Sam Mendes On Making Movie Magic With Olivia Colman And Micheal Ward In ‘Empire Of Light’, And Why A Woman Should Direct The Next James Bond Film

deadline.com:

Sam Mendes was writing the screenplay for what would become Empire of Light and he’d hit a wall.He knew he was writing it for Olivia Colman even though they’d never met.Observing her husband’s frustrations with his script, Alison Balsom, an eminent trumpet soloist, suggested he somehow get in touch with Colman in the hope that the actress could excavate him from the rubble of that darned wall.Eventually, Mendes reached Colman (The Favourite) via her agent.

They met on Zoom. “Look, I’m writing something for you,” he recalled telling her.They had a gossip, then chatted briefly about the project. “I told her it’s a love story of sorts and I talked about how personal it is, and how much it’s drawn from my own life.

The upshot of it is that I got a very powerful sense of her.”Mendes told us that Colman reminded him a bit of Judi Dench. When he was 24, he’d directed Dench in a production of The Cherry Orchard at the Chichester Festival Theatre in West Sussex, and there was the small matter of him directing her in two James Bond films, Spectre and Skyfall, where she played M; he had her bumped off in the latter.”Olivia’s like Judi in that she’s accessible and yet also slightly mysterious,” Mendes told Deadline during a rare one-on-one interview to discuss Empire of Light. “She’s very friendly, always delightful to see her, but there’s something held back, too.

A little core is very private. She’s not an extravert, not an exhibitionist; she’s very guarded actually. Certainly since the Oscar.