Education Quote by Sam Mendes

Mendes is refusing the comforting, prestige-drama lie that moral complexity automatically adds up to moral balance. The opening gesture - "There's good and bad in everybody" - sounds like the polite, humanist baseline we expect from a serious director. Then he yanks it away: he "wasn't looking" for either side. That’s the tell. He’s not interested in a psychological audit that lets the audience feel wise for spotting shades of gray; he’s interested in the machinery of a choice already made.

"Signed his pact with the devil 20 years ago" is deliberately mythic language for something grimly practical: a career-defining compromise, a violent act, a corruption you don’t outrun. It frames the character less as a man who keeps falling than as a man who built a life on the fall. Mendes’s subtext is about time as an accomplice. Two decades is long enough for the initial sin to harden into routine, for self-justifications to become daily weather, for guilt to be managed rather than faced.

The sharpest twist is the final line: "He's tried to protect his family from it". Protection becomes complicity’s favorite alibi. Mendes doesn’t absolve the character; he explains the seduction of the role. A person can be ruthless in public and tender in private and use that tenderness as proof he’s not a monster. The intent is to keep the audience in an uncomfortable place: not asking whether he’s good or bad, but watching how someone learns to live inside a moral decision and calls it duty.