Director Sam Mendes

He’s the British director who has brought us some of the most American films, from American Beauty to Revolutionary Road. Sam Mendes is taking on the American landscape once again with his latest film, Away We Go. He took some time to sit down with Buzzine and let us in on his grasp of America and what he is looking for when making a film.

Molly Sullivan: I’m very curious about your apparent penchant for telling such American stories. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that. Do you feel like, as a Brit, you’ve got some outside perspective that makes these stories more interesting?

Sam Mendes: It’s funny for me. Recently, it’s sort of circumstantial because I live in New York, so making movies in America is just easier because I don’t have to leave home. I think when I was at university, my first formative experience with a movie that really inspired me was Paris, Texas. It proved to me that you can tell a mythic story with a contemporary story. It’s one of the reasons why it’s so much easier to make these movies in America — it’s a mythic landscape. Take a movie like this, for example — a road movie across America. It really is a trip into the unknown, even now. I was reading somewhere, between that period when they were searching for Bin Laden, there was an article -– it was an op-ed — saying, “How do you think you’re going to find a man in a cave in Afghanistan when 30 of the top missing persons on the CIA Missing Persons list are in America and you can’t find them? It’s possible for people to still be lost in this country and to be completely invisible. There’s so much of it as you fly over various mountain ranges that’s totally uninhabited, even now. There is this vastness to it that’s very enticing when you’re trying to tell a contemporary story that [has] a scale, and that’s really what I’ve tried to do. It hasn’t been a conscious, “I know what I’m going to do — I’m going to make a career out of it.” Every time I say, “Oh, I’m probably not going to do another one for a while,” then I go and do one, so I’ve learned not to say anything now. I just say I don’t know what I’m going to do next, and I’ll just do the best script that comes along — the one that speaks to me at that time, and that was definitely the case for this one.

MS: How did this script come to you?

SM: I heard someone say that Dave Eggers has written a script. I didn’t know he had written it with his wife (Vendela Vida). I sought it out and read it and loved it and said, “Is anyone doing this?” Someone had been in discussions, and I said, “Well let me call up Dave,” and I went out to lunch with him. I said, “I’d really like to do this,” and he said, “Really?” I said, “Yeah, I would.” So we did and that was it. It was partly when it came to me as well, because it came to me after Revolutionary Road, and it’s such a kind of flip-side of the same coin for me. I felt like, after making three quite dark movies, I wanted to make a movie that better expressed how I actually feel about the world, which is that I am an optimist. I’m really not someone who thinks we’re all doomed and men and women are destined to never be together or to find any happiness; even if you find it like Lester in American Beauty, you’re going to get your brains blown out two seconds later. Let’s make something that doesn’t involve death of the central character. That was why I got drawn to it — that and the fact that it made me laugh a lot, and it was time to do something I felt was very fun.

MS: What about these two characters are you drawn to?

SM: I love the fact that they were completely original creations. They were people I knew, and yet… I think somebody said great writing makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. I felt that I knew them but that I didn’t know them -– that I had met them somehow before. That’s the sign of good writing, just three-dimensional characters with this very effortless sketch in a screenplay — you feel like you know who they are. I also liked the fact that it changed the traditional concept of romantic comedy. I wouldn’t necessarily describe this as a romantic comedy, but it certainly has elements of it. The tradition of the romantic comedy is that boy meets girl and they fall in love, and then there is some crisis, are they going to be apart? and then of course, right at the end, he runs through the rain and they’re together — magically a happy ending. The movie is about two characters facing each other and dealing with falling in love and whether they’re going to stay together. But this movie starts with the premise that these two characters are absolutely one hundred percent in love and are supposed to be together, and Dave and Vendela treat them as a unit and turn them out to face the world, so it’s like a single character. It was very important [to] their chemistry that they fit hand in glove and that they’re a great couple. At the same time, the movie is not about the dynamics between them as much as it is between them as a couple and the rest world and the people they meet. I love that idea of a couple unquestioningly in love and deeper in love, in a way, than at the beginning.

Mendes with 'Away We Go' stars, John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph

MS: What about the exploration of parenthood, because there aren’t too many films that we see that delve into the whole subject matter of parenthood and the different types of parenthood, and helping people coping with the imminent arrival. As a parent yourself, was that appealing to you?

SM: Absolutely. I loved all the parents of comedy because, on the one hand, you feel sort of smugly, “Oh, that’s not me. I can parent better than that.” Then, of course, you meet the people [who] are good parents and there’s something wrong there too. Gradually, you realize, at the end, there’s no such thing as perfect parenting; you just do the best you can. There’s a subtle exploration of different natures of parenting. Even little tiny scenes, like that wonderful scene they wrote — it took place at the resort when that little boy comes up and starts talking about cacti and then reveals that he’s just tried to kill his little sister. That’s the thing — you can’t control kids. However much you think you’ve got it down, you haven’t. That was a very subtle, satirical line that ran through the movie, and I loved all that. Of course, as a parent, I’m constantly in discussion with other parents at school about how you’re going to bring up your children. You run a day-by-day navigation. There are no rules.

MS: Can you talk a little bit about the casting? I think [John] Krasinski and [Maya] Rudolph are both very good, but was there ever any pressure or suggestion to cast bigger movie stars as opposed to people who are primarily known for television?

SM: I can honestly say no because I’ve always been happy with my cast. I never ended up casting someone in any movie that I didn’t want, which makes me quite fortunate. I’ve never been told by a studio, “Cast whoever you want. As long as you’re happy, we’re happy.” I did and they were. They were very hands-off and trusting of me, and of course that makes you want to pay them back in kind and do the best you can. It was very nice to know that my only criterion was that I thought I was going to cast the people that were best in the roles.

Mendes with wife Kate Winslet

MS: What made these two the best?

SM: John had done three or four lines for me in Jarhead before he did The Office and was clearly a talent. When I read it, I thought of him because the description of him in the script is John really, physically. Maya I had admired off of Saturday Night Live, but both of them were doing some sort of thing that they had never done before, so I had to be confident that they could both do that and then be a unit. I met them both and they met each other, and it was clear that they were going to hit it off.

MS: In addition to this being a shift from your previous films in terms of tone, the visual aesthetic is really different and a little more raw, stripped-down. What was your process like in getting the look of it?

SM: It was always clear to me that I needed to make it in a simple, loose way and I didn’t want to adorn it. I didn’t want to make it too detailed, too complicated. I wanted to let people exist and live in the frame of it and move around and hold shots a little longer. But it’s not a million miles away from sections of American Beauty and sections of Jarhead too. I think it’s fair to say that all five of my movies have been made in quite different styles, and that’s something I really have enjoyed and embraced. So, for me, I just wanted it to have a sort of softness –- softness in the light, sort of warmth, and I wanted to be aware of the landscapes all the time behind the characters. I shot widescreen, even though a lot of it takes place in rooms, to just be aware of the beauty of the country as well as the fact that all of these places offer tempting possibilities for a young couple wanting to settle down, but none of them are quite right. Then part of it was just the function that we had no time, we had no money. We had money, but we didn’t have a lot of money, so I needed to shoot fast and I wanted to shoot in a very simple way. Movies influenced by Hal Ashby and those kinds of movies of the ‘70s — that’s the sort of feeling I was going for. It’s funny how he’s coming so much back into fashion now, as a filmmaker influencing other filmmakers, but it’s also interesting how difficult it is to try to do it — how simple he makes it look and how difficult it actually is.

MS: What’s next for you?

SM: I’m going back to the theater to do two more plays with my company, Bridge Project: The Three Sisters and As You Like It. I hope I’ll do a movie next year, but I don’t know what it is yet because I’m just coming up for air after doing two movies and two plays.