“I remember the time Les Misérables The film came out, and there was a lot of fun with Anne Hathaway doing her one song, ”said Sam Mendes who appeared after the New York Comic-Con last October. "There's no disgrace to Anne Hathaway, who is a great actress, but so is everyone who has ever played the song! Go to Broadway, for fuck's sake."
The longevity politics – when called upon, how to manage the delicate interplay between form and content, the line that separates stylistic bravado from display – has been on Mendes & # 39; s mind since announcing his new feature. 1917. This intimate (or very close?) WWI film, which recently won the 2020 Golden Globe for Best Drama, follows the tragic deployment of two soldiers to inform their allies that they are about to rebel before it is too late. From the very beginning, Mendes knew he wanted their journey through the occupied territory of Germany to play as a single, continuous game. The veteran stage director thought it would be like installing a theater, where the show should go on for the rest. And at some points, it was only raising a thousand times.
"Before the game, the director will say to the actors, & # 39; We'll see you in two hours, & # 39;" Mendes told Polygon. “The amazing thing about going from stage to movie is that you travel a lot. The scene can be more than half a mile away. I only saw the players with the tracker, and that would feel awkward. ”
Image: Roger Deakins / Universal Pictures
Mendes now has two James Bond cars under his belt, and still his latest effort is as high as his big movies. That is a very literal concept; even dividing the film into multiple arrows clustered together without a hand, that left seven to eight seconds carrying action over the hills, in and out of buildings, and in destruction.
“If you think about going back Specter, for example, the first sequence is an eight-minute, unarmed, five-shot rifle, ”recalls Mendes. "It came out more, much more planned this time. We haven't left much opportunity, but you remain optimistic for a little bit of magic. You will look to take, and you can point to one, two, three things that work out for total accidents. Happy accidents."
By creating a tad more "weird and neurotic" for himself, Mendes was able to control the production management of many moving parts. Prior to 007 days, he was best known for in-house melodramas driven by the characters American Beauty and The Rebel Road; now he is expanding his focus from living room to battlefield, a place that is captured for you where you are – right – where there are 360-degree images. During the following brief Q&A 1917 In an NYCC panel with this interview, Mendes used the word "immersion" on at least four occasions. But getting his viewer into a fully formed world was a difficult task.
With the camera rolling around catching everything in sight, Mendes couldn't leave his players' marks to strike as they passed the stadium. "Sometimes you had to use things to mark in private – that cord, that tree, that stone, that rock – it all would help give players a chance to see the place," he said. What he called "intuitive land management" was the name of the game, so much so that the director started taking cues from the area around him.
Mendes explained: “Javier Bardem's first big scene sky fall it is a reminder of him about rats, which he made while traveling. By the time he finishes, he gets to the point he was supposed to be, so we had to build the set to be a bit longer for his speech. I went to Pinewood Studios and walked back up to the idea of how long the set should be. Take that idea and take that out in two hours. We had to go through all the incidents; Press all the doors, measure how far the door can be, the dead dog must be here, this far from the river. It was a matter of local engineering (…) The domain and locations needed to be fully synchronized. ”
Photo: François Duhamel / Universal Pictures
Over six months of practice and return, Mendes, his team, and his team have come to understand the cohesion of their work. They learned to accept what their director had set for them, and he learned to take care of them. “Adrenaline gets players to act faster,” he said. "You have to account for that, see the difference, and that's where the stage training comes into play. we are able to get a sense of place. & # 39; It allows the unacceptable to work sometimes, and then we produce something about it. Letting the actor breathe, that would work wonders. ”
But as much as his theater training has seen him, their use has been limited. More than ever, Mendes was receiving the mercy of Mother Nature. Because his film takes place in a sequence, each image can only be shot under hot weather conditions, which means submitting to troops of a certain degree.
“At the end of the first day of shooting, we were behind, because we didn't shoot anything,” he admits. “The weather was not good. By the end of the second day, we were ahead. We spent that first day doing nothing but practice, so when we were ready to roll, we could jump forward and shoot everything we were ready to shoot right away. We always cheered when there was plenty of sun outside. Sometimes we have to hold while the sun is setting behind its cloud; a few people check the clocks, they make the keywords, but they mostly practice. ”
Competition and fate itself have been part of the work of an experienced and prolific filmmaker. Of all his plans, all his suggestions about the immersive cinema connection and its stage setting, all his thinking about obstacles, ultimately had nothing to do but to do. He took each challenge as it came, adapted and built forward.
"We were completely in the hands of God, and we would have been totally hard," Mendes said. "Fortunately, we were shooting in a country with reliable weather."
