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.
There is definitely a trend of late for film directors to take a look in thinly disguised cinematic memoirs of their early influences that shaped the artist and person they have become.
Kenneth Branagh with Belfast and Paolo Sorrentino with The Hand Of God did it last year. Of course there is Alfonso Cuaron’s Roma, others over the years.
Sam Mendes, while not drawing a portrait of his younger self revisits the movie palaces of his youth in another 2022 offering, Empire Of Light, which premiered last weekend at Telluride and will also hit the Toronto International Film Festival.
TIFF is also where the man I recently described as the GOAT, Steven Spielberg, has chosen to debut his own story where the names have been changed but the story is clearly his.
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