![]() ![]() Several years ago, he’d written a a much more “directly autobiographical screenplay” but it was solitary, he said. ”My mother never worked in a cinema … but her story and certain scenes from her life are scenes that I lived through,” he told us. He stressed, however, that Colman’s Hilary is not his mother. So a lot of these things are from a deep personal place,” he told Deadline. ![]() ”Look, I’m an only child and I grew up with my mother and my mother suffered from mental issues. Several years ago in a New Yorker interview, Mendes discussed the impact of mental illness on his family growing up. It’s like having a Ferrari …she’s like a Ferrari dressed like a Mini, you know what I mean? Then you turn the key in the engine and this engine just roars into life. ”She doesn’t love rehearsing but she wants to know everything you can possibly give her, so you tell her stories, history, memories, thoughts and it all goes in and she soaks it up. Mendes said Colman is one of those actors who’ll be talking right up until you say “Action, and there it is,“ he marveled. It’s a scorcher of a film, absolutely one of the year’s best, with a star-making performance by Ward and an unbelievably sublime Colman locating the fragility of a lonely woman searching for, and hoping, that the embrace of her young colleague will allow her safe passage through the tremors and terrors of mental illness. Mendes has used the illusion of film to comment on reality. There are three central themes: love, race and cinema. “That’s the thing that links all the different threads of the movie,” Mendes explained. Mendes had the art department etch on a wall at the cinema, the Empire of the title, the line “Find Where Light In Darkness Lies,” taken from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost. ![]() Set in Margate, a seaside resort on the north coast of Kent in the southeastern part of the UK, in the early 1980s, the film takes place in a sea-front movie theater that’s seen better days Mendes is just as interested in what’s showing- Chariots of Fire is on its way, for starters- as he is in the lives of those who toil there a motley crew that includes fragile Hilary (Colman), the middle-aged deputy manager, and Stephen (Micheal Ward), a handsome 19-year-old Black youth who collects ticket stubs and keeps an eye on the confectionery stand. (L-R) Roger Deakins, Sam Mendes, Olivia Colman, Micheal Ward and Tanya Moodie at Toronto Chris Chapman for Deadline On Monday, the Neal Street Productions (founded by Mendes, Pippa Harris and Caro Newling) and Searchlight Pictures production played at the Toronto Film Festival. When I got off the Zoom I knew which way to go with this and so I completed it.”Įmpire of Light received it’s world premiere at the Telluride Film Festival over Labor Day weekend. “That’s all I needed, I just needed a blast of her really. The conversation with Colman did the trick. It’s frightening I’ve lived through it too, to a degree, but not as a famous face.” I think she had to recalibrate her life as people do when they become that level of famous. She’s not an extravert, not an exhibitionist she’s very guarded actually. “She’s very friendly, always delightful to see her, but there’s something held back, too. ”Olivia’s like Judi in that she’s accessible and yet also slightly mysterious,” Mendes told Deadline during a rare one-on-one interview to discuss Empire of Light. When he was 24, he’d directed Dench in a production of T he Cherry Orchard at the Chichester Festival Theatre in West Sussex, and there was the small matter of him directing her in two James Bond films, Spectre and Skyfall, where she played M he had her bumped off in the latter. Mendes told us that Colman reminded him a bit of Judi Dench. 'Empire Of Light' Telluride Review: Olivia Colman Is Incandescent In Sam Mendes' Touching Ode To Movie Theaters ![]()
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