Age: 60
male
Sir Samuel Alexander Mendes CBE (born 1 August 1965) is a British film and stage director, producer, and screenwriter. In 2000, Mendes was appointed a CBE for his services to drama, and he was knighted in the 2020 New Year Honours List. In 2000, Mendes was awarded the Shakespeare Prize by the Alfred Toepfer Foundation in Hamburg, Germany. In 2005, he received a lifetime achievement award from the Directors Guild of Great Britain. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 15 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". Born in Berkshire to a Trinidadian Catholic father and an English Jewish mother, Mendes grew up in North London. He read English at Peterhouse at Cambridge University. He began directing plays there before joining Donmar Warehouse, a centre of 1990s London theatre culture. In theatre, he is known for his dark re-inventions of the stage musicals Cabaret (1993), Oliver! (1994), Company (1995), and Gypsy (2003). For the first time, he directed an original West End stage musical with Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2013). For his work on the London stage, Mendes has received three Laurence Olivier Awards for Company, Twelfth Night, and The Ferryman. On Broadway, he earned two Tony Awards for Best Direction of a Play for The Ferryman in 2019 and The Lehman Trilogy in 2022. In film, he made his directorial debut with the drama American Beauty (1999), which earned him the Academy Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Director. He has since directed the films Road to Perdition (2002), Jarhead (2005), Revolutionary Road (2008), and the James Bond films Skyfall (2012) and Spectre (2015). For the war film 1917 (2019), he received the BAFTA Award and Golden Globe Award for Best Director, as well as his second Academy Award nomination for Best Director, Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. Description above from the Wikipedia article Sam Mendes, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Off the coast of Panama, treasure hunter Nathan "Nate" Drake (Nolan North) and journalist Elena Fisher (Emily Rose) excavate the coffin of English explorer Sir Francis Drake, Nate's supposed ancestor, whose ring (in Nate's possession) has coordinates leading to that location. Instead of a body, the duo find only a small notebook, which Nathan refuses to allow Elena to read. A small fleet of pirates attack their ship and set it on fire, destroying any record of their find save for the notebook and Elena's camera. After getting her to safety, Nate holds a private discussion with Victor "Sully" Sullivan (Richard McGonagle), his old friend and mentor. Based on clues provided by the notebook, he theorizes that Drake faked his death to cover up the discovery of El Dorado, an ancient city said to be made entirely of gold. Burdened by severe financial problems, Sully persuades him to help find the city, ditching Elena in port, as he fears that a report on the find will summon competitors. The two follow a trail left by Drake to a temple in the Amazon, where they learn that El Dorado isn't a city, but a massive gold statue, actually a sarcophagus, which was taken centuries before by Spanish Conquistadors. They follow tracks to a waterfall, where they come across an abandoned U-boat. A search of the vessel's cabins turns up a missing page from the notebook, pinpointing the statue's location in a former Spanish colony on an uncharted Pacific island, along with some dead Germans who were apparently clawed to death. Once Nate emerges from the vessel, he and Sully are confronted by another treasure hunter named Gabriel Roman (Simon Templeman), to whom Sully owes a great deal of money. Backed by his partner, archaeologist Atoq Navarro (Robin Atkin Downes), Roman forces Nate to hand over the page and shoots Sully dead when he tries to intervene. Before he can kill Nate, a loose torpedo charge previously accidentally triggered by Nate causes the U-boat to explode, distracting the gang long enough for Drake to escape. He runs into Elena, who agrees to help him find the statue, and together they use Sully's plane to travel to the old colony. The plane is shot down mid-air, separating Nate from Elena when they parachute out. He tracks her to an old fort controlled by pirates led by Eddy Raja (James Sie), an old enemy of Drake's who traps him and demands that he help him find the treasure. Elena arrives in a stolen jeep and breaks him out, but they are unable to outrun Eddy's men. Stalling for time, Nate manages to drive the jeep over a cliff and into a lake surrounding the colony's port. Tired, injured, and grieving Sully's death, Nate decides to give up and return home. Elena convinces him to see Drake's work through, and the two work together to reach the crumbling customs house, where Nate is able to trace the statue to an inland monastery. While on reconnaissance, they discover that Roman has also found the statue with help from the supposedly-dead Sully. While in pursuit, Elena falls through a bridge and reluctantly discards her camera so that Nate can save her. Nate subsequently catches up to Sully and accuses him of betrayal, to which Sully reveals that he was only pretending to help, having survived Roman's bullet because of Drake's notebook in his shirt's breast-pocket preventing a fatal wound. The trio fight their way through Roman′s men, reaching an underground chamber where Nate believes the statue is buried. Meanwhile, Eddy, consumed by paranoia, warns Roman that an unearthly force has been killing off his men, which the former dismisses as nonsense. Nate investigates the chamber but not before he gets separated from Sully via a booby trapped secret doorway. Unfortunately Nate and Elena, after deciding to carry on without Sully, find not the statue but Drake's corpse, with whom he sadly leaves the ring (believing he never found the sarcophagus). A group of zombie-like creatures swarm him and his companions, including Eddy and his bodyguard. In the chaos that follows, Eddy and his man are killed. Nate and Elena press on and find themselves in an old Nazi submarine base built into the island. Looking for a way out, Nate finds a letter written by Drake exposing the truth: El Dorado is protected by a curse that turned both the Spanish colonists and the German soldiers into monsters. Drake sought to destroy it, but the creatures killed him before he could; a picture reveals that Drake's corpse was in front of the statue before it was moved by the Germans. Meanwhile, Elena is kidnapped by Roman, and Nate reunites with Sully and follows him to the statue. Encouraged by Navarro, Roman opens the sarcophagus, exposing himself to an airborne virus. As he begins to turn, Navarro guns him down and orders his men to secure the statue so that he can sell the virus to the highest bidder on the black market. Nate jumps onto the net carrying the treasure which is connected to the transport chopper while a captive Elena gets the pilot killed, causing it to crash on Navarro's cargo ship. Nate kills the remaining mercenaries and attempts to rescue Elena, only to be attacked by Navarro. After a fistfight, he pulls her out of the chopper and pushes it overboard, taking Navarro, whose leg is tangled in the rope connected to the net, and the statue with it to the bottom of the sea. Moments later, Sully arrives on a small speedboat loaded with riches from the pirates. Elena surprises Nate by returning his family ring and makes him promise to give her the story she lost. The two then embrace as Sully drives the boat into the sunset.
