Romeo + Juliet
(1996)
William Shakespeare’s tragedy is reimagined as a post-modern urban gangster movie.
I had an overhead deal with Fox, and Romeo + Juliet was certainly not what they wanted. I think everybody wanted Strictly Ballroom
But that’s not how I proceed. I have these ideas or things I want to do, and one of the things I always wondered, having been a scholar of Shakespeare—he’s my go-to, really, kind of my guiding light—was the question: if Shakespeare were here, how would he make a movie?
I’d done a crazy thing once in Australia, with a girlfriend of mine, where we went into a boys’ prison—more than a reform school, a place with serious offenders—and did a radical theater company. We did some scenes from Romeo and Juliet with the boys, and I thought they’d kill us. But it was amazing how quickly they took to the idea of playing both Romeo and Juliet. It was unbelievably freeing for them. I only remembered that the other day.
At the time I was thinking about my next movie, I was really focused on the idea of reinventing the musical. I really thought I could do that, but I knew it was going to be quite labor-intensive. I needed to learn more, to study musicals and learn more how to actually make or produce music. I thought, “Well, that seems too big to do right now. Why don’t I do something really small that I could knock off pretty quickly as a short adventure? What if Shakespeare made a movie?” That turned into an epic journey of unimaginable proportions, with me ending up in Mexico with 19-year-old Leonardo Dicaprio and a young Claire Danes.
One day someone should make a movie about the making of that film. I mean, we had our own army. We had things like our hair and makeup person being kidnapped, and us getting him back for $2,000. (Or was it $200?) Take the church scene where the helicopter attacks Leo. It was a real helicopter shooting at him, and it blew out all the windows in the local neighborhood. We shouldn’t have been there. And it was a totally real church. The candles were real, the neon lights were real. There was no artificiality. The final shot at the end was just the camera on a rope being winched up into the ceiling. The romance of making that, plus all the difficulty and drama, was epic. So, I went from Strictly Ballroom to this epic cinematic creative adventure.
It’s ironic to me that a lot of commentators called it “MTV Shakespeare”. I don’t mind, but MTV had nothing to do with it. I’ve never made an MTV thing in my life. What I was coming at was the way Shakespeare would do high and low comedy to disarm you. He would then slash that by flipping to high tragedy. I’m alright with it, but people back in the day would just say, “It’s bonkers.” But it’s prevailed, and it’s prevailed because there’s a method and process to the madness, if that makes sense.
I can give you an example: if you look at Romeo + Juliet, you’ll see there’s no actual objects in there that date it. At some point we were going to maybe have rollerblades and a Sony Walkman, but I knew that would date it. The cars are not dateable, the clothes are not dateable. That’s why it’s so profoundly copied. Even now, 25 years later, it’s still copied in fashion because it has its own world. But even in Strictly Ballroom, you can’t exactly tell if it’s the ’80s or the early ’90s. It’s slightly timeless. I build my films to move through time and geography, and mostly I build them for the future.