Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/798465
DGA QUARTERLY 31 "The great teachers are the great directors. If you're willing to watch and study, you can find out so much." end, when I thought of course, that makes to- tal sense." Q: And La La Land. A: And Manchester by the Sea—they all give the audience a sense of being pulled into the unknown. I had this conversation with the great Anthony Minghella, who is sorely missed now, about The English Patient. I sat for 2 ¾ hours in a cinema, watching what is a very difficult movie to make feel coherent, but from the sec- ond it began, the audience smelt purpose, they sensed that somebody wanted to tell them a story, and for whatever reason, they wanted to be told that story, even though they didn't know entirely where it was heading, what timescale it was working on, how they would interrelate those different timescales. But they were happy to be on the ride. That's the work of a great filmmaker. I felt that with Barry Jenkins on Moonlight, I felt like I'm going somewhere, I know I'm in good hands, and that's an instinctive feeling an audience has right at the beginning, and of course it's what you crave more than anything. But I don't agree with that thing about familiar- ity. This is where coming from the theater gives you a slightly different perspective. When I watched the great Hamlets of my life, I didn't find that knowing the story of Hamlet prevented me from being absolutely astounded by what had happened with a play that I felt was familiar that felt utterly new and completely surprising. Q: A distant observer might say your films have been largely American—the first British film was really the first Bond movie—whereas the plays seem to be closer to your own cultural roots. A: If you're asking me how are they personal in a way that's different from the plays, I would say that each one reflects where I was in my life at that time. You have to look outside the cultural landscape of the period and the story and look at what the core of the story is. The loneliness and paralysis of Road to Perdition was me at that time, the sense of not know- ing quite where to go, being a little lost, not knowing quite where to turn. Going to war and discovering war wasn't quite what you thought it was, going into the world that you thought you knew from the outside, but once you got into the middle of it, you found you didn't understand at all, that was Jarhead. Revolutionary Road is an unflinching look at a marriage. Away We Go is a romanticized look at a marriage. Skyfall is about someone coming back to England to find that everything has changed and yet on some level everything remains the same, and that the old ways are better than the new ways, in From the top, Jarhead, American Beauty and Road to Perdition gave Sam Mendes three distinct canvasses to prove his mettle as a director, and allowed him to work with DP legends Conrad Hall and Roger Deakins. PHOTOS: (TOP TO BOTTOM) UNIVERSAL; EVERETT; PHOTOFEST