The director has turned his grandfather’s horrific memories of the war into a rollercoaster of fear and sacrifice – an antidote of the ‘chaos’ of directing Bond films
When Sam Mendes was small, he would laugh at his grandfather’s habit of forever washing his hands. His father took him to one side. “It’s because he remembers the mud in the trenches,” he said, “and never being able to get clean.”
Sam stopped laughing. He asked his grandfather, then in his mid-70s, to tell him more about the war. After five decades’ silence on the subject, “he finally cracked. And he told us loads and loads of stories, especially after a couple of rums. He was very theatrical and charismatic and Edwardian. He was also quite deaf, so he shouted them all.”
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