ROMEO + JULIET’S POOL SCENE
One of the titular teenagers’ most famous scenes has long been performed from a balcony, as advised in Shakespeare’s stage directions. But Baz Luhrmann’s lysergic, poppy, sexy, cool interpretation doesn’t hold with tradition in any fashion.
Though Claire Danes’s Juliet does have a balconied bedroom, her red-hot love connection with Leonardo DiCaprio’s Romeo happens as the duo fall into a dappled swimming pool together before splashing and swirling their way to a climatic kiss. Luhrmann came up with the conceit during production for the 1996 film, deciding that the H2O added an extra, teasing, dimension to the scene: “using the water so they can almost be together and not together” as they wade, swim and dive through the Bard’s romantic words.
Building the pool on the set in Mexico City where cast and crew had decamped, Luhrmann needed to shoot fast, as Danes was still in school and could only work limited hours. She was also wearing a wig for her role, which meant a special ‘in-water’ hairpiece needed to be crafted so that it reacted as natural hair and not as a follicle sponge. Both constraints meant that as soon as Danes fell in the pool, production only had an hour to film her and DiCaprio wet. For Luhrmann, the pressure only added a frisson to proceedings, creating the crackling chemistry that leaps off the screen when viewing the film. “That’s why I think the scene has such vibrancy,’ he concluded recently. “Even just standing next to each other there’s a sort of vibration – because there’s a sense that we have to live it and do it. There’s not a lot of second chances. The water adds an environment that makes it essential that it isn’t all about touching – until they do touch.”
It wasn’t the only do-or-die moment during filming – production was plagued by a hurricane that wrecked sets (you can see the foreboding clouds looming during the Veracruz beach scenes) and key hairdresser Aldo Signoretti was kidnapped and ransomed for $300. But the visceral buzz, the tangible sense of danger and romance and the transporting nature of the whole endeavour only served to make this incarnation of a celebrated play an industry standard and a blockbuster hit. Jane Crowther