Sam Mendes

Early life and education

Mendes was born on 1 August 1965 in Reading, Berkshire. He is the son of Valerie Mendes (born Barnett), a publisher and author, and Jameson Peter Mendes, a university professor. His father is a Roman Catholic of Portuguese descent from Trinidad and Tobago, and his mother is an English Jew. His grandfather was the Trinidadian writer Alfred Hubert Mendes.

Mendes's parents divorced when he was three years old, after which Mendes and his mother settled in Primrose Hill in North London. He attended Primrose Hill Primary School and was in the same class as future Foreign Secretary David Miliband and author Zoë Heller. In 1976, the family relocated to Woodstock near Oxford, where Mendes's mother found work as a senior editor at Oxford University Press. Mendes was educated at Magdalen College School where he met future theatre designer Tom Piper, who went on to work with Mendes on a National Theatre revival of Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party.

Mendes had an early interest in cinema and applied to the University of Warwick (then the only university in the UK that offered an undergraduate film course), but was turned down. He was then accepted at the University of Cambridge, graduating at Peterhouse with first-class honours in English. Having developed a passion for theatre only in his late teens, Mendes became a member of the Marlowe Society at Cambridge and directed several plays. His first play was David Halliwell's Little Malcolm and His Struggle Against the Eunuchs, and one of his later productions was Cyrano de Bergerac with Tom Hollander and Jonathan Cake among the cast members. During his time at Cambridge, Mendes also became enthusiastic about cinema in earnest. He cited Paris, Texas, Repo Man and True Stories as three "seminal film moments" that influenced his stage and film career.

Mendes was noted as a "brilliant schoolboy cricketer" by Wisden Cricketers' Almanack, scoring 1,153 runs at 46 and taking 83 wickets at under 16 for Magdalen College School in 1983 and 1984. He also played cricket for Cambridge University Cricket Club, and in 1997 played for Shipton-under-Wychwood in the final of the Village Cricket Cup, the only winner of the Academy Award for Best Director to have played at Lord's.

Career

Stage career

After graduating from Cambridge in 1987, Mendes was hired as assistant director at the Chichester Festival Theatre. In September 1987, Mendes made his professional directing debut with a double bill of two Anton Chekhov plays, The Bear and The Proposal. In 1989, he was appointed the inaugural director of the Minerva Theatre.

In 1989, following the abrupt departure of director Robin Phillips, Mendes took over a production of Dion Boucicault's London Assurance at Chichester. Later that year, Mendes made his West End debut at the Aldwych with a production of Chekhov's The Cherry Orchard, starring Judi Dench. London Assurance then transferred to the West End following a six-month run at Chichester, opening at the Theatre Royal Haymarket. The successes of the plays established Mendes as a theatre director of national renown.

In 1990, Mendes was appointed artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse, a Covent Garden studio space previously used by the Royal Shakespeare Company. He spent two years overseeing the redesign of the theatre, which formally opened in 1992 with the British premiere of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins. Mendes's tenure at the Donmar saw its transformation into one of the most successful and fashionable playhouses in London.

In 1993, Mendes staged an acclaimed revival of John Kander and Fred Ebb's Cabaret starring Jane Horrocks as Sally Bowles and Alan Cumming as Emcee. The production was approached with a fresh concept, differing greatly from both the original 1966 production directed by Harold Prince and the famed film version, directed by Bob Fosse. This production opened at the Donmar and received four Olivier Award nominations including Best Musical Revival, before transferring promptly to Broadway where it played for several years at the Kit Kat Club (i.e. the Stephen Sondheim Theater). The Broadway cast included Cumming once again as Emcee, with Natasha Richardson as Sally, Mary Louise Wilson as Fraulein Schneider, John Benjamin Hickey as Cliff, and Ron Rifkin as Herr Schultz. Cumming, Richardson, and Rifkin all won Tony Awards for their performances.

1994 saw Mendes stage a new production of Lionel Bart's Oliver!, produced by Cameron Mackintosh. Mendes, a longtime fan of the work, worked in close collaboration with Bart and other production team members, William David Brohn, Martin Koch and Anthony Ward, to create a fresh staging of the well-known classic. Bart added new musical material and Mendes updated the book slightly, while the orchestrations were radically rewritten to suit the show's cinematic feel. The cast included Jonathan Pryce (after much persuasion) as Fagin, Sally Dexter as Nancy, and Miles Anderson as Bill Sikes. Mendes, Pryce and Dexter received Olivier Award nominations for their work on Oliver!.

Film career

In 1999, Mendes made his film directorial debut with American Beauty, starring Kevin Spacey. He had been approached by Steven Spielberg, who was impressed by his productions of Oliver! and Cabaret. The film grossed $356.3 million worldwide. The film won the Golden Globe Award, the BAFTA Award and the Academy Award for Best Picture. Mendes won the Golden Globe Award, Directors Guild of America Award, and the Academy Award for Best Director, becoming the sixth director to earn the Academy Award for his feature film debut.

Mendes's second film, in 2002, was Road to Perdition, which grossed US$181 million. As of October 2023, the aggregate review score on Rotten Tomatoes is currently 81%; critics praised Paul Newman for his performance. The film was nominated for six Academy Awards, including Best Supporting Actor for Newman; it won for Best Cinematography.

In 2003, Mendes established Neal Street Productions, a film, television and theatre production company he would use to finance much of his later work. In 2005, Mendes directed the war film Jarhead, in association with his production company Neal Street Productions. The film received mixed reviews, with a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 61%, and a gross revenue of US$96.9 million worldwide. The film focused on the boredom and other psychological challenges of wartime.

In 2008, Mendes directed Revolutionary Road, starring his then-wife, Kate Winslet, along with Leonardo DiCaprio and Kathy Bates. In a January 2009 interview, Mendes commented, about directing his wife for the first time: "I would open my eyes in the morning and there Kate would be, going, 'Great! You're awake! Now let's talk about the second scene.'" Mendes's comedy-drama Away We Go opened the 2009 Edinburgh International Film Festival. The film follows a couple (John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph) searching North America for the perfect community in which to settle down and start a family. The film was well received by critics but performed poorly at the box office.

In 2010, Mendes co-produced a critically acclaimed documentary film Out of the Ashes that deals with cricket in Afghanistan. On 5 January 2010, news broke that Mendes was employed to direct the 23rd Eon Productions instalment of the James Bond franchise. The film, Skyfall, was subsequently released on 26 October 2012, to coincide with the 50th anniversary of the Bond films. Mendes had been employed as a consultant on the film when it was in pre-production, and had remained attached to the project during the financial troubles of MGM. The film was a major critical and commercial success, becoming the 14th film to gross over $1 billion worldwide.

Filmmaking style and techniques

Influences

Mendes has listed Stanley Kubrick, the Coen brothers, Alfred Hitchcock, Martin Scorsese, Wim Wenders, Howard Davies, David Lynch, Peter Brook, Ingmar Bergman, Orson Welles, and Francis Ford Coppola as amongst his cinematic and theatrical influences. He cited Paris, Texas, Repo Man and True Stories as three "seminal film moments" that influenced his stage and film career, and is also heavily influenced by British comedy acts such as Monty Python, The Goons, Tommy Cooper, and Morecambe and Wise.

Style and themes

Much of his film directing techniques were informed by his background in theatre, which consisted of meticulous attention to detail, slow pacing, pictorialist composition, close collaborations with actors, use of tranquil atmosphere, periods of wordless visual storytelling, and long takes. His first two films established a reputation for him of utilising a visual style that was considered formalist and classical, preferring to shoot and stage scenes with theatrical-style mise-en-scene and use of chiaroscuro. His third film, Jarhead, which would mark the first of a long-time collaboration between him and cinematographer Roger Deakins, served as a stylistic departure from the former two films as it relied heavily on a grittier feel with improvised dialogue and looser handheld close-ups. Despite this, it shared a similar attention to detail and flawed characters.

Although he has tackled a variety of genres over the course of his career, Mendes has frequently explored themes of family and isolation in his work. The protagonists in his films are realistically flawed and struggle to fit in a world that is hostile towards them, a theme that was initially established in American Beauty and would be further explored in his subsequent films, including Skyfall and Spectre, and 1917. The exploration of such themes are owed to his early childhood experiences, particularly with his parents, with the most direct being his grandfather and his mother serving as inspirations for the characters of Schofield and Hilary Small in 1917 and Empire of Light, respectively.

In an interview in 2014, Mendes explained his reasoning for exploring such themes: "If you are doing a play or a film, you have to have a secret way in if you are directing it. Sometimes it’s big things. American Beauty, for me, was about my adolescence. Road to Perdition was about my childhood. Skyfall was about middle-age and mortality."

Personal life

Mendes has been married to British Classical musician Alison Balsom since 5 January 2017. Their daughter was born in September 2017. Mendes has a son, actor Joe Anders, born on 22 December 2003, from his marriage to actress Kate Winslet, and a stepson born in March 2010 from Balsom's previous relationship with conductor Edward Gardner. Mendes had a stepdaughter, Mia Threapleton, from Winslet's first marriage to filmmaker Jim Threapleton.

Mendes was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2020 New Years Honours List for services to drama.

In 2009, Mendes signed a petition in support of film director Roman Polanski, calling for his release after Polanski was arrested in Switzerland in relation to his 1977 charge for drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl.

Favourite films

In 2012, Mendes participated in the Sight & Sound film polls of that year. Held every ten years to select the greatest films of all time, contemporary directors were asked to select ten films of their choice.

Works

Film

Executive producer

Starter for 10 (2006)

The Kite Runner (2007)

Out of the Ashes (2010) (Documentary)

Blood (2012)

Television

Executive producer

Awards and honours

Directed Academy Award performances

Under Mendes' direction, these actors have received Academy Award nominations (and wins) for their performances in their respective roles.