Sam Mendes

Sam Mendes (birthname: Samuel Alexander Mendes) is one of the most acclaimed and successful British filmmakers of his generation, having earned instant fame as a moviemaker with his feature debut, American Beauty (1999), written by Alan Ball and co-starring Kevin Spacey, Annette Bening, Thora Birch, Mena Suvari, Wes Bentley, and Chris Cooper; the film was a universal success, winning five Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director for Mendes, and earning over $356 million on a $15 million budget.

For his much-anticipated second film project, Mendes turned as director-producer to Depression-era America for Road to Perdition (2002), starring Tom Hanks, Paul Newman, and Jude Law, scoring five Oscar nominations and grossing over $183 million globally on an $80 million budget. Sam Mendes served as director only on a film based on Marine vet Anthony Swafford’s memoir, Jarhead (2005), with Jake Gyllenhaal, Peter Sarsgaard, Lucas Black, Chris Cooper, and Jamie Foxx. Still, it proved to be the first disappointing release of Mendes’ film career, earning only $97 million worldwide on a $72 million budget.

Rebounding with a fine artistic and solid commercial success, Mendes returned as director-producer on the four-decade-delayed film adaptation of Richard Yates’ literary masterpiece, Revolutionary Road (2008), starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Kate Winslet, Michael Shannon, Kathryn Hahn, David Harbour, and Kathy Bates, doubling its $35 million costs with a $76 million global return.

Quickly making his next feature—this time in a low-budget ($17 million) vein and working with literary star and screenwriter Dave Eggers—Mendes directed Away We Go (2009), with John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph, Jeff Daniels, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Chris Messina, and Catherine O’Hara.

Sam Mendes directed perhaps the most brilliant of all recent Bond movies—marking, astonishingly, Mendes’ first British-based movie—with Skyfall (2012), starring Daniel Craig, Javier Bardem, Ralph Fiennes, Naomie Harris, Albert Finney, and Judi Dench, receiving rave reviews, five Oscar nominations (a rare achievement for a Bond movie), and grossing a massive $1.1 billion global take based on a $200 million budget.

That success followed with Mendes directing the next elegantly-mounted Bond project, Spectre (2015), starring Craig, Fiennes, Harris, Christoph Waltz, Léa Seydoux, Ben Whishaw, Dave Bautista, and Monica Bellucci, and though it wasn’t quite the smash hit of Skyfall, the movie grossed nearly $881 million on a $300 million budget.

Sam Mendes took on the chores of writing, producing, and directing for the first time with his second war film (but first on the British side) for the conceptual single-shot film 1917 (2019), in which Mendes dramatized events during the Allies’ World War One “Operation Alberich” as recalled to him by his paternal grandfather and Trinidadian novelist and short story writer, Alfred H. Mendes.

The single-shot staging is an optically invisible weave of several long tracking shots arranged with Mendes’ regular cinematographer, Roger Deakins, which feature actors George MacKay, Dean-Charles Chapman, Mark Strong, Colin Firth, and Benedict Cumberbatch. The technical achievement was awarded at the Oscars (three for cinematography, sound mixing, and visual effects, among ten overall nominations), and the movie grossed nearly $385 million on a $100 million budget.

Mendes’ first movie capturing English civilian life and his second as writer-producer-director was Empire of Light (2022), starring Olivia Colman and Micheal Ward, with Toby Jones and Colin Firth in supporting roles, and premiering at the Telluride film festival.

Sam Mendes has had a fine career in the theater paralleled with his movie work, starting with his work at the Chichester Festival Theatre and the Minerva Theatre, and hit stagings of Chekhov (The Bear, The Proposal, and The Cherry Orchard, starring Judi Dench). Mendes was artistic director of the successful new Donmar Warehouse from 1990 to 2002, which included several fine successes, including Stephen Sondheim’s Assassins (1992), revivals of Cabaret (1993), and Oliver! (1994), and Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya (2002).

Mendes has continued to mix musical productions (Gypsy in 2003) with popular shows like Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2013), Shakespeare, and the hit staging of Stefano Massini’s acclaimed The Lehman Trilogy (2018) and winning five Tonys in 2022.