The movie Sam Mendes calls “an untouchable masterpiece”
The British filmmaker Sam Mendes is one of the many unsung heroes of modern cinema, creating some of the most beloved movies of the contemporary industry, even if you may have never known it. Ever since his directorial debut, American Beauty in 1999, Mendes has grown to become a truly iconic filmmaker, best known for his revolutionary take on the modern James Bond franchise.
Indeed, where the likes of Christopher Nolan and Danny Boyle are widely appreciated in the world of online film criticism, Mendes is too rarely discussed despite his contributions to modern cinema. Whilst the James Bond movies Skyfall and Spectre remain his most iconic works, his most impressive movie may be his recent WWI epic, 1917, which was nominated for Best Picture and took home several technical awards.
Taking to filmmaking with apparent immediate proficiency, Mendes’ rise to success at the turn of the millennium was spectacular, but didn’t come without a helping hand, with the filmmaker looking to one seminal movie in his life for guidance.
Speaking on the BBC podcast This Cultural Life, Mendes sat down with John Wilson to discuss the pivotal pieces of culture that sculpted his modern career as a filmmaker. One of his choices was the 1984 Palme d’Or winner Paris, Texas, directed by the German mastermind Wim Wenders, calling the movie an “untouchable masterpiece,” among other deserved superlatives.
“I saw it two successive nights,” Mendes revealed on the podcast, explaining: “it was a big moment for me… I think the movie is still an untouchable masterpiece, made by a great filmmaker but written by a great playwright, Sam Shepard…it’s a film that starts with 40 minutes of no dialogue and it’s about a man who has left his wife and child behind and comes back to find them after years in the wilderness, but he’s stopped talking”.
A road movie like no other, Wenders’ distinctly European viewpoint makes his handling of this expressly Texan story unusual, tracking the life of an outwardly tough Texan hero, played by Harry Dean Stanton, who has been fractured by personal grief. The German filmmaker was well seasoned in the road movie sub-genre, too, directing Alice in the Cities in 1974 and Kings of the Road two years later. However, Paris, Texas, was distinctly different; raw, powerful and character-led.
Further revealing his thoughts about the film, Mendes recalls: “It was the first time I’d seen a contemporary movie that felt like it could tell a mythic story, it felt like it was a timeless, vast, epic story set in an inhuman landscape, a series of inhuman landscapes, including Houston, which Wim Wenders shot entirely, apart from the central characters, behind glass”.
Comparing the movie to a “Greek tragedy,” the filmmaker later admits to taking multiple aspects of the masterpiece for his own American odyssey, 1999s American Beauty. Specifically, it was the final scene of Paris, Texas which most inspired Mendes, using “the idea of people trapped behind glass” several times throughout his later filmography.
