Parenting & Family Quote by Sam Mendes

A line like this lands because it’s so cheerfully wrong. “I like throwing snowballs at small children” borrows the cadence of an innocent confession and swaps in a petty act of cruelty, turning the speaker into a cartoon villain for half a beat. The humor isn’t in the image of a snowball so much as the social violation: adults aren’t supposed to take pleasure in targeting kids, and “small” intensifies the imbalance. Mendes is playing with power in miniature, letting the audience feel the jolt of impropriety while safely reading it as a joke.

Coming from a director, the line also works as a kind of self-parody about authorship. Directors are professionally tasked with “throwing things” at characters - pressure, obstacles, embarrassment - then shaping the fallout into a story. Recast as snowballs, that godlike manipulation becomes playground mischief: low-stakes, kinetic, a little mean, and undeniably fun. The subtext is less “I’m cruel” than “I enjoy the mischievous control of causing a reaction,” which is practically a job description for someone who orchestrates emotional weather on set.

Context matters: this kind of quote typically emerges in a light interview where hyperbole signals personality, not policy. It’s a performative quip meant to puncture the solemn auteur myth. Mendes, associated with controlled, prestige seriousness, gets to show he can be impish - and the audience gets permission to laugh at the idea that seriousness is just another pose a director can turn on and off.