Sam Mendes, the award-winning director, has discussed his experience of directing s^x scenes involving his wife, Kate Winslet, and Leonardo DiCaprio.

Mendes said it was “profoundly weird” to direct any s^x scene, but especially when it involved his wife.

For the s^x scenes in Revolutionary Road, Mendes moved the monitor screens into another room and watched from there while the actors listened for his instructions.

He shouted instructions such as “Leo, don’t bang her head so hard against the kitchen cabinets!” and “Could you not do it for so long this time?”

Mendes recently won Golden Globe nominations for his latest film, as well as his upcoming theatre project, The Bridge Project, set to open in New York in January and at the Old Vic in May.

In an interview with The Sunday Times, Mendes talks about his work and family life. He and Winslet have two children together, Joe, five, and Mia, eight, from Winslet’s first marriage.

Mendes is one of the busiest men in New York, but considers his current workload relatively light compared to his previous years.

“I spent 20 years looking for every available opportunity to work, and now… I don’t,” he says.

“Really, spending time with the kids is the defining… You know how it is, I just don’t want to go away.”

Winslet gave Mendes Richard Yates’s novel, Revolutionary Road, and Mendes directed the film adaptation.

The film has been nominated for four Golden Globe awards, including Best Director and Best Motion Picture.

Mendes directed his first film, American Beauty, when he was 34 years old. It went on to win five Academy Awards.

He was also the founder and artistic director of the Donmar Warehouse in central London for 10 years.

Mendes has always been a self-confident and talented director, with a background in sport and an interest in art.

However, he admits that he did not know what he was doing for the first 10 years of his career.

He says he was “flying by the seat of my pants” and did not always like the plays he directed.

Mendes was born in Reading, England, and grew up near Oxford with his mother, a publisher and author of young adult novels.

His Portuguese-Trinidadian father and British Jewish mother divorced when he was three years old.

Mendes did not go to the theatre as a child, but his father occasionally took him to the cinema.

His education in film and theatre began at Cambridge University, where he put on a student production of David Halliwell’s play, Little Malcolm and his Struggle Against the Eunuchs.

Richard Eyre, a friend of Mendes and the former director of the National Theatre in London, says Mendes’s self-confidence may come from his isolated childhood and from his success in sport.

Mendes was hired by the Chichester Festival Theatre because of his sporting abilities, and because the theatre’s director was tired of losing their annual cricket match to the Royal Shakespeare Company.

Mendes’s work in the theatre is characterised by a quickness and clarity, as well as a respect for words.

His style is subtle, and his least successful work is still well-crafted. Tom Stoppard, the playwright, describes Mendes’s work as “always interesting but never crazy”.

Kevin Spacey, who starred in American Beauty and is now artistic director of the Old Vic, tells a story about Mendes’s first day of shooting American Beauty.

Mendes told the studio that the first day’s footage was “s***” and asked to reshoot it. The studio agreed, and the new footage made it into the final cut of the film.