When we meet, in an hotel overlooking Waterloo Bridge and the National Theatre
whose artistic director he might have become, Sam Mendes is in cricket mode.
Legend says that he got his first job, directing at Chichester, not only
because he’d been staging undergraduate plays at Cambridge but was also the
ace batsman needed to beat the theatre’s great rival, the RSC. And now he’s
preparing his 43-year-old torso to play for Shipton, the Cotswolds side
that, thanks largely to the quickfire 50 he made in the semis, reached the
national village cricket final in 1997 but, sadly, lost.
Mendes has won awards galore and, though he now spends most of the year in New
York, is as highly regarded as any British director, either of films or
plays. But, like his friend Harold Pinter, who declared cricket more
important than sex, he has his priorities. “You haven’t lived until you’ve
heard your name announced as you’re walking down the steps of the pavilion
at Lord’s,” he says. “Unfortunately, I batted horribly. I still have a photo
on my wall of me losing my middle stump at Lord’s, which to me is as cool as
hitting a six there.”
A photo celebrating defeat? Isn’t that painfully British? Mendes gives his
trademark roar of laughter. He’s more confident than the young man I met 16
years ago, when he was about to transform the tiny Donmar into the pacemaker
in the ailing heart of the West End, but he’s equally un-assuming, affable
and, yes, English. Living in New York is fine, but he misses British
newspapers, British telly, British theatre. Certainly, you’d never guess
that the chunky, chortling bloke with the whitening beard has become an
international celebrity, thanks largely to his marriage to the actress he
recently directed in Revolutionary Road, Kate Winslet, but also to his own
straight bat and the big hitting that’s about to bring us the Bridge
Project.
This ambitious enterprise gets its name from the bridge that it is building
not only between New York and London but also between casts who are seldom
able to perform together. Productions are cast with a 50-50 split between
British and North American actors and spend a near-equal time in each
other’s theatre capitals. Mendes’s opening revivals of Chekhov’s The Cherry
Orchard and Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale have already played at the
Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) and now are bringing Simon Russell Beale,
Ethan Hawke, Sinéad Cusack and others to our own Old Vic. Next year, the
pairing will be The Three Sisters and As You Like It, and in 2011 there will
be two plays by different authors, both perhaps featuring the Vic’s
director, Kevin Spacey.
Mendes has often directed Russell Beale, who is playing Shakespeare’s Leontes
and Chekhov’s Lopakhin, and remains close to Spacey, the lead in his
Oscar-winning American Beauty. “The Old Vic is a good match for BAM and the
link-up with Kevin wonderful, especially as we’ve often said we must do
something together onstage one day. It’s as if we’ve swapped lives, with him
an American in London and me a Brit in New York. And hats off to him. He’s
taken some serious body-blows and I must confess that I couldn’t see him
sticking with a big theatre that’s almost impossible to fund. And he’s come
out the other side with some amazing shows.”
One of the plays that could prove amazing, and is bringing Mendes back to the
London stage after seven years, is familiar to him. His first West End
production, in 1989, was The Cherry Orchard, with Judi Dench in the lead.
But then he was 24. “I don’t think I understood it very well. I knew I
didn’t want to be what I call fluttering chintz curtain Chekhov. I didn’t
want it to be old-fashioned and sentimental, equating the English with the
Russian aristocracy, but I didn’t have any serious insight into the play.
Now I’m returning to it with a bit more life experience.
“That’s what links it with The Winter’s Tale: the idea of coming to terms with
your past, the loss of childhood, and the loss of children that haunts both
plays. That’s the thing we most live in fear of. I now know what it feels
like to hold a baby, your own child, in your arms. It makes a huge
difference and you direct The Winter’s Tale in particular differently.”
Mendes is clearly as devoted to his and Winslet’s five-year-old son, Joe, as
Leontes is to Mamillius. In New York they play football in the park, watch
it together on television and proudly support Arsenal. Indeed, it was to
devote himself to his and Winslet’s family — meaning his stepdaughter,
eight-year-old Mia, and Joe — that he virtually withdrew from both screen
and stage after leaving the Donmar in 2002.
The ten years he spent there were workaholic years. They produced much of his
best work: Sondheim’s Assassins, which had proved too daring for Broadway;
Cabaret with Alan Cumming; Brian Friel’s Translations; The Blue Room, with
Nicole Kidman vamping my susceptible colleagues with her theatrical Viagra;
the Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night that went on to BAM in 2003 as a foretaste
of the Bridge pairings.
Not everything was a success, of course. A satiric musical called The Fix left
most of us with long faces. David Mamet and Michael Frayn are both fine
dramatists, but Mamet’s Boston Marriage was a downer and, Mendes recalls,
the second night of Frayn’s odd, difficult Here attracted an audience of
only three. Yet this was also an era in which Zoë Wanamaker, Stephen
Dillane, Rachel Weisz and Adrian Lester triumphed in (respectively) Electra,
Stoppard’s The Real Thing, Coward’s Design for Living and Sondheim’s
Company. “But I don’t think I had supper at home for four years. There’s a
line in Company that says, ‘This is my apartment, it’s where I pass through
on the way to somewhere else’. That was me.”
The triumph of American Beauty in 1999 wasn’t an unmixed blessing, either.
True, I recall running into Mendes soon afterwards and saying that he must
be bored with being congratulated, only for him to reply with a grin that it
was funny how much such boredom one could tolerate.
“But I suddenly felt the world was watching me rather than a small theatrical
elite,” he admits. “It sort of freaked me out. I felt very lonely and
isolated. I didn’t have a partner for a couple of years. I became
suspicious. Continued from page 1 But then came Kate, marriage in 2003, the
move to New York and a more relaxed, happier Mendes. In the four years that
ended with Joe starting school and the release of Revolutionary Road, he
confined himself to directing the film Jarhead and staging David Hare’s Iraq
play, The Vertical Hour, on Broadway. And when Trevor Nunn left the National
he didn’t seek a top job that he thought, and still thinks, ideally suited
to Nicholas Hytner: “It was clear I was a contender, but the last thing I
wanted was to take on this vast building. I wanted a life.”
One day, he says, he’d like to create a new theatre from scratch. He’ll also
respond positively (“Oh God yes, absolutely!”) to any invitation to direct
at the National, RSC or Donmar. But back then he was liberated to accompany
Winslet and the children to Germany when she made The Reader. There, he was
content to stay in the background, offering support and occasional advice to
an actress he regards as “a force of nature”. “I don’t fully understand
where it all comes from,” he says. “Kate doesn’t over-analyse, she’s a doer.
When she turns on the ignition it’s ‘Get out of the way’. It’s a powerful,
deep talent I’ve seen in few other people, but then she does come from a
line of wonderful British actresses: Judi Dench, Helen Mirren, Zoë
Wanamaker. They’re not just movie stars, they’re not beauty alone, they’re
not about cosmetic surgery, they’re just delivering the goods.”
But Kate and Sam are now a famous partnership. Celebrity means that Winslet in
particular sometimes gets goggled at or even approached in the street,
though more in London than in New York, where (says her husband) sports
heroes are the major draws. “But that’s a small price to pay. And we don’t
go to premieres when they’re not our own or enjoy big visible parties or
galas at the Met. Most of the time it’s just home, family, friends, school,
people who see Kate as a mum rather than an actress.”
Directing her in Revolutionary Road, which involves the slow death of a
marriage, was, he says, hard and not hard. He already knew what buttons to
push in order to bring out Winslet’s emotional best, but standing beside the
camera during her most intimate scenes with Leonardo DiCaprio was
inhibiting. “When you’re working with your onscreen husband you don’t want
your actual husband there. So she smiled and said, ‘Why don’t you bugger off
round the corner?’ So I’d take myself off and watch on a monitor.”
So will Mendes direct her again? “We’d like that, but what’s right for her
isn’t necessarily right for me and vice versa. The worst thing you can do is
bend yourself into a pretzel for another person because you feel you are
doing them a favour.” Recently, they discussed her return to the stage,
maybe in Pinter’s Betrayal: “She looked at it and said, ‘It’s a masterpiece
but a play about infidelity and I’ve just done Little Children and
Revolutionary Road, movies about middle-class marriages in crisis’. She
didn’t even get to the end of the sentence before I said, ‘No, do something
else’.” That “something else” remains undecided.
To the obvious question, whether he prefers making movies or staging plays,
Mendes replies that after finishing the one he longs to return to the other
and hopes to maintain a career in both forms. With films, this means having
a central character interesting enough to justify a whole year of his
creative life. “All my films focus on someone who’s lost and trying to find
a way through. They’re all loosely dealing with the question, how do we
live?”
That’s the case, he says, whether he’s making a gangster film (Road to
Perdition), a war film (Jarhead) or a road comedy (the impending Away We
Go). Or American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, two films about the subjects
that fascinate him — “family dynamics, dysfunctional families, love affairs,
partnerships, marriages, whatever”. Nor is it an accident that his two most
masterly movies are set in suburbia, not a place that Mendes, who spent his
early years on an Oxford estate with his professor father and writer mother,
recalls with affection: “It looked all right from the outside. It was all
very uniform and tidy, but on the inside there were a lot of very strange,
unhappy people. There was even one who climbed to the top of an electricity
pylon and threw himself on the wires.”
American Beauty was his first film and, when he shot it, he was so ignorant of
the process that he nervously asked his cameraman when he should shout
“action” and forgot to say “cut”. But his awkwardness has given way to
technical know-how and artistic assurance. And one reason for his screen
success is surely that he’s brought his stage experience to the process.
But none of the actors in the Bridge Project can have been surprised by the
unusually meticulous methods Mendes used when he was trying to fulfil what
he’s always seen as a stage director’s prime duty, not to parade his ego but
to honour and penetrate a dramatist’s text. There was diffidence in the
rehearsal room, especially from American actors initially intimidated by
their English counterparts’ greater experience of Shakespeare. Ethan Hawke,
Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale, was reported to have jokily remarked, “I
don’t know what the f*** I’m doing” — but then the British were clearly
impressed by the realistic Chekhovian performances that, thanks to
Stanislavskian traditions and the Method, come with being an American actor.
Will the mix of accents prove a problem? With The Winter’s Tale surely not,
because Leontes’s Sicilia is English and Polyxenes’s Bohemia is American.
And The Cherry Orchard? Well, Mendes says there was a frisson of about ten
seconds from Brooklyn audiences when Tobias Segal’s Yepihodov came in to
join Russell Beale’s Lopakhin, but then they accepted the convention. As far
as Mendes is concerned, styles congealed, friendships blossomed. “I didn’t
realise the degree to which I’d missed tackling classical plays until I was
back in the rehearsal room . . . I could be at home, drop off the kids at
school, then work with some of my favourite actors. What’s not to like?”
The Cherry Orchard, The Winter’s Tale, the Old Vic, London SE1, from June 9
until Aug 15; 0870 0606628, www.oldvic theatre.com
