“It’s a cracking read.”
William Oldroyd, un réalisateur prometteur.
Au XIXème siècle, quelque part en Grande-Bretagne, un propriétaire terrien a acheté un domaine et une épouse pour son fils. La jeune femme (Florence Pugh) isolée et délaissée par son époux a interdiction de sortir. Elle se morfond… jusqu’au jour où elle croise le regard d’un de ses fermiers. The Young Lady est le premier film austère et hypnotisant de William Oldroyd. Portrait.
As a theatre director, William Oldroyd has done his share of Shakespeare. But his film-making debut, Lady Macbeth, has nothing to do with the Bard. Featuring a mesmeric lead performance by Florence Pugh – the discovery of Carol Morley’s film The Falling – it’s the 19th-century story of Katherine, a young married woman in the north of England who frees herself from the shackles of patriarchy in the most drastic way. Written by playwright Alice Birch, it’s adapted from Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, an 1860s Russian novel by Nikolai Leskov, which also inspired an opera by Shostakovich.
BACKGROUND
2.The book is almost forgotten today but Oldroyd, 37, says: “It’s a cracking read. We’re used to so much literature of that period where women either suffer in silence or run away. Katherine full-bloodedly takes her destiny in both hands. It’s in the Jacobean tragic tradition.”
3. This former theology student originally planned to become a priest but lost his faith at university in Durham and discovered theatre instead. He got into directing by accident, when taking part in a revue in Edinburgh: “When you weren’t actually on stage, you were sitting back and telling your mates why they weren’t funny. That, I realised, was basically directing.”
4.He went on to be an assistant at theatres including the Almeida and the Barbican, had a directing residency at the Young Vic; and has travelled the world staging Beckett in Germany, Sartre’s Kean in Japan, baroque opera in Portugal and Donizetti at Sadler’s Wells.
5.Raised in Guildford, Oldroyd first tried his hand at film during a stint at art school, making video diaries on the short-lived Flip camera. But it took him a long time to evolve the rigorous style of Lady Macbeth. “The first short I made was a scene from a play. I shot it in a field from one angle, because that was where I was used to sitting in a theatre. I thought, why doesn’t this work?”
6.He became a lot more confident on his 2013 short Best, a fiveminute two-hander that won the Sundance London Short Film Competition. Now he is poised for his first US project, an adaptation of Walter Mosley’s novel The Man in My Basement.