“Empire of Light” stars Olivia Coleman, Colin Firth, Michael Ward, Toby Jones, Tanya Moodie and writer/director Sam Mendes discuss their new film in this interview with CinemaBlend's Sean O'Connell. They chat about the making of Mendes' semi-autobiographical love letter to cinema and more.
Category
🎥
Short filmTranscript
00:00 This was so completely built, it had us all fooled.
00:05 (gentle music)
00:07 - Film journalists like myself
00:12 will say really pretentious things like,
00:14 "Oh, the movie theater is a character in this film."
00:18 But I swear with Empire of Light, it honestly is true.
00:21 - That's not pretentious, that's quite right.
00:24 - I'm curious if you as an actor,
00:25 if you can treat a location or a set
00:29 like an individual and almost be inspired by them
00:32 and draw off of them the way that you would a human co-star.
00:35 - I think it's invaluable.
00:38 I've done almost no work with a blue screen
00:41 and I think I would really struggle with doing a good job.
00:44 And I have such admiration for actors who can do that.
00:47 'Cause I love walking onto a set, onto Hillary's flat.
00:51 The work that goes on behind the scenes
00:55 with incredible people,
00:57 all of the books that my character had read
00:59 and the things she'd got over the years
01:01 during the breakdown and the food being upside down,
01:06 which is all from your memories as well.
01:08 - But the cinema also speaks about the fact
01:11 that that lobby was basically created.
01:14 The outside of the cinema is real,
01:18 but the inside of the cinema, we needed to be bigger.
01:21 So we created it.
01:23 - Yeah, and so it makes our life so easy.
01:26 The beauty of the hard work that these people have put in
01:29 and then you walk in and go, "I can feel all of it.
01:31 I can smell it. I can look at it."
01:32 Even though it was only built,
01:34 they probably finished painting that morning.
01:36 There was sort of mold on the ceiling.
01:38 You could see that it was a place that had been loved
01:40 and was not in its prime.
01:42 It is, it's a really necessary part of the whole process.
01:46 - It depends on how a thing's being shot.
01:49 Sometimes the environment is very helpful to you
01:53 because it's entire and you can see it.
01:56 Sometimes you're just staring at lights and half a set.
02:00 This was so completely built.
02:02 It had us all fooled.
02:04 When we walked in there, Sam wanted to do this
02:08 just so we'd all get the buzz,
02:10 the very thing you're talking about.
02:12 And the way it had been designed and lit had us,
02:16 those of us who are old enough to remember
02:19 those kinds of structures and cherish them for that part,
02:22 it brought it all back.
02:23 And signs of its deterioration had been added.
02:28 And he thought, "Well, no,
02:30 but this wasn't all art directed, right?"
02:33 Yes, it was from scratch.
02:35 And then the skylight, there was this dome skylight
02:38 that we had to be assured was artificial
02:41 because it kind of just put you there.
02:45 - Yeah.
02:45 - Even the candy, the sweet-
02:48 - Concessions, yeah.
02:49 - The concession stand, just remembering those things.
02:51 And so I think it did an awful lot of the work for us,
02:55 didn't it, really?
02:56 - Yeah.
02:56 For Stephen, definitely, because he loved film so much
02:59 and he loved being in that environment so much.
03:02 I really felt that.
03:03 So for him, it was a big impact in his life, I think,
03:07 because without that and having someone like,
03:11 meeting someone like Hilary
03:12 and her kind of galvanizing him to go to university,
03:16 he might not have done that.
03:17 So I feel like, even sometimes
03:19 when I'll just be going past set,
03:21 when I wasn't in, sometimes just saying my lines
03:24 while I'm chilling on the beach
03:25 and looking at the cinema and stuff,
03:27 there was a connection that I built up as Stephen
03:32 that whenever I saw that location,
03:34 it gave me something to feel and kind of play off.
03:38 I compared it when I was reading the script to,
03:41 you know how the cinema plays a big part
03:43 in "Glorious Bastards"?
03:45 - Oh yeah.
03:46 - For example, that's when I read it,
03:47 I felt like, you know, it was definitely,
03:51 it gave me that kind of feeling of like,
03:53 it's its own character.
03:55 Like it doesn't, the film doesn't exist without it.
03:57 - Who was guilty of going into a concession stand
04:00 and nicking a few things?
04:01 - You know what?
04:02 It was really disappointing.
04:03 Those, they all just had,
04:05 they didn't have the real sweets in there,
04:07 the real candy in there.
04:08 It was very disappointing.
04:09 - Like bits of, you know, dried grass.
04:10 - It would have been me,
04:11 because I love all that stuff.
04:14 I thought, well, even if the movie goes tits up,
04:17 at least I'll be able to get some free candy,
04:19 but no, you know?
04:20 (laughing)
04:22 ♪ Where it goes now ♪
04:25 - Here's to the future.
04:26 ♪ Walking those old streets ♪
04:29 - Here's to getting back up.
04:31 - And here's to coming home.
04:33 - As film people, we are always asked
04:35 to make recommendations for movies,
04:38 and I personally stress over what movie
04:40 I'm going to recommend.
04:42 So in this magnificent scene of where
04:45 Miss Coleman's character asks,
04:47 basically, Toby Jones' character,
04:48 to show her a movie, to immerse her in a story in cinema,
04:52 you chose "Being There," and I want to know why.
04:55 - That's a very good question.
04:56 I chose it, A, because it meant something.
05:00 I had to find a movie that meant something
05:02 to Olivia's character in Hillary in that moment.
05:05 And Hillary struggles with a mental illness
05:07 and a feeling that she is somehow not,
05:09 she's an outcast.
05:14 And she's not allowed in to the world of normal people.
05:18 And for me, "Being There" is a movie
05:20 about how it's possible to be broken
05:22 and yet still somehow survive in the world.
05:25 And it happens to also be one of my favorite films,
05:28 feature, and it happens, obviously, crucially,
05:31 to have been released in the year the movie takes place,
05:33 which is 1981.
05:35 So it ticked all those boxes,
05:37 and I wanted to find a movie that I thought
05:39 would speak to her and move her.
05:42 So that's why I went for it.
05:43 - The timing of the release is kismet, almost.
05:46 It's like it was meant to be at that point.
05:48 - I think "Being There" is a really good choice
05:50 for the title as much as anything,
05:55 because I think there's something that he detects in her.
05:58 It's just fortuitous that it happens to be out that week,
06:00 but I mean, it's a perfect movie,
06:04 mixture of comedy and very, very sad,
06:09 and also miraculous in a way that cinema
06:13 can be all of those things.
06:14 And for me, I think "Being There" is a pretty good choice.
06:18 Suddenly my mind goes blank when I try to think,
06:22 well, how would I improve on that?
06:24 Because I love that film.
06:26 If you were trying to help,
06:28 there's a therapeutic aspect to cinema anyway,
06:32 that people use films as a kind of therapy.
06:36 They return to a certain kind of film
06:39 just to trot through it,
06:40 almost as if, let's go through that story once more.
06:43 I see my kids doing it in particular,
06:45 that they return to these films in a way that I don't.
06:49 I always feel like a huge debt of unseen films
06:52 that prevent me going back and re-watching other films.
06:56 I see the pleasure they get from it,
06:58 and I'm sure that is therapeutic,
07:00 is that once you've been through the initial thing
07:02 of the hit of it,
07:04 the ritual of rewinding, I think, must be therapeutic.
07:08 - It's funny that I would say,
07:10 my partner and I, when we were going through our courtship,
07:12 that was an important part of our courtship,
07:13 that we each gave each other a list
07:15 of our top 10, top five films, basically.
07:20 The one that I gave to him,
07:21 which was the real litmus test
07:24 in terms of what is this man's character like,
07:27 was "The Lives of Others,"
07:30 which I just think is a film that,
07:33 I mean, I could watch it again and again
07:35 and get just completely lost in the story.
07:40 The characters and the performances,
07:43 oh, it's just such a beautiful, beautiful piece of work.
07:46 - Do you remember what his top one was?
07:48 - That's a real, gosh, no, I'd have to have a,
07:53 think about that, I mean, he's such a mad James Bond fan,
07:58 so it might be one of those.
08:00 Yeah, and also we had a separate list for Studio Ghibli.
08:05 We weren't allowed to have Studio Ghibli films
08:06 in the main list because they would take up
08:08 too much of the space,
08:09 so we had to have a separate Ghibli top five, basically.
08:14 - That's very fair, I can understand that.
08:16 Mr. Firth, next year, remarkably,
08:19 marks 20 years of "Love Actually,"
08:22 which comes up around this time,
08:24 and I'm curious what the film's legacy means to you
08:27 and why you think we return to it every year.
08:30 - There's a bit of a mystery to it, really.
08:31 I mean, it's one of the,
08:32 I don't think anyone knew what to expect when making it.
08:39 Because it's a compositive of all these different stories.
08:43 My own experience of it was so isolated
08:46 because I was in a little film all to myself in a way,
08:48 and I maybe shot a lot of the others,
08:50 but I was in France with only one other actor,
08:55 and we were the first thing that was shot,
08:58 and so I was done and moved on
09:00 while everyone else got on with the rest of it.
09:03 So I didn't really have much of a full picture of it,
09:05 and then I think it,
09:08 I can't remember how well it did at the box office,
09:10 it was so long ago,
09:11 but I don't know if its initial opening was successful.
09:14 It certainly, reviews-wise, got some stinkers.
09:18 I'm sure it got some great ones as well,
09:20 but I remember the hostile ones.
09:21 - Right.
09:22 - And I don't think I would have imagined
09:25 that we'd be talking about it 20 years later.
09:27 I don't think you can assume that about any film.
09:29 - True.
09:29 - And then for it to become this perennial,
09:32 partly as a Christmas movie,
09:33 and it's very kind of Marmite.
09:34 I mean, some people love it,
09:37 but it's also up for a kind of deconstruction,
09:40 and again, it's targeted for all kinds of criticism,
09:45 but still in the discussion.
09:48 So go figure.
09:50 I mean, it's not, you know,
09:52 I feel very little to do with it,
09:54 but it's a very interesting thing
09:55 to sort of track it through those 20 years.
09:58 (upbeat music)