“Queens have brought me luck”- iO Donna

Olivia Colman: ‘Sam Mendes saw me in The Crown’

For being Queen Elizabeth in the third and fourth seasons of The Crown, the actress instead earned the third Golden Globe of her career, in 2020. And now also a film directed by the fifty-seven-year-old director Sam Mendes, another Oscar winner, who wanted her in his new job, Empire of Light (at the cinema from March 2).

The link? The director of Skyfall, Specter And 1917 – and of course the award-winning American Beauty – saw her in the series of the giant Netflix in the role, note of the sovereign who died at the age of 96 on 8 September last, and he convinced himself that she and no one else should be the protagonist of his new film.

Sam Mendes: ‘Olivia Colman is vulnerable and beautiful’

He wrote it with inspiration to his childhood in 1980s Thatcherite Englandbetween deep social frictions and with a bipolar mother who was in and out of the hospital (“Olivia knows how to look vulnerable and beautiful at the same time” Mendes confessed to us in an interview on Zoom).

Autobiographical work for the director

An autobiographical and very personal work (“It took me ten films to get there,” added the director, a recent winner of five Tony Awards in New York for the show The Lehman Trilogy by our Stefano Massini) which is also, in parallel, a tribute to the magic of cinema.

Almost at New Paradise Cinemaas has been said by many, but where “The center of the film actually remains my mother’s human story,” he was keen to clarify with iO Woman.

A presence that deeply marked Mendes as a child (“I grew up studying her moods, practically parenting her”) and that she wanted to tell through Hilary’s perspective, no longer young manager of an art deco cinema in Margate, a seaside town in Kent a couple of hours from London.

Olivia Colman is a psychiatric patient

Olivia Colman takes on the role. Every day, between cleaning the rooms, popcorn and small confidences, she coordinates a group of masks and ticket cutters that stay close to her like a family. Passively submitting, at the same time, to the insensitive and ambitious manager, Mr Ellis (Colin Firth), who asks her for constant sexual favors.

She lives an ordinary and solitary existence, interspersed with depression and hospitalizations in which they administer lithium as a drug. Until one day a new employee is hired, Stephen (Micheal Weard), a black boy mistreated by the regular customers, all too racist, but with whom Hilary immediately senses her affinity.

They recognize each other, despite having a certain age difference.

Love has no age

“It’s curious how time is a relative concept,” says Colman. «My mother used to tell me that deep down we all always feel eighteen for life. Until, then, one day there let’s look in the mirror and find out who we really arero. I didn’t quite understand what he meant at the time, but today I understand it all too well. And for Hilary it’s the same: she finds herself with Stephen, she becomes a girl again, becomes sunny and discovers again her enthusiasm for her life ».

For the film, Olivia – who received an Oscar nomination for best actress for a drama – was inspired by a documentary by Stephen Fry on manic depression (The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive).

Olivia Colman: «I felt the responsibility of the role»

But above all by listening the most significant memories of Sam Mendes who preferred not to include himself in the film (“I know that when there is a child on the screen, the audience has a different reaction, think about what will happen to him, I didn’t want to arouse these kinds of emotions. I preferred to focus attention on the adults,” he revealed).

Also because when you are a child you accept reality without asking too many questions. “I strongly felt the responsibility of this role, perhaps because I felt I had to honor the story of Sam Mendes’ mother (Valerie, a painter, who is 83 today, ed)” says the actress. which will soon appear in the musical Wonka alongside Timothée Chalamet and in Wicked Little Letters by Thea Sharrock with Jessie Buckley as well as in the transposition on the big screen of Girl From the North Country, a Tony-winning Broadway musical featuring the songs of Bob Dylan.

«On the set there were some painful passages for him. I know how complicated it is when there are elements of one’s own life in a film. But I loved the delicacy with which he spoke about mental illness ».

The Thatcher Years

«In the 1980s the subject was not openly addressed as it is today. It was considered a stigma that stuck with you, the comments were brutal and kindness was far away. Mendes was an ante litteram caregiver even before this figure was recognized ».

Empire of light, however, also brings together other themes in the background: the 80s with Two Tone Ska music and bands dealing with inclusive themes such as The Special, The Beat and The Selecter, the rebel movement of the punks, the skinheads and that imperceptible racism which created a further “war” between the subjects and above all social intolerance and unemployment while Thatcher said “Society does not exist”.

It dates back to that time what was called “the Brixton riot’, a clash between the Metropolitan Police and protesters in Lambeth.

“How far we’ve come since the 1980s”

Colman, born in 1974, lived through those years as a teenager. “If I think back then and see where we’ve come today, I think we’ve come a long way. But perhaps not all: prejudices on mental illness and racial violence have not disappeared, they are issues on which unfortunately we still confront each other ».

He was 16 when he realized – right then, during a school play – that acting was going to be her path. She came late to success, to support herself she did cleaning by the hour, but in the meantime, however, she already dreamed of being able to receive an Oscar one day (« I think everyone has done it, at least once in their life!» ).

Meanwhile, there was a fascination for that “artisanal” cinema that Mendes describes in the film through the days of the projectionist Norman (played by Toby Jones, also known for happy ending by Michael Haneke and The Tale of Tales by Matteo Garrone), constantly focused on changing reels. And perhaps the closest, in sensitivity, to Hilary.

Empire of Light, an ode to cinema

“I was impressed that Sam’s mother she had always refused to go to the cinema: she feared that the emotions in those dark halls might overwhelm her. Yet the first films are the memories we all cherish the most. For me the silver screen will always see me as a child in Norwich with my parents. The noise from the projector booth, the film stretching… ».

And it is in this sense that the final scene of the film – perhaps the most touching – should be read in which the protagonist witnesses alone a Beyond the garden with Peter Sellers. Among the most classic and impressive cornerstones in the history of cinema.

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