Yahoo Lifestyle How Sam Mendes and Jez Butterworth Brought a New and Improved Version of “The Hills of California” to Broadway
The playwright Jez Butterworth recently had perhaps the most eventful recording session in the history of “Stagecraft,” Variety’s theater podcast.
Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below:
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'The Hills of California' Review: Sam Mendes and Jez Butterworth Deliver a Dream of a Broadway Drama
“In the course of this call, I have returned one dog to its owner and seen four foxes,” Butterworth said during a conversation with director Sam Mendes about their latest Broadway project, “The Hills of California.” With Mendes recording from New York, where “Hills” opened Sept. 29, Butterworth was beaming in to the virtual studio from the streets of London after 10 p.m., and enjoying all the color that comes with the locale.
But even with the occasional diversion, Butterworth and Mendes carried on a revealing conversation about their creative partnership, which began in the film world when Mendes tapped Butterworth to contribute to the scripts to Bond films “Skyfall” and “Spectre.” Mendes later staged Butterworth’s play “The Ferryman,” which was a West End hit and transferred to Broadway, where it won the Tony Award for Best Play in 2019.
Butterworth described his plays as “made up of indigestible losses that I put together in an order to try and make sense of them. And they’re like dreams. I have as much control over them as you have over your dreams.”
He continued, “This play was definitely born after I missed my sister who died. … It was the idea that I had not been through an experience like that before that, and I’m a writer and I was going to write about it.”
Butterworth and Mendes made some notable changes to the play, particularly to its ending, in the interim between its premiere in the West End earlier this year and its Broadway run. “This play needs much more fine tuning [than ‘The Ferryman’ did],” Mendes said. “And we found that in rewriting and adjusting from London to New York, we’ve been able to achieve that.”
It’s rare, the director noted, that “you get successful enough to go to Broadway, but at the same time, you’re wanting to make it significantly better and you make quite big and important changes. It’s not massively different, but much more changes were made than we made for ‘The Ferryman’ and much more than I made on, for example, ‘The Lehman Trilogy.'”
On “Stagecraft,” the two collaborators also talked listeners through their rehearsal process and shared what it’s like working so closely with Laura Donnelly, the actress who is Butterworth’s wife and the star of “Hills of California.” (Donnelly was nominated for a Tony for her performance in “Ferryman.”)
Mendes also discussed his new project, the HBO movie-industry comedy “The Franchise,” and recalled his own experience working on franchise films in the James Bond series.
“I don’t think I really understood the franchise-ness of Bond until I was in the middle of it,” he said. “It is quite weird, when you’re a director and you’re used to being the person who is the generating engine of these projects, to be jumping onto an already moving train.”
Mendes said he was done with franchise films, at least for the moment — his next movie project is an ambitious, four-film series about the Beatles — but he found much to appreciate in the experience. “It’s a heady and exciting thing to know for certain when you make a movie that it is going to enter the main artery of the culture, whether it’s any good or not,” he said. “It could be rubbish, but everyone is going to talk about it for a spell.”
To hear the entire conversation, listen at the link above or download and subscribe to “Stagecraft” on podcast platforms including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the Broadway Podcast Network. New episodes of “Stagecraft” are released every other week.
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