When film and theater director Sam Mendes first pitched the screenplay for “Empire of Light” to his regular collaborator, cinematographer Roger Deakins, the topic of how to portray the bittersweet personal story didn’t come up, he says.
Instead, it was all about whether Dickens felt something for the central characters, Hillary (Olivia Colman) and Stephen (Michelle Ward), two lost souls brought together by a gorgeous movie mansion in an English seaside town, and whether he wanted them to tell their story. Mendez says.
“For Roger,” he explains, speaking at the Camerimage International Film Festival in Toruń, Poland, “it’s not like every movie has to be ‘1917’ or ‘Skyfall.’ He wants the movie to be good. That’s why he had such Brilliant career – he’s worked on so many different levels. It’s not driven by the visual – it’s driven by the spirit of the film.”
That’s something aplenty in Empire of Light, based on the critical and audience acclaim the film has won since it premiered at the Telluride Film Festival in September.
Mendes’ original screenplay is the relatively simple story of a manager of the Empire Cinema, a place far from its former glory, and her love affair with a young man, a newly appointed ticket-taker, who confronts a world of racism, of which he has few clues. Around.
And while Mendes is celebrated for his brilliant career, making his directorial debut with “American Beauty” in 1999, following up with “Road to Perdition,” “Revolutionary Road” and “1917,” which he co-wrote, screenwriting is something he admits. He doesn’t always feel confident.
“It was very fast,” he says of the writing process. “But on one level I’ve been thinking about it my whole life. It has to do with my mother and my childhood and my teenage years. And I felt like it was all something I had to do rather than something I decided to do.”
However, Mendes felt he needed a factual review of his story before committing to it. “Now if Roger had said, ‘I’m not sure’ and my agent and my wife, I wouldn’t have made the movie. Because I really can’t figure it out. I still can’t tell on some level. Because when you write it…it’s not the strategic part of the brain that makes the choices.” You don’t think twice, “Do I have time to do a big movie, or this movie or that?”
Mendes, who was born in the south-east of England, knows very well the world of British small-town culture in the 1980s, he says, but somehow over the years, as he tries to tell the story of his mother, who struggled with mental health issues, he never really got along — until he got into the situation. The story is set in the weird, faded world of Empire.
Roger said when he read it he expected to read something different. And I said, I know that’s not what you were expecting but I want to do this instead — and I gave him the whole script. And he was like, ‘Wow.’
It was as if the whole story was waiting for the moment when it was ready to unfold, Mendes says. “She came to me and just announced herself. This has never happened to me before.”
That’s when he brought together Hillary, “who relies in a very strong way on my mother,” and Stephen, “who in many ways is going through the things I’ve been through — I’m not black, I haven’t gone through racism — but the look of the political landscape at the time, the music, the movies , and you bring it together into this centrifugal force, cinema. That works—and I started writing it.”
When it came time to plot the visuals for Empire of Light, which makes cinema magic potent, while also recreating the turbulent era of Mendes’ youth, Dickens says he was able to easily imagine the unique look of the film.
“You talk about it. You sit in a room. He sees the pictures very quickly. You have to go to the site together. Some of the best conversations I had with Roger were sitting on a bench on the site, staring out to sea. We sat on a bus shelter looking out at the beach at Margate.” .
He says that at that moment, they both started to feel the power of the place. “T.S. Eliot wrote ‘The Waste Land’ here: ‘On the sands of Margate, I can’t connect anything with anything,’” Mendes recalled. “JMW Turner painted his wonderful landscapes here because he said it contained the most beautiful skies in Europe.”
Stunning visuals aren’t the goal when collaborating with Dickens, Mendes says. “The joy of working with him is that you don’t feel like he’s looking for ways to show off at all. He’s just looking for the best solution to the scene to express it in some way. And if that solution is so simple and natural, that’s what we’ll go for.”
Recalling Dickens’ work with the Coen brothers on films such as “Fargo,” he adds: “If you’ve read that screenplay, it wouldn’t be like you’d say there are wonderful visual opportunities there. Nor is it a particularly expressive film. But the clarity of his vision, the idiosyncrasy Its atmosphere, created by someone who just says, “I love this movie — I’m going to commit to whatever it takes to make it work.”
The main theme of “Empire,” the quasi-superpower of movies, is something most people feel deeply in their post-COVID days, and Mendes admits he’s gained a new appreciation for the communal experience on the big screen during lockdown — and a dream of returning to “these secular rituals.”
“It’s as if we need a destination, some kind of gathering. It’s really important, that kind of sharing enthusiasm and love — sitting in the movies again.”
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