Ever the man to conjure up a polished stage performance, Sam Mendes arrived in Edinburgh last night as an Oscar-winning film director and, true to form, soon had his audience in the palm of his hand — even without the presence of his leading ladies.

Mendes’s latest offering, Away We Go, opened the Edinburgh International Film Festival with an international premiere that brought the lightest sprinkling of stardust to the city’s Cineworld theatre. Two of the film’s leads, John Krasinski and Carmen Ejogo, attended, with Frank Langella, who played the president in the recent hit movie Frost/Nixon.

Crowds who had gathered in the city centre were disappointed by the absence of both Kate Winslet — Mendes’s wife, who was “looking after the kids” — and Maggie Gyllenhaal, the film’s female lead. Instead they had to make do with the festival patron, Sir Sean Connery, who lingered on the red carpet, soaking up the sights of his home city.

Happily for the locals, Mendes had struck all the right notes at the film’s press conference when he helped to shore up Edinburgh’s big screen reputation. After long being embedded among Edinburgh’s other festivals in its frenetic August season, the 11-day jamboree is running in June for only the second time in its history.

Mendes said that everything about Edinburgh — timings, scale, city — worked perfectly for him. It was all so much nicer than other, gaudier, festivals, like that one in France for example. He “particularly didn’t” want to take his movie to Cannes, whose scale could dwarf other films.

“I love Edinburgh. It seemed a great match,” said Mendes. “I’m delighted that its British premiere gets to be here rather than in some giant red carpet event where the whole things is dwarfed by the publicity machine of the festival as a whole. Movies like this get a better look-in at a place like this.”

Fortunately for festival organisers, Mendes had not done too much homework about this year’s event. Last month his fellow director Ken Loach called for moviemakers to boycott Edinburgh unless the festival returned a £300 travel grant from the Israeli Embassy, which had been awarded to Tali Shalom-Ezer, a young Israeli director, to enable her to attend a screening of her film Surrogate.

The organisers complied with Loach’s demand, sparking anger among other film-makers and artists. Protests continued this week, with a letter to The Times from Nicholas Hytner, the artistic director of the National Theatre, among nine prominent signatories who scorned Loach’s “loud statements” that “help no one”.

Mendes, who otherwise appears to revel in his sense of Britishness in an American-dominated industry, said that he had not been following the UK news and had “no opinion at all” on the matter — except to say that he was dying to see Loach’s film, Looking for Eric.

The Edinburgh experience is nothing new to Mendes, who first came to the city about 20 years ago as a student theatre director with a production of Tim Firth’s play Hexen. That was the prelude to a stage career that saw him direct for the Royal Shakespeare Company and at the Donmar Warehouse in London. He recently produced the Broadway adaptation of Shrek.

Despite his Oscar-winning Hollywood debut, American Beauty, and the recent and acclaimed Revolutionary Road, this continuing love of the theatre inevitably meant that his film work was relatively sporadic, he said. Away We Go was made quickly last summer and on a relatively low budget of an estimated $1.7 million.

Krasinski, the star of the US version of The Office, said that filming had taken eight weeks. After Mendes had cast his lead, he told the young American actor that he had to grow a beard for the role.

“I didn’t know how I was going to do that — but luckily I passed through puberty just before the movie,” Krasinski said.

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