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Director Sam Mendes talks to In Focus about – among other things – actors, Oscars, Kubrick and the myth of three-act structure.

by Mike Russell

What does the man who’s won it all do for an encore?
Sam Mendes had to face that (admittedly privileged) dark night of the soul a few short years ago, after snagging a Best Director Oscar for his work on 1999’s “American Beauty.” Although he’d earned a young-upstart reputation in the legitimate theater – directing his first Royal Shakespeare Company play at age 25, followed by such well-received hits as a revival of “Cabaret” – “American Beauty” marked Mendes’ first foray behind a movie camera.

“I’d lived through a whole lot of Academy Awards, and then the penny dropped,” he says, laughing. “It’s weird. You think you’re going to celebrate – but in actual fact, all you’re worrying about is not falling over and not bursting into tears and remembering everyone’s name.”

Luckily, Mendes was in a position to get some expert advice. “I bumped into Matt Damon like a week before the Oscars, and he said, ‘You’re gonna win,’” Mendes recalls. “And I said, ‘No no no.’ And he said, ‘Look, come on – you are gonna win. So prepare yourself.’ And I said, ‘What do you mean? What was it like when you won?’ And he said, ‘Well, it didn’t sink in for 18 months.’ And I’m really glad that he said that – because it was true of me, as well.”

Mendes ultimately decided against a James Cameron-length hiatus – instead directing Tom Hanks and Paul Newman against type (as a hit man and Irish crime lord, respectively) in the 1930s gangster epic “Road to Perdition.” Although the film’s based on a blood-soaked “graphic novel” (i.e., a comic book with better binding) written by pulp novelist Max Allan Collins, Mendes brought a more measured approach to David Self’s script, collaborating once again with legendary cinematographer Conrad Hall. The resulting film – a bleak, moody, thoughtfully paced revenge tale – is considered a dark horse in this year’s Oscar race.

Having cracked his “sophomore jinx,” Mendes is entering the new year in a reflective mood. In Focus caught up with him during a recent stop in Los Angeles – where he held forth on Oscar night, “Road to Perdition,” how he directs actors, and his love for a little musical called “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.”

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I. RECOVERING
from OSCAR

So that moment where you win the Best Director Oscar and you’re stepping up to the podium and you’re speaking to the world — what was that moment like? [Pause] This is my “Entertainment Tonight” question.
Yeah, exactly…. It’s weird, actually — I’m staying in the same hotel room I was staying in the night that I won it; I get blasts of memory when I come back in here. I spent that whole period clinging to some sense of reality by my fingertips. And that moment, all I could think of, to be honest with you, was, “Am I going to remember everybody?”

Well, that makes perfect sense. There’s a long history of grand-mal meltdowns during Oscar acceptance speeches.
Yeah, exactly. [Laughs]

How long is it after you win that the honeymoon’s over, as it were — until you feel like your old self again?

It took me about six months to come down. It’s the iconography of it that’s difficult to deal with. You can de-mystify it — say, “Look, it’s just an award — and it just happened to be that the people voting that year liked your movie better than the other four, and it’s not a big deal.” But it’s the history of it that freaks you out, obviously. And I suppose it froze me for about six months in terms of, “What am I going to do next? Do I just take a huge break and take a long time before my second movie? Do I dive straight in? Do I go back to the theater for a while?”

And in the end, what I decided is that I needed to work, and get back in the environment that I was used to. And so I did a play back in my theater. And that helped hugely — because it just immediately gives you something to focus on that you know and love; it’s very normalizing.

While I was doing that play, I’d been reading everything that was being sent to me. “Road to Perdition” turned up. And the moment you have a project to focus on, your nerves kind of fade away, and you stop second-guessing yourself. The moment you’re engaged in a movie, you have to take it day-by-day — from “Who’s going to be in it?” to “Who’s going to shoot it?” to “Who’s going to design it?” to “Who’s going to edit it?” And every day brings 20 to 30 more decisions all the way through the process. It’s odd to say, but you go into a tunnel, and that’s part of the enjoyment, in a way — part of the deep satisfaction of making a film is that that tunnel utterly cuts out all other focus, and it’s completely involving and completely obsessive. And that’s the perverse pleasure of making films — because you have to lose yourself in it; otherwise, it’s not going to work.

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II. LOST in
AMERICANA

Speaking of iconography: Both “American Beauty” and “Road to Perdition” are deeply fascinated with American culture. One sort of satirizes the iconography of suburbia, and the other dives into this sort of classic Americana. Where does that fascination come from?

For one thing, it is unquestionably a fascination bred in a young boy in England by American movies. You know, all the great movies I was obsessed with when I was a kid and when I was at university were American. When you’re making “American Beauty,” you can’t be unaware of “The Graduate”; you can’t be unaware of “Once Upon a Time in America” when you’re making “Road to Perdition.”

And coming from a theater tradition, where you’re used to reviving a play that’s been done many times before.… If you do “Richard III,” you can’t be unaware of Olivier’s “Richard III” or Ian McKellen’s “Richard III.” It encourages a kind of understanding of the iconography of the role — or, in this case, of the movies — and the twisting of it so it catches the light in a different way.

But part of it is also that I’ve been attracted in those two movies to a kind of big-scale storytelling — to fables, really. Both of them are kind of fables set in America. And to tell a story that needs the scale of myth, you need a country that has a mythic dimension — and America does. Which is why so many of the great American movies are mythic in scale — whether they be Westerns or gangster movies or contemporary films.

I think so many movies set in the contemporary world may be wonderful films, but they fail to find a large-scale visual correlative for the script. I think that’s something that attracted me to “American Beauty” as a script — that it was so visually articulate, and that it was a movie I felt needed to be told in big pictures rather than small pictures.

Now, “American Beauty” satirized America in a way that “Road to Perdition” does not.

Yeah. I don’t disagree with that. I think it’s my nostalgia for the ’30s across ALL cultures. You know, I spent a long time directing “Cabaret,” which is set in the same period. I just think it’s one of the most incredible periods of the past 2,000 years, let alone the last century. And the beauty of the Midwest is always something that I’ve found incredibly moving.

I’d be lying if I didn’t say that one of the things that really attracted me to “Road to Perdition” was the canvas, and the opportunity to shoot on those bleak landscapes under those slate-gray skies, and to try and re-create a version of Chicago in the ’30s There’s something incredibly moving about finding a period where father and son can kind of be cut adrift and lose themselves. The concept of “losing oneself” is kind of difficult to pull off in a contemporary film — although, you know, movies like “Paris, Texas” manage to achieve it in a sense, where people just disappear.

If you think about it, there’s very little cinema set in the bleak Midwest, in winter. I can’t think of any major film.

“Fargo.” But that’s about it.

Yes, that’s true; that’s a real snow-bound landscape — and what a magnificent film. In terms of the sense of reality — of cinematography not romanticizing the landscape — “Bonnie and Clyde” is a good example. And I suppose, in a romantic way, “Paper Moon,” with its black-and-white translation of that period. So there are examples where you really feel the poetry of the landscape is a character in the movie. That’s what I wanted to achieve in “Road to Perdition” — where you get a feeling that the atmosphere of the locations almost seeps through the skins of the characters. And one of the reasons that the characters in this film are so kind of monosyllabic and silent in that film is because they’re frozen like the landscape.

You cut dialogue out of “Road to Perdition” during editing.
Yeah, I took a lot of dialogue out.

But going back to your earlier question: In addition to the film influences, there are lots of PAINTER influences on both films. With “American Beauty,” yes, it was in part Norman Rockwell, but it was mainly Magritte who was the influence for the visual style of the film — in terms of the fantasies and the rose petals and, you know, the blank surfaces and the simplicity of the compositions. That’s very Magritte-like, and a lot of my picture-reference for the movie, and the things I handed to Conrad [Hall, cinematographer], were Magritte and some contemporary photography.

Whereas, for “Road to Perdition,” it was Hopper. Edward Hopper is equally stark and, while he’s actually very complex compositionally, he appears to be simple. So both films are kind of combinations, in a sense, of American iconography and European/American art.

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III. ‘ROAD TO PERDITION’: from ‘PULPY’ COMIC
to SERIOUS FILM

I did have a couple of questions about Conrad Hall. [PAUSE; then, in AWED TONES] Hoo boy, you know?
Well, yeah. Exactly. [Laughs]

Imagining him reading the comic book of “Road to Perdition” is kind of an amusing image.
[Laughs] I don’t think he ever read the comic book, actually. I think he read the script, and that was enough violence for him.

Because we got the script first, the images came to me from David Self’s script rather than from the graphic novel. So the dynamism and more conventional, action-packed, energized drawing that happens in the comic book was not, for me, what I had in my mind. I had in mind something much more elegiac, and an epic, and not so concerned with drumming up energy. I felt the heart of it was slightly less pulpy than the graphic novel, and it had these great ideas buried in it.

So that’s how I pitched Conrad the movie. Because he doesn’t do violent movies on the whole — he hasn’t done them and he’s very suspicious of them, as is Paul Newman. And so both of them kind of needed to have it explained by me what I thought the movie was about, and why I thought it wasn’t just a kind of bloodfest — even though there are so many dead bodies — and how each death, I felt, was going to be shot. And Conrad knew what I was going for. He was fully on board.

I have a friend who’s a film critic, and he pointed out to me that pretty much every murder in “Road to Perdition” involves water in some way.
That’s right, yeah. He’s a very observant critic. [Laughs]

You know, it was a weird thing; sometimes, when you’re working on a film, it starts speaking back to you. And I did a lot of research — because I think, doing period films, you’re desperate for those nuggets of detail that are not received clichés through movies. Because all of our shared knowledge about the ’30s, if you think about it — with the exception of a few bits of black-and-white film of the time — are from movies. So you have to get beyond that and do your research.

And one of our bits of research was into wakes — and we discovered that they used to keep the dead bodies on ice to keep them from rotting before the burial. And the boy’s first image of death is the corpse at the wake, and it’s accompanied by water. The movie starts with the sound of water, with the sound of lapping waves, which came in the cutting — that wasn’t in the script — and it ends that way, too, with the boy on the beach.

I kind of felt the characters were withstanding — that the dam was always about to burst, that at the beginning of the movie there was a sense of unnatural stasis, of paralysis, where they thought they were living a normal life, but really they were about to get wiped away by fate. And if you tamper with life and death, it will finally come back to get you. It’s a very fatalistic movie in that respect.

If you think about how the movie starts, it starts on the beach, with the boy looking out on the water. If you think about it as a flashback, every character in the movie is dead already — it’s a movie populated entirely by ghosts. That informed a lot of the way we treated sound in the film — that sense of death lying in wait for everybody, and everybody somehow knowing it, from Paul Newman’s character to Tom Hanks’ character — that finally it’s going to take them, no matter how hard they try.

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IV. PAUL NEWMAN and the FAINTING WOMAN; TOM HANKS and the CAREER STRETCH

Paul Newman was quoted in an interview just before making “Road to Perdition” saying he was only going to do one more film and then he was going to retire. And so “Road to Perdition” is apparently his final performance.
Yeah. [Laughs]

Do you think that’s true?
I don’t think so. I think Paul’s got a few more performances in him. For a start, he’s fit as a fiddle — mentally and physically — so I don’t see why he would stop. And I think he’s not in the business of working for anything other than his own pleasure and his own reward — spiritually, not financially. And so if someone sends him a role that’s wonderful and that he can’t turn down, then I’m sure he’ll do it — but he’ll only do it if it turns him on.

He’s incredible. I mean, he’s still racing cars; he still has his team, and he still has his Hole In The Wall camps, and he still has his food, and he still does all this work for charity, and he still has his kids and his grandkids…. I mean, it’s a great American life, in truth — and only one element of it is his public persona, which is as an actor.

But what’s amazing is that I really felt he was doing this movie to do something that he really hadn’t done before. It’s inspiring. And to have him on the film set alone made us all feel like kings — just his presence, really.

You mentioned in an interview once that Newman rode you pretty hard in the early meetings when you were wooing him to make the picture.
Yeah, well, it wasn’t an unpleasant experience in the slightest. It was pretty clear to me what the agenda was before I even walked in the room: I was coming to persuade Paul Newman to do a movie, and he’s not going to do many more movies. [Laughs] And I thought, “He has the right to ask anything he wants” — and he just wanted to know, “What’s the movie about? And how are you going to make it? And what’s it going to look like? And who else is going to be in it? And what’s this scene about and what’s that scene about? And could this line be changed to that?” And, you know, we ranged over every topic.

And at the end of those meetings, we already had a relationship — so rehearsing was a pleasure, and then shooting felt like the most natural thing in the world, and it was completely un-tense, because we’d done so much talking about it beforehand. But you know, he’s like me — he comes from the theater and he likes to rehearse; he’s made to feel more comfortable by rehearsing.

But yeah — there were a couple of moments when I walked in there and thought, “What on earth am I doing here?! [Laughs] He can’t possibly want to do this!” But he’s very good at defusing any sense of his own iconography. But frankly, it’s quite difficult to explain to Paul Newman why you want to use Paul Newman; it’s like, “Well, it’s because you’re a great actor.” What else are you supposed to say?

You’ve said a woman actually fainted in Newman’s presence on your set. They don’t even make star power like that any more.
I know, I know. This woman was in her 60s, and I think she just couldn’t believe it. [Laughs] It literally was her life flashing in front of her eyes. It was magic, really.

And I guess, in a way, you are now to Tom Hanks what Anthony Mann was to Jimmy Stewart.
[Laughs] I take that as a huge compliment — partly because the Anthony Mann/Jimmy Stewart movies are amazing films. But I think that was just good fortune on my part, because Tom was always going to do this kind of little right-turn in his career.

I think at some point he was thinking, “All right — I’m coming into my mid-40s. I’m going to get craggier as I get older. I want to play the Jimmy Stewart parts, but I also want to play the Spencer Tracy parts.” And so I think it was just my good fortune to be around when he was thinking that. And he’s his own man, completely.

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V. ONE WAY TO
WORK WITH ACTORS

In talking about working on “Perdition,” Jude Law said, “Good actors don’t create tension.” Do you try and create a harmonious set?
Oh, completely. I think there are two types of directors: There are adversarial directors and there are allies. And I think that you can choose to be an adversary — you can choose to be a shouter and a driver of people on, and a motivator of people by unbalancing them or disturbing them or pushing them harder than they’ve ever been pushed before or whatever — and that’s not my style. I think it’s a valid style, in a way — but my style is to be an ally.

I try to realize that every actor needs to be talked to in a different way. There are some actors who don’t want you to talk to them for the first three takes — they want to just get up on their feet and do it. Some people don’t want to talk about what they’re going to do before they do it at all — so rehearsals with them are quite practical and you discuss their characters’ backgrounds but you don’t discuss the scene that much. But then some actors, like Paul, want to know everything about the scene, and even want to get up on their feet and stage a scene weeks before you shoot it, so they have it in their head. You know, some actors like to warm up intensely before a shot or a scene and not be disturbed, and some people like to joke about and lark around, and then the cameras roll and they turn on their focus at that point.

You have to be alert to every different way of working, and you have to try and make that into a coherent set, and you have to make sure that one thing doesn’t disturb another — and you have to get what you need out of each performer. Sometimes that’s on the first take, and sometimes it’s on the 30th take.

Take an actor like Daniel Craig, who plays Paul Newman’s son in “Road to Perdition,” and who I think is a wonderful actor. But Danny’s rusty for the first three or four takes, and then hits four takes that are generally brilliant, and then he loses it — by which I mean he overanalyzes what he’s doing.

And I began to learn that when Paul had the scene clearly in his head, in first two takes, maybe three, he’d get it. And he’s not a young man any more — you want to conserve his energy, maybe for a close-up or another scene later on.

Nicholas Meyer said that the way he got a good performance out of William Shatner was to do take after take after take until Shatner was bored — and then Meyer got the take he wanted.
Famously, that’s what Nicholson has been quoted as saying about Kubrick on the set of “The Shining” — the first 10 takes were bad, the next 60 takes were pretty good, and then the last 10 takes, he went insane [Laughs] — and those are the ones Kubrick used! So he filmed until the man went literally mad. There are all sorts of ways of getting a level of performance out of somebody.

Now, you were directing a play at the Royal Shakespeare Company at age 25. What did you learn about directing by going through that forge?
You make some colossal errors when you’re young and you’re directing experienced actors. I mean, I think I was always responding to people’s rhythms and personalities; it’s as important as dictating your terms. I learned storytelling by doing theater — by telling many stories over the course of two-and-a-half hours to an audience without recourse to close-up and without recourse to the moving camera.

And in the end, it is about storytelling. It’s not just about working with actors — it’s about the rhythm of the whole thing. And you can’t help but learn when you work with great plays: You learn about the rhythm of storytelling and you learn about dialogue and you learn about character and you learn about structure.

You know, people waffle on about this Hollywood three-act structure; I’ve done three-act plays and I’ve done five-act plays. I’ve done twenty act plays. [Laughs] You learn about a variety of different ways of telling a story, so I don’t subscribe to that structure thing — although “Road to Perdition” is easier to break into that structure than “American Beauty,” which I think defies all those rules.

Now, on your first Royal Shakespeare Company play, were there any really intimidating, seasoned vets in the play?
Well, weirdly, the RSC show wasn't intimidating to me, because it was people of my generation — it was Ralph Fiennes and Simon Russell Beale and people like that. But before that, I directed Judi Dench and Michael Gough and Ronald Pickup in “The Cherry Orchard,” and yes, it was very intimidating. [Laughs] You know, when you’re that young, you have a kind of blind confidence. If you know how you can fail, you’re probably not going to get out of bed in the morning; but because you don’t know that kind of failure, you get up and you do it with all the confidence of youth. But there were some old hands who must have raised an eyebrow if I got up on the first day of rehearsals and told them how I was going to do it.

I’m imagining being fixed with Judi Dench’s laser stare.
Yeah, although her laser stare is something that is absolutely there as an actress — but as a person, she’s the softest, most gentle…. I’ve never seen her do that in life. She just doesn’t operate like that. It’s amazing how much darkness she can harness onscreen.

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VI. MUSICALS
and MOVIES
(and ‘SOUTH PARK’)

Now, you love your Stephen Sondheim.
I do. He’s an idol.

Any chance you’ll be bringing Sondheim to the big screen? I’ve always thought there was a good movie to be made of his musical “Sweeney Todd.”
I totally agree with you, and it has been talked about. I mean, God knows it’s not easy, and it may take a long, long time, but I’d love to do a movie musical.

I think some of the great movie musicals have not been stage adaptations; I think they’ve been written for the screen. If you think about the great ones — “Singing in the Rain” or whatever — they’re not from the stage, and sometimes there is a great difficulty in transferring a very successful stage musical onto the screen. It’ll be interesting to see how “Chicago” goes, because if people have come round to musicals again with “Moulin Rouge” and “Chicago,” then the door will opened for a few more of them, possibly, on the big screen. And I hope that’s true.

Don’t forget about “South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut.” [Laughs]
Which I’m sure you know is the greatest movie musical of the past 20 years. [Laughs] I mean, Mark Shaiman’s songwriting genius in that is just…. I mean, it’s a great movie. And it’s quite sophisticated, as well; not only does it have its own voice — which is, God knows, these days very difficult — but it does have its own voice largely because of the literal voices of Matt and Trey. I mean, that pastiche of “Les Miz” is one of the great pastiches ever written in the musical theater — and anyone who has any mixed feelings about that show is going to be rolling in the aisles. [Laughs]

So I’m guessing, from your earlier answer, that you’re not planning on taking your stage versions of “Cabaret” or “Gypsy” or “The Blue Room” to the big screen.
No. I think you have to feel that there’s something left to get out of it that you didn’t get out of it as a stage piece. A great stage piece is great because it’s meant for the stage. And also, once I’ve explored a story once, to do it again has always been a struggle for me. I’d rather do something new, you know?

That’s impressive, because I think there’s a feeling today in entertainment circles that it isn’t “real” unless it’s been televised or filmed.
I do think that’s true — and there’s been a lot of pressure to televise “Cabaret.” I mean, “Cabaret”’s an odd case in point, because I think if there hadn’t been one of the great movies made of “Cabaret,” then I would probably consider putting it on television just for posterity. But I think you’ve got to be realistic and say that Bob Fosse’s “Cabaret” is one of the greatest movie musicals ever made — some people would say the greatest — and our “Cabaret”’s completely a stage production. And so I think we’re not going to do that.

Is Fosse’s career one you’ve studied? He was one of the last guys to truly straddle stage and screen as a director.
I’ve studied Fosse partly because I believe he’s such a brilliant filmmaker. I mean, I really do. In terms of raw filmmaking talent, I think he’s incredible — I think he had it all. Well, I think what he didn’t always have was the right material. But in terms of the way he uses the camera and the way in which he cuts — often the case with choreographers, of course because their sense of rhythm and musicality of linking image with music is so refined. And he came to it late in his career, when he was a great choreographer already — much the way Jerome Robbins did when he did “West Side Story.”

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VII. LESTER BURNHAM and DVD GOODIES

A friend of mine wanted me to ask: What’s your take on Kevin Spacey’s “American Beauty” character? Some critics dismiss Lester Burnham as being just another mid-life crisis-having twit; do you see him as having a certain nobility?
[Laughs] You know, I don’t see my opinion as being more valid than anyone else’s opinion — I think once the movie’s out there, he is what people make of him, you know?

One of the reasons I love the character, from the moment I read the script, was that the dividing line between this man — was he just a spoiled child or was he this magnificent modern antihero? I think the movie remains ambivalent about that right through to the end — and the see-saw between the plus and the minus of the character is part of the reason the movie works. Part of you’s supporting him and loving him and part of you’s thinking he’s an absolute idiot. And that’s the joy of it.

I mean, sometimes I've watched the movie and thought, “He’s a contemporary Everyman hero,” and sometimes I’ve thought, “Oh, grow up!” [Laughs] But that’s why the character is interesting, and I think that’s what people sometimes forget — they think, “Oh, we’re meant to love him from the beginning to the end,” and we’re not. Not at all.

And it’s the same with Tom Hanks’ character in “Road to Perdition.” One of the things I’m attracted to is these morally ambivalent central characters who are capable of good and bad, and the story is told in shades of gray. I think one becomes obsessed with, “Well, am I supposed to like this guy or not like him?” And I think the best drama doesn’t offer those easy solutions.

If you could take one actor from the British or American stage and get that person in front of a movie camera — someone who isn’t in front of movie cameras now — who would that actor be?
My longest relationship with an English stage actor is with an actor named Simon Russell Beale, who played Hamlet when it came to BAM, the Brooklyn Academy, and who played Hamlet for the National Theatre maybe three years ago. And he’s in my productions of “Uncle Vanya” and “Twelfth Night,” which are coming to BAM in January, February and March of this year. And he’s one of the greatest actors, if not THE greatest actor, of his generation. But he’s not conventionally “handsome.” And so it’s a little bit like an actor like Peter Stormare, who was in “Fargo”; he was Bergman’s leading actor for 10 years — played Hamlet for Bergman — but because he doesn’t look like a movie star, it’s only in the last five or six years that he’s having a movie career here.

I feel very strongly that, one day — the way Ian McKellen has developed into a movie star here, or Anthony Hopkins, or Ian Holm — Simon will be someone who will surprise people and have a movie career in the second half of his life.

What sort of goodies can we expect on the “Road to Perdition” DVD?
[Laughs] “Goodies.” There’s going to be scratch-and-sniff cards. [Laughs] We’ve got, I think, about 25 minutes’ worth of deleted scenes. We’ve got the commentary, we’ve got the making-of documentary. I mean, it’s not a deluxe, David Fincher-style, two-DVD, do-your-laundry type special package, but it’s got lots of interesting things that were taken out of the film. Some of Conrad’s best work is actually in the deleted scenes, so I think you’re going to see some interesting stuff. And if you’re really in the mood for self-punishment, you can listen to me droning on about it in the background. [Laughs]