“I’d be utterly lost”: The one thing Sam Mendes has always hated about cinema
When Sam Mendes was knighted for ‘services to drama’ in 2020, nobody batted an eyelid, for the British sensation was making waves long before he ever set foot on a film set.
As a theatre director, he reinvented a number of classic shows, bringing them up to speed to modern times, and while his work on the stage is revered by those who move in that circle, for most people, it’s his contributions to the big screen that stand out.
When your very first feature film lands you the ‘Best Director’ prize at the Oscars, then you know you’re on to a winner, which is precisely what happened to Mendes, who won for American Beauty, a chilling exploration of a midlife crisis gone wrong. Over the years, more excellent films would follow. He’s made two Bond movies, got the world talking with his epic war flick 1917, and recently accepted the challenge of a lifetime when he agreed to try and turn the story of The Beatles into four separate feature films. Good luck, Sam, you’re going to need it.
Perhaps one of the reasons why Mendes has enjoyed such a long and successful film career is that he understood one of the medium’s key tenets right away. Speaking to the Washington Post to promote American Beauty, the then-34-year-old filmmaker revealed that one of film’s greatest strengths was also one of its big weaknesses.
“It’s difficult to bring off, because you wake up one day and you’re working with an army,” he said, “I don’t like to see ‘A film by,’ in the credits, followed by a name. No one man could do a film. I couldn’t possibly do a film on my own. Without the actors, the writer, the brilliant cinematographer, I’d be utterly lost.”
The possessory credit or vanity credit, as it is known, has been causing arguments in Hollywood for decades. It doesn’t help that it was first used for DW Griffith’s insanely racist film, The Birth of a Nation. Those who support the credit believe it highlights the incredible amount of effort that a director puts into making a movie, while also highlighting their artistic vision. Its detractors claim it belittles the other people who worked on the film, reducing them to little more than side characters in the story of a ‘great’ person; essentially, it boils down to how much you believe in auteur theory.
While Mendes doesn’t tend to surround himself with the same people, he does have his favourites, being a long-time collaborator of legendary cinematographer Roger Deakins, who won an Oscar for his work on 1917. Equally important to Mendes’ success is composer Thomas Newman, who has provided music for seven of the director’s films, but other than that, he’s mostly open to new partnerships.
It might not seem particularly important, but the way a director chooses to introduce themselves in the credits says a lot about their attitude towards filmmaking, as like all art, film is collaborative, so everybody has a part to play, from the very bottom to the very top, and no one person should claim all the credit, even if they were technically in charge.
