He won Best Director at the Golden Globe Awards for his war epic this week.
Sam Mendes' very first movie was American Beauty, and it was released 20 years ago this month. Mendes went on to win Best Director at the Academy Awards.
Jump forward two decades, and Mendes has just won Best Director at the Golden Globe Awards for his work on World War One epic 1917.
In between, he has given us Road To Perdition, Jarhead, Revolutionary Road, Away We Go, and two Bond movies: Skyfall and Spectre.
He has covered a huge amount of genres in just a small number of movies, but in turning his eye to war, he has taken a genre that we all know inside and out, and warped it into a ticking clock thriller. The entire movie is presented as a single take (much like muti-Oscar-winner Birdman a few years back), working with fourteen-time Oscar nominated cinematographer Roger Deakins to bring a very unique take on war movies.
JOE was lucky enough to sit down with Mendes in the run-up to the release of the movie, and we discussed everything from his own personal favourite war movie of all time to his opinion on Ireland's own Andrew Scott (who features in 1917).
There is also a long discussion about the hidden work that goes into a movie of this magnitude, as all that hard graft can be overshadowed by a coffee cup (Game Of Thrones) or one extra looking the wrong way (Dunkirk).
So knowing that all of these moving parts must work together perfectly, just how much is the audience actually seeing, and what needs to be hidden from modern viewers, who are maybe a little savvier and are looking for the seams that make the long shots slot together.
Check out our chat with the man himself right here:
Meanwhile, JOE was also lucky enough to chat to the movie's writer Krysty Wilson-Cairns (which you can watch here), as well as the two leading stars of the movie, Dean-Charles Chapman and George MacKay (which you can watch here).
1917 lands in Irish cinemas on Friday 10 January, and you can watch the behind-the-scenes featurette on the movie right here:
Clip via Entertainment One UK
