Sam Mendes is like a magician with a huge bag of tricks. At 24, he directed Judi Dench, then his debut movie won five Oscars — cementing his reputation as a unique creative force. Now, with his latest film winning Golden Globe nominations, and an ambitious theatre project in train, he talks to Gaby Wood about family, work and watching his wife, Kate Winslet, have screen sex with Leonardo DiCaprio

DIRECTING any sex scene, Sam Mendes says, is "a profoundly weird experience", but when the sex scene is between Leonardo DiCaprio and your own wife, it's "almost impossible" for them to do it if you're in the same room. So for the relevant parts of Revolutionary Road, his first collaboration with Kate Winslet, Mendes moved the monitor screens into another room, and watched from there. The actors would hear him shout from around the corner: "Leo, don't bang her head so hard against the kitchen cabinets!" And: "Could you not do it for so long this time?"

DiCaprio wanted specifics. "Like how long?"

"About 45 seconds."

A meaningful smile from DiCaprio: "Really? Only 45 seconds?"

Mendes laughs as he retells the story. "I chose to ignore the obvious inference. I said: 'What's wrong with 45 seconds? That's a long time. Anyone would be lucky...'"

I meet Mendes in his office in Manhattan's Meatpacking District. He's been spending the evenings here after simultaneously rehearsing The Cherry Orchard (in a new translation by Tom Stoppard) and The Winter's Tale all day in Brooklyn. The two plays, starring British and American actors including Simon Russell Beale, Sinead Cusack, Rebecca Hall and Ethan Hawke, will christen his ambitious Bridge Project, opening in New York in January and at the Old Vic in May.

In the back of his office, he has an edit suite, where Sarah Flack, the young and eminent editor of his next film, Away We Go, is holed up, waiting for him to emerge from our interview. The room we're in has white bookshelves from the floor to its very high ceiling, generous dark grey sofas and a flat-screen TV. Antique metal letters, culled from an abandoned theatre, have been placed along one wall to spell "Art" and "Commerce", the words interlocking, as if their meanings were made to fit.

Once the boy wonder of British theatre, now the unassuming mini-mogul of a theatrical and motion-picture empire, Mendes, who has lived here for the past five years, is one of the busiest men in New York. Revolutionary Road -- which has been nominated for four Golden Globe awards (for Best Director, Best Actress, Best Actor and Best Motion Picture) -- opens in the US on St Stephen's Day; Away We Go, scripted by Dave Eggers and his wife, Vendela Vida, is already being shown to test audiences; the Bridge plays are nearing the end of their rehearsal period; he produced the musical version of Shrek, which has just opened on Broadway; he recently bought the option to Joseph O'Neill's novel Netherland; and -- just so you can try to imagine the coordinates of his home life -- his wife is in not one but two likely-to-be-Oscar-nominated films at once (one of them his own).

Yet Mendes considers this a rather light work schedule. "I spent 20 years looking for every available opportunity to work, and now... I don't," he laughs as he dunks a long herbal tea bag into his mug. He and Winslet have a five-year-old son, Joe, and Mia, an eight-year-old daughter from Winslet's first marriage. "Really, spending time with the kids is the defining... You know how it is, I just don't want to go away."

For the first four years of his son's life, he only worked on one thing: the Broadway premiere of David Hare's play The Vertical Hour -- "and that was just down the road, with friends". Now that Joe's at school, he says, "it's easier to work again", and although Revolutionary Road, in its subject matter, is a relentlessly dark portrait of a marriage, it was also, in its making, a family affair. Winslet first gave him Richard Yates's now cult book -- "an act of faith in itself, given what it's about" -- and she and DiCaprio, who have been good friends for a third of their lives, understood each other so well it meant, from Mendes's point of view, that "a huge amount of rehearsal time was saved".

What becomes of a wunderkind once he hits his 40s is a question not everyone could answer with optimism. Mendes was artistic director of a new theatre -- the Minerva in Chichester in southern England -- only a couple of years out of Cambridge; he directed Judi Dench in the West End when he was 24; he founded and ran central London's Donmar Warehouse for 10 years; and his first film, American Beauty, won five Academy Awards. No small promise to live up to. Yet Mendes has hit a new stride: avowedly changed by fatherhood, he is coming back to the London stage for the first time in years with two powerful plays about dead sons -- he has not revisited The Cherry Orchard since his 1989 production with Dench, and only now feels he's beginning to understand it -- and he's returning to cinema with a film he calls both his least showy and one of his most personal. In the words of his friend Richard Eyre: "What was a precocious confidence has become more earned."

Mendes's look and manner might be described as shaggy-chic: a regular uniform of jeans and navy blue jumper, outgrown silvery hair, a scruffy beard several shades darker and still, "an enviable way of seeming permanently young". He gives big bear hugs and warm belly laughs. His ease and self-confidence are legendary. Judi Dench once recalled that she'd told him during Cherry Orchard rehearsals that she'd like to try something, and that the 24-year-old upstart had replied: "Well, you can try that, but it won't work." Kevin Spacey, who starred in American Beauty and is now, as artistic director of the Old Vic, one of the masterminds behind the Bridge Project, tells me that Mendes left him similarly stunned.

"The very first day of shooting American Beauty we shot the fast food restaurant sequences," Spacey remembers. "And two days later I walked up to Sam and said: 'So, have you seen the dailies?' He said, 'Yes. They're s***.'

"And I sort of laughed, and he said: 'No, no, they're s***. They're f**king awful.' I said: 'What's wrong with them?' He said: 'Well... I hate the way you're acting, I hate the costume, I hate the location, they couldn't control the light, Peter [Gallagher] and Annette [Bening] should not be walking in, they should be in a drive-thru, and... I like the dialogue. The script is really good. But everything else is wrong, and Connie [director of photography Conrad Hall] feels exactly the same way and we've gone to the studio and we've asked them if we can reshoot the first day.' I looked at Sam and I said: 'Are you kidding me? This is your first movie, and you're telling the studio you blew the first day?' He said: 'Yeah. Yeah, I can't live with this.' And lo and behold the studio agreed, and we reshot the sequence three weeks later and that's the sequence that's in the film."

Mendes was born 43 years ago -- in the same small hospital outside London, in the town of Reading, where Kate Winslet was born 10 years later. His life was not exactly charmed, but it was self-sufficient. His Portuguese-Trinidadian father and his British Jewish mother divorced when he was three, and Mendes, an only child, grew up near Oxford with his mum, a publisher and now the author of several novels for young adults. He inherited his work ethic from her, he says.

"I never went to the theatre," Mendes says, "we didn't have a lot of money, and theatre wasn't really on the cards until I was about to study Shakespeare, and then my mum and dad both took me to Stratford." Instead, his father, who taught English literature at Manchester University, would occasionally take his son to the cinema.

His real film and theatre education came, Mendes says, when he went to Cambridge -- by his account something of a surprise in itself. "I was much more sport-oriented at school, and I wasn't very academic. I came through in my last year at school and got into Cambridge." Then he adds, philosophically: "It was the case for me in my 20s, and into my 30s, that I sort of pulled things out of my arse at the very last moment."

When he put on a student production of David Halliwell's play, Little Malcolm and his Struggle Against the Eunuchs, Mendes realised that theatre direction was, as he puts it, "a combination of lots of different things that I liked: the society of other people, the visual aspect of it -- I had originally got into Cambridge to study history of art, and I'd worked in my year off at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice -- and weird elements of sports psychology and teamwork."

In Richard Eyre's opinion, some of Mendes's self-confidence can be traced both to his isolated childhood -- "being responsible at an early age" -- and to "having authority in a different field. He's always been good at sport -- rather rare in our world". When he left university, Mendes was hired at the Chichester Festival Theatre because its director had been informed of his sporting abilities and was sick of losing their annual cricket match to the RSC.

"Here's the thing," Mendes reflects now, with unprompted honesty, "I don't think I really knew what I was doing for at least 10 years of my career. You know, I think I was just flying by the seat of my pants.

"Early on, I did O'Casey and Jean-Paul Sartre -- I had no right to do those things, I didn't like them very much. But I did them anyway because I thought it would be a good idea at the time."

It's rather touching that Mendes should volunteer this information; it means that, as someone who has always been good at what he does, he understands the risks of competence. Because his style is subtle, and because even his least successful work is well-crafted, it's an important distinction to make. In the theatre, Mendes's work is characterised by a quickness and a clarity and a peerless respect for words -- in Stoppard's description, "always interesting but never crazy". None of this translates as swagger.

As for his films, other than their visual grace and their unerringly excellent performances, there's little to link Mendes's four movies -- American Beauty, an intermittently surreal take on American suburbia; the sleek Paul Newman gangster film Road to Perdition; Jarhead, which revolves around the idea of wasted troops in a desert war; and Revolutionary Road, a work of virtuosic mid-century intimacy. They are mainstream studio movies with major box-office stars, made by a British theatre director who eschews Hollywood endings and always has final cut. It's an unusual combination: auteurish licence without an auteur's signature.

Three weeks after our first meeting, I join Mendes at the Museum of Modern Art, where Revolutionary Road has just been screened, and several cast members are due to speak at a Q&A session afterwards. He is casually hanging around in the foyer with the film's screenwriter, Justin Haythe. We amble through to the auditorium. Only when everyone is seated and the rest of the cast introduced by the moderator do Winslet and DiCaprio make their starrily timed entrances.

I had asked Mendes what he'd discovered about Winslet when they worked together, and he said: "Quite a lot, really -- a surprising amount for somebody I know very, very well. You watch this face that you think you know and expressions pass across it that you've never seen. It's very... exciting."

Mendes met Winslet in 2001, when he had her in mind for parts in his simultaneous productions of Uncle Vanya and Twelfth Night. Winslet had no interest in the job -- her daughter was a baby, and the theatre project required a commitment of a year. But, as she has said on several occasions, "When your agent calls and says Sam Mendes wants to have lunch, you say OK." (She told this story a few weeks ago at a stage event organised by the New York Times, and Mendes quipped: "She doesn't say OK any more.") Richard Eyre, who had just directed Winslet in Iris and had overseen several of Mendes's productions at the National Theatre, claims to have "played Cupid". "They both separately asked me my opinion of the other. They were both slightly bashful about it" -- perhaps because it came so soon after Winslet's separation from Mia's father, Jim Threapleton, a shift that caused something of a media stir at the time. Since then, Eyre says, "Kate's been very, very good for Sam -- giving him stability and children. He's become less insulated, more gregarious."

Mendes has never been a 'genius' in the traditional neurotic mould; he's much more like a charismatic magician with a seemingly bottomless bag of very elegant tricks. This in itself can be nerve-racking. Mendes tells me about his very first moment in motion pictures. There he was, with a budget of $15m, several high-profile stars and a veteran cinematographer, yet he had to approach Conrad Hall before the first day of shooting American Beauty and say: "I know this sounds really stupid, but when do I say 'Action'?"

Hall explained; the moment arrived; Mendes said it. Instantly, he drifted off into a reverie of boyish excitement. "I'm thinking: Oh my God, I just said 'Action'! That's amazing! I'm in Los Angeles, California and I actually said, 'Action'! And the whole crew is standing there looking at me and I say, 'What?' I'd forgotten to say 'Cut'."

Before the Oscar ceremony that year, someone from the BBC said to Mendes: "You are aware that it would be a big disappointment if it didn't win?"

Mendes thought: "How is it possible that not winning the Academy Award for my first movie would be considered a disappointment?" But then, as he would put it, he pulled the Oscar out of his arse.

Now that his life is no longer about the whizz-kiddish things he can pull out of anywhere, it's possible to see that he has a solid set of less spectacular and arguably more impressive gifts. Behind the scenes, Mendes bridges generations and worlds without difficulty: the UK and the US, theatre and film, writers and actors, art and commerce, studio executives and everyone else. He protects people fiercely. Eggers and Vida were amazed that when Mendes promised that they wouldn't have to rewrite anything they didn't want to rewrite, they really didn't. Tom Stoppard is impressed that Mendes's attention to detail in the text is "on the scale of syllables".

Actors trust him implicitly. Speaking about theatre, he'll say that it's not a director's medium and that he doesn't want to get between the actors and the writing. About film, he'll tell you he doesn't want the direction to get in the way of the actors' relationship with the audience. He erases himself, while in the background he's willing, as he puts it, to "soak up the s***".

"There's a political side to it," Mendes explains, "and I'm lucky that I'm very thick-skinned, and very tenacious. I don't mind the dance that you have to do in order to get something made -- the hoops you have to jump through, the fake smiles you have to adopt. You just have to. No one is entitled to anything: you have to earn it." One of his predominant talents, in other words, lies in making it seem as though things have happened by osmosis, when really they have happened because of him.

I turn up at the stage door of the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Mendes arrives, jovial as ever, and gives me a hug. He shows me the place where they're rehearsing: the actors are milling about a large daylit room covered in randomly overlapping Persian rugs. It looks as though he expects the performers to fall on the floor at any moment, but he says this is a habit of his -- the rugs just make people feel more comfortable. Here and there, bits of coloured masking tape mark out certain boundaries, but they rehearse in the centre of the room, without any sense of where the audience might be, so that they're not always thinking about being watched. It's a very graphic representation of the protected environment Mendes offers.

"His rehearsals," Tom Stoppard says of these latest sessions, "are very quiet, and very exploratory, and nobody, presumably including Sam, knew where the furniture might be for what seemed like weeks. Whereas nine times out of 10, on your first day of rehearsal you're shown a model of the set. With Sam, there was no model because there was no set -- which I found slightly alarming, slightly breathtaking, but fundamentally brave and admirable."

Mendes is good at rewriting such rules. When preparing Revolutionary Road, the cast rehearsed for three-and- a-half weeks, and shot everything in sequence and on location, so that by the end Winslet and DiCaprio were genuinely stifled by the small, claustrophobic house in which they were shooting. "I've never done so much off-camera work in my life," DiCaprio said at MoMA of Mendes's theatre ensemble method. "At the beginning, Leo looked like a movie star," Mendes tells me, "and by the end he looked like Gollum. I remember saying: 'That's it, Leo. It's a wrap.' And he just burst into tears."

Kevin Spacey says that "one of the things I've always admired about Sam is that the kind of direction he gives is really accessible for an actor to understand. Also, he knows when to give you a note. There are some directors who talk too much, or give you a note way before you're ready to hear it. He has the skill to observe where you are, and what you need, at a very specific moment."

Mendes takes me downstairs to a dressing room so that we can continue our conversation. He bends back over his chair, his spine cricking audibly as he stretches after a good morning's rehearsal, and has mushroom soup delivered for lunch.

He is so affable, and so articulate, that as an interview subject he can be a little disconcerting: where, you wonder, is the friction, the grit, the mystery? Eventually I become so exasperated with this search that I present the problem to him outright.

He laughs, of course. "I have many, many flaws, believe me," he says, sidling up to a slightly different point. "I obviously won't list them for you, but if you want to talk to my wife..." (As it happens, his wife declines to elaborate.) I put the question another way: What's the biggest risk you've ever taken?

Without missing a beat, he says: "Getting married. And having children. But professional risk? Oh, doing my first film was a massive risk. Running a theatre was a massive risk. Retrospectively, it all seems to have been a piece of p*** -- people forget. I took on a theatre, I could have fallen flat on my arse. I directed in the West End when I was young, I could have fallen flat on my arse. I directed a movie, I could have fallen flat on my arse. You know, I've worked f****** hard."

Mendes is governed not by straightforward ease or entitlement, but by the sleight of hand that masks his own determination. As a wrap present for Revolutionary Road, Haythe gave him a signed photo of Bjorn Borg, because Mendes had told him early on in the proceedings: "If you're going to direct a film, you'd better make bloody sure you're channelling Bjorn Borg and not John McEnroe." Mendes has no recollection of having said this, but he loves the photo, and has it on the bookshelf in his office. It's of Borg on his knees in jubilation -- proof that channelling him can mean more things than mere unswerving calm.

As he leaves to go back into the rehearsal room, Mendes tells me a story about his son. Joe's schoolteacher took him aside the other day, he says, because she wanted to tell him about a conversation she'd overheard between Joe and his best friend, Nicholas. They were standing in the hallway, looking at the trophy cabinet.

"My dad's got one of those," Joe said, "it's called an Oscar."

"What's it for?" asked Nicholas, adding hopefully: "Soccer?"

"No," replied Joe, "it's for farting and burping."

Nicholas nodded. "Cool," he said.

Mendes laughs proudly. Then he looks briefly worried. "I don't know when I'm going to break the news to him that it's for a stupid old movie."

'Revolutionary Road' is due to open on January 30. 'The Cherry Orchard' and 'The Winter's Tale' run in rep theatre from May 23 to August 15 at the Old Vic, in London. For more information, visit www.oldvictheatre.com

© Observer

- Gaby Wood