by Gill Pringle

Oscar-winning director Sam Mendes ((American Beauty) is not unaware of the irony of making this highly personal drama at a time when the cinema-going experience is under threat, so when FilmInk asks him for his predictions on the future of cinema, his answer is measured.

“I think that, even though people talk about attendance going up to almost pre-COVID levels across the year – the attendance is for 20 or 25 movies, not for 200 movies. It’s for a very small number of big movies.

“And, as for the smaller movies, people are feeling, well we can stay at home and see that on our streaming service in a few weeks’ time, or even straight away in the case of a Netflix or Apple movie. Obviously, you don’t need me to tell you that,” says Mendes, 57.

“There’s also a dearth of original content. So much of it is existing IP – sequels, franchises that people know, so they feel confident that they’re going to have a movie of a certain scale.

“And then there’s something which is really obvious, which people don’t talk about very much, which is – if you go to a restaurant, there is a difference in the kind of ingredients you get when you pay more money. And if you want a cheap meal, the food adjusts itself, but it’s cheap. In other words, there’s a price differential. If you go to the theater to see a big show, it costs you $200 and if you go to the fringe, it costs you $20 right? But in movies, every movie costs the same amount of money to see. And so people will go and see a movie that cost US$400 million, pretty much consistently over a movie that cost $4 million, because the ticket price is the same and until there’s some acknowledgement of the differential between the big and the small movies, you’re gonna get steamrolled by the big films and that’s what’s happened consistently and there’s no one fighting for or finding a way to show the smaller movies for less money. It’s all about the distributor and it’s all about the theatrical exhibitor.

“So, if Avatar costs 10 pounds and Empire of Light costs 10 pounds and you’re a teenager, you’re going to go and see Avatar, it’s obvious. And I’ve made movies in all of those spheres. I’ve made a Bond movie; I made 1917, which is an event movie, but non-franchise and I make a small movie like this. And the answer is, this movie is ten times harder to publicise. And it’s criticised ten times more than a Bond movie, because people are hoping that it’s going to make a case for the cinema, not just itself, but it has to be a masterpiece to get people out to see it. In a world where Spielberg’s movie and Damien Chazelle’s movie, and Alejandro Inarittu’s movie, James Gray’s movie, and this movie are released – no one has gone to see them. All I can say is – it’s clearly in trouble. And you have to acknowledge that and you can’t make it the filmmaker’s problem. Many of those movies are brilliantly reviewed; The Fabelmans is one of the best reviewed movies of the year, and it’s taken US$15 million at the US box office. It’s nearly finished its theatrical run. So what hope is there for anyone?” asks Mendes when we spoke a few months ago.

Written and filmed during the pandemic, Empire of Light 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.

“For most people, their most formative period is their teenage years. For me, that was the late ’70s and early ’80s: the music, the movies, the pop culture of that period generally formed who I was. It was a period of great political upheaval in the U.K., with a great deal of incendiary racial politics – but at the same time, an amazing period for music and for culture generally – very creative, very politicised, very energised,” recalls Mendes, who would go on to become one of Britain’s most successful directors, responsible for Revolutionary Road, Road to Perdition and Jarhead, among others.

“Lockdown was a period of intense self-examination and reflection for all of us. And for me it meant starting to confront these memories that I’d been wrestling with since childhood. That was the spur to write and explore those memories and to see if I could unlock anything interesting,” says the director who largely based Colman’s Hilary on his own mother who, likewise struggled with mental health.

With Mendes at her side, Colman was confident that she had everything she needed to play the character, even if others might have been perturbed by playing a version of the director’s mother. “I’m not a great method or researching actor, but it was all in the script,” says the Oscar-winning actress. “Everything I needed was there and also, Sam was there, obviously. And so, at any point I had the best research material where I could ask Sam: ‘what was that like? What’s this moment like? What’s it like, on lithium or off lithium or before, you know, on the upward trajectory and on the other side’. I could ask Sam everything.

“So, that might sound sloppy, and I feel a bit ashamed to say that, but I did have someone who knew about it to ask questions,” laughs the self-deprecating Oscar winner.

For relative newcomer Micheal Ward (Top Boy, Small Axe: Lovers Rock), the opportunity to star in a Sam Mendes movie was irresistible – even if it did mean that he had to conquer his lifelong fear of pigeons, to perform multiple close-up scenes surrounded by the birds, often described as the vermin of the sky.

“He did this with dogged determination, I would say. He just went and sat in a room with a pigeon for day after day after day,” says Mendes. “And he worked through his fears. I’m saying this because it’s true – he was quite heroic in his own way because he was really genuinely terrified.”

Ward agrees. “That’s pretty much what it was like, a day by day effort and day by day trying to do something that made me more and more comfortable with the pigeon. And also, I had this lovely lady who was helping me through the process, and making sure that I didn’t treat each day as the one before, and that really helped me, because she was basically pushing me to get over it. And if I didn’t have that, I probably wouldn’t have done it alone. So, I’m glad that that was put in place but also, just knowing that we had a schedule to work to, and just wanting to be comfortable,” says the actor who is already being mentioned as the next 007.

Mendes argues that cinema will always represent escape to him – and not just because he’s a filmmaker.

“As a kid, the meaning of cinema for me was escape. In those days, you couldn’t see a movie unless you went to the cinema, there were no video recorders and no smartphones. And movies were only on television at Christmas.

“So, for me, it was an escape into a whole other world of imagination and excitement. As a child, it meant getting away from my life. As an adult, it meant finding another family. So, the eccentric families that you found working in cinemas or working in theaters became kind of surrogate families for me. And in fact, the only families I’d experienced because I was an only child growing up with a mother who was in and out of mental hospitals. It became a place of escape in a different way when I was an adult,” he says.

His only hope is that audiences will continue to escape to the cinema.

Empire of Light is in cinemas March 2, 2023

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