A love story develops in a beautiful old cinema on the south coast of England in Director Sam Mendes’s romantic drama, Empire of Light.
Set in the 1980s, Mendes’s unfolds the tale of Hilary, a lonely single woman who works at a seaside movie palace and is engaged in a boring occasional affair with her married boss, Donald. When Stephen, a young new theater employee, arrives on the scene, Hilary senses something kindred in him and they fall into a tenuous romance.
On December 4, after the DGA membership screening in Los Angeles, Mendes discussed the making of Empire of Light during a Q&A moderated by Director Karyn Kusama (Destroyer).
During the conversation, Mendes admitted he felt compelled to make this film and discussed paying homage to the nostalgia of smaller theaters.
“The bigger movies go into mega movieplexes and the smaller movies tend to go into independent movie theaters in smaller businesses and there is not so much in between, and I miss that. But it’s not an active nostalgia. We could all sit there and say, ‘oh, it’s all gone now’ but it’s really all longing and understanding what film means to us — the physical aspect of film, the fact of you're just sitting all alone in an auditorium and they were giving you the movie. It was a very human feeling.”
Mendes’s other directorial credits include the feature films Road to Perdition, Revolutionary Road, Skyfall, Spectre, Jarhead and Away We Go. He won the DGA Award for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Theatrical Feature Film for his 1999 film American Beauty and again for his 2019 film 1917.
Mendes has been a DGA member since 1998.
You can listen to Mendes' Q&A by clicking the podcast episode embedded below. You can find more DGA podcast episodes here.