or just a headlong charge into action -all of those things, those muscles were built up in the theater, but, at the same time, it’s a very cinematic experience. 1917 was inspired by your grandfather’s stories and some research you did at the Imperial War Museum.

My grandfather, Mendes, was a Portuguese Trinidadian. His greatgrandfather emigrated to Trinidad in the 19th century and he was sent away as a boy to school in England aged 11 in around 1910. He chose to sign up for the war because his friends from school had all gone. He was a very small man, 5’ 4”, ended up being a novelist and he was very theatrical, charismatic, and a great storyteller. But for whatever reason he never told the stories of his experiences in the First World War to his own children. He decided to tell his grandchildren. One of the many stories he told us was the fact that he had been tasked with delivering a message many times over. Besides he was fast, and because in the winter the mist hung at about 6’ in No Man’s Land and he was 5’ 4”, they would send him because he wasn’t visible above the mist, which

is incredible, and he got a medal. They were never stories about his own heroism. They were always stories about how lucky he was to have survived. He used to wash his hands incessantly, and I remember asking my dad why grandad washes his hands. He says because he remembers the mud of the trenches and never being able to get clean. I suppose that stuck with me in a way that is just beyond words.

I wonder, which were your grandfather’s stories?

It’s not specifically my grandfather’s story and there are many fragments of stories that we picked up from research at the Imperial War Museum and other places. Without wanting to be pretentious, there’s a great Sartre quote, he says a man’s work is nothing more or less than the slow trek to rediscover through the detours of art those two or three great and simple images in the presence of which his heart first opened. I suppose my heart as an 11-year-old or 12-year-old boy opened when he told me these stories.

You obviously grew up with the stories your grandfather told you. Why now, in this moment of your life, did you decide to tackle this?

We live in a time when we’ve sort of lost what it

means to sacrifice for others. We’re in a very selfobsessed culture. There’s a generation of people here, who sacrificed everything for something bigger than themselves. They sacrificed for an idea that was going to help their children and their grandchildren live in a free world. I know that sounds idealistic but if you can’t be idealistic as a storyteller, then what can you be? In war stories, you see human beings pushed to the absolute limit and there are very few situations where you see what it means to be human. I feel in this movie they’re walking the line between the living and the dead, and it is very, very slender. I was trying to tell a story about those universal themes: love, friendship, what it means to go home, what it means to have a home, what it means to fight for. What I didn’t want to do is make a dry, historical, period film.

When you started this movie you wanted to have a real time and basically a one-shot kind of movie. Why is that?

Because I wanted people to feel like they were walking with these boys, breathing every breath with them, and stepping every footstep. It was an emotional choice really. I wanted to feel connected to them. Once I had the idea that it was going to be 2 hours of real time, it seemed a natural progression for it to be an unbroken shot. It makes you think about the fact that in most cases, one defaults always to editorial choices. In every edit, every little cut, there is a slight distancing that happens between you and the characters. I wanted as little distance between them and the experiences they were going through as possible. You’re always looking for a marriage between style and content, and it seemed to be the right way to tell this story. Then we had to work out how to do it, which was more difficult. In some way you just prepared for the decathlon. Run, jump, swim. There are lots of those sequences that are variables. Can you talk to us about how spontaneous you had to be during the big running sequence? The actors were basically

flailing about in the mud in another sequence.

You mentioned two moments in the movie that I feel are the perfect marriage of planning and accident. You’re looking to create this map for them for the entire journey and then you hope for happy accidents and spontaneity and moments. A lot of what George Mackay was doing in the river was not acting. He was just trying to stay afloat, and it was scary, and it was cold. He was truly heroic. The only thing he didn’t do was fall backwards down the stairs and smash his head open. But if I’d asked him to do that, he would have said yes. That run at the end of the film, that run he got knocked over, I thought not only would he not get up but I thought that the ambulance would have to get a call. He gets totally taken out but he was so focused, he was so into it, he was so determined to get there it was incredibly moving. There was a spirit that comes from when you make a movie about a war in which a generation of people was wiped out, people who lived in mud for 3 or 4 years of their lives, who were scarred by it even if they did stay alive. A movie that’s about wanting to get home and about love for your friend and comrade. It’s very difficult to complain about anything, because what’s three weeks spent in the mud when people spend three years?

You are also the movie’s writer.

An interesting thing happened on the movie which is, first of all, the first movie I’ve ever written. As a writer, I can now say, you feel vulnerable in a different way to when you’re just directing. On this movie, I would send the script out, and then I’d be checking my email every 10 minutes: Have they read it? Do they like it? Are they responding? What do they think?... But when you write it, it’s much more personal and so you become more thin-skinned.

What advice do you have for making it in the film industry as a director?

You have to have a story to tell. I know it sounds simple, but you got to have something to say. When I was growing up, there were a lot of filmmakers, but there weren’t many great storytellers. For me, story comes first. First know your story, then try to match style to the content.