Sir Samuel Alexander Mendes CBE (born 1 August 1965) is an English film and stage director, producer and screenwriter. In theatre, he is known for his dark re-inventions of the stage musicals Cabaret (1994), Oliver! (1994), Company (1995), and Gypsy (2003). He directed an original West End stage musical for the first time with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2013).
For directing the play The Ferryman, Mendes was awarded the Tony Award for Best Direction of a Play in 2019.
Roger Deakins, legendary cinematographer and knight of the British realm, cut to the chase: In his view several of the best examples of cinematography are missing from this year’s Oscars list. “The best cinematography hasn’t been nominated,” he tells me at the British consul general’s Oscars reception.
Which film I ask? “It’s The Batman.That’s the best work in my view,” he says as he heaped acclaim on Greig Fraser’s “extraordinary” visual flair on the Warner Bros movie directed by Matt Reeves.
The picture should have been a contender in that category Deakins insists. “The reason it wasn’t is pure and simple: snobbery.
There’s this unfair tendency to avoid the Marvel universe and the other popular universes,” he says. Claudio Miranda the director of photography of Paramount’s Top Gun: Maverick “is another one that was shut out,” Deakins notes. “It comes down to the work.
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