Sam Mendes names his favourite movie
There’s no shame or harm in a filmmaker using their favourite movie as the inspiration behind their debut feature, especially when it turns out as well as it did for Sam Mendes when American Beauty was released in September 1999.
Belying his status as a debutant to deliver one of the most acclaimed movies of the year, the first-time director was showered with accolades, including eight Academy Award nominations. Mendes would win the ‘Best Director’ trophy for his very first film as part of five wins in total that numbered ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Original Screenplay’, but he wasn’t interested in resting on his laurels.
From there, he’d dive into the dark and dingy comic book adaptation Road to Perdition, make a minor misstep with wartime literary adaptation Jarhead, and return to his dramatic roots through Revolutionary Road and Away We Go before directing the only James Bond adventure to ever earn a billion dollars at the box office in Skyfall. Returning to the world of 007 with Spectre, Mendes would then experience more awards season glory in 1917, with Empire of Light marking his most recent feature to date.
It’s an impressively varied filmography, but Mendes’ ascent may not have ignited in the way that it did had he not taken so many cues from Wim Wenders’ Paris, Texas, which he named as his personal favourite on the BBC’s This Cultural Life podcast. American Beauty adopted that approach through its view on the supposed mundanity of suburbia, with Mendes describing both as stories of “entrapment and escape.”
“It was the first time I’d seen a contemporary movie that felt like it could tell a mythic story,” he said of the 1984 classic. “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.”
Wenders’ neo-western also deals with a fracturing family dynamic, beginning with Harry Dean Stanton’s Travis Henderson wandering out of the desert with no idea who he is. When he manages to reconnect with his sibling, Dean Stockwell’s Walt ends up discovering that being reunited with his long-lost brother isn’t quite the feel-good moment he wanted it to be, further exacerbated when Travis’ wife and son enter the mix.
Furthering his celebration of Paris, Texas, Mendes named his first time watching the film as “a big moment for me”, one that left a monumental imprint on his own work. “I think the movie is still an untouchable masterpiece, made by a great filmmaker but written by a great playwright, Sam Shepard,” he continued. “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.”
American Beauty is hardly a remake of Paris, Texas, but the stylistic and thematic similarities are there for all to see, with Wenders’ masterpiece directly informing what Mendes wanted to bring to the table from the second he was afforded the opportunity to direct.
