After the juggling act of two Bond films, with their cadre of characters and armoury of gadgets, Sam Mendes had something cleaner in mind for his next film.


From the start, Mendes envisioned his ‘1917’ as unfolding continuously and breathlessly. In the British trenches of the First World War, two soldiers are tasked with delivering an urgent message to stop an attack, planned for the next morning, that’s doomed to fail.

The Germans have stealthily retreated. Mendes, working with cinematographer Roger Deakins and production designer Dennis Gassner (both collaborators from Mendes’ 007 epic ‘Skyfall’), follows their harrowing journey without blinking, hiding any edits to give the impression of a ceaseless and fluid film.

For even the 54-year-old Mendes, renowned for his inventive stagings (he won a Tony earlier this year for directing ‘The Ferryman’ and this March will bring ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ to Broadway), it’s an especially bold enterprise, one that extends the cinematic history of the long take (see ‘Rope’, ‘Russian Ark’, ‘Birdman’, among others) into a new realm.

Now with a Golden Globe win for Best Picture and Director, Mendes on why he hopes people are drawn in by his technical achievement but, as soon as the lights go down, forget it.


You opened ‘Spectre’ with a great long take. Is that when you started thinking about more elastic ways to shoot?


Were you concerned that it could come off like a gimmick?


How extensive was the rehearsal?


Early in the film, one of the soldiers hurts his hand on a barbed wire. Does that cut precede the first film cut?

There are a couple of cuts beforehand but I wouldn’t call them cuts. Blends, stitches, whatever you want to call them. Morphs. On the whole, there were long takes of five, six minutes, as long as eight and a half. Even if you know what it’s going to be going in, I hope you forget about it and get immersed in it. The goal is to remove as many layers between the audience and the characters as much as possible, not add them. So we never moved the camera in a way that was self-advertising. It’s a constantly shifting dance between the subjective and the objective, between being intimate and being epic.

To prepare, did you go back and watch Hitchcock’s ‘Rope’ or 2002’s one-take ‘Russian Ark’?

I had seen ‘Rope’, I had seen ‘Birdman’. And not just one-shot movies but movies that deal with long, continuous takes. I thought ‘Children of Men’ was a masterpiece of camera work and poetry. I didn’t go back at look at them because even the movies that are most similar to it are quite dissimilar. ‘Birdman,’ for example, which is a movie I loved, is a very surreal film. It’s not asking you to experience time. It’s asking you to forget about it, in a way. ‘Son of Saul’, which is an absolute masterpiece, is very subjective. It’s very shallow depth of field, everything drops out of focus. That wasn’t like our movie, either. So wherever we looked, it was like, ‘Well, that’s not quite what we’re doing’. We had to make up our own rules.

This is your fourth film with cinematographer Roger Deakins. On ‘Skyfall’, you together reached a high level especially in the moving neon reflections of the Shanghai tower scene. Was it a given you’d reach out to him?

Yeah, it’s pretty much a given that I try to him to do anything. The answer is yes or no, or he’s doing a movie with the Coen brothers and he’s not available. I’ve been fortunate to work with him from the beginning and particularly on this one. For that scene, Dennis Gassner, who also designed this movie, built the office tower in Shanghai as a model and then we would move all the LED screens to begin to understand how the reflections work within those glass cubes. I remember sitting for hours with the lights off in the room in Pinewood with Roger and Dennis trying to work out how we would construct it. We did a similar thing with this, Dennis building a model of the town and putting the flares on tiny wires so we understood how the shadows fell and the big church in the centre of it aflame and how the light from that would streak through and intersect with Scofield’s journey. That feeling that it was both an environment and a conduit for light — that existed in both of those sets. In a way, they’re my two favourite sets. They share in common that somehow the light and the world are one thing.


I’ve made franchise movies but I’ve also made movies on a much, much smaller scale that would today probably be on a streaming service, and would be fine on a streaming service. What I did want to do, though, was make a film where the audience went, ‘Oo, I’ll be missing out if I didn’t see this in a cinema.’ But I don’t think there’s that thing that used to happen where pretty much everyone who made a story with a beginning, middle and end that lasted two hours thought it as their God-given right to be on a big cinema screen. That’s no longer the case. You have to fight for that.

You once compared your experience making two Bond films to ‘a siege’. Would you ever make a franchise film again? I imagine you’re conscious that in the time of one Bond film, you could have directed three plays.

Exactly. Or maybe five. I think my franchise years are probably over. Never say never _ excuse the pun. I learned a whole amount. It was a great adventure. But I think that in the end, the feat of engineering sometimes overwhelms the human element of storytelling. And it’s the human element of storytelling that interests me the most.

‘1917’ is dedicated to your grandfather, Alfred Mendes, who was a runner in the First World War. What prompted you to return to him now?



Don’t miss it!

‘1917’ is out in the UAE on January 9.