No./6
Building a big-screen dream
Sam Mendes on recreating a 1980s cinema — cue Pearl & Dean music — for EMPIRE OF LIGHT
SAM MENDES’ EMPIRE Of Light may be led by Olivia Colman and Micheal Ward, but the title star is a cinema on the south coast of England that becomes a makeshift home for a group of outcasts in 1981. “I wanted it to stand alone in a way, and I wanted it to be slightly oversized,” says Mendes of his Empire. “The big movie houses I remember had a kind of magnificence to them: a scale and an architecture that you wouldn’t find in any other building.” Here’s how Mendes created his faded but still fabulous picture palace…