STEFAN DECHANT, THE TRAGEDY OF MACBETH

Director Joel Coen “never wanted to deny that the text was written for a theatrical experience,” explains production designer Stefan Dechant of the idea behind the filmed version of William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Macbeth for Apple TV+. “We wanted to engage artifice right away, and we wanted to kind of create this hybrid between cinema and theater.”

To achieve that abstraction, the director turned to black and white and the Academy aspect ratio. But a major touchstone for the look of the film was the work of Danish director Carl Theodor Dreyer, particularly his 1928 masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc. “The setting is what’s holding the emotion and that performance in there. It’s not distracting from that,” Dechant says of Joan of Arc, adding that for Macbeth, “We tried to simplify the frame and reduce the number of elements that we had in each set, so that we were creating a visual haiku almost [with] the psychological space that we could create.”

Additional inspiration for the sets (the movie was shot on stages at Warner Bros.) came from the early 1900s Shakespearean works of theater designer Edward Gordon Craig — “he was working with a lot of rhythmic elements in terms of these very simple shapes” — and the architectural photography of Hiroshi Sugimoto.

“There’s this repetition of imagery that’s running in the text, and we tried to create that as well in the sets,” explains Dechant, citing repeating archways as an example.

He also used the design for foreshadowing, pointing to the layout of the columns in the throne room of Dunsinane. “That’s a reflection of Birnam Wood. It’s laid out the same distance and with the same rhythm of Birnam Wood, so that when the prophecy has been called out — of Birnam Wood coming to Dunsinane — and Macbeth goes and opens those grand windows at the far end of the hall, all those leaves rush in and then lay across the floor. The columns have now become the alley of trees. Visually, Birnam Wood has come to Dunsinane.”

Top: Renée Jeanne Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s The Passion of Joan of Arc. Above: Frances McDormand as Lady Macbeth in The Tragedy of Macbeth.

Stefan Dechant describes the minimalist sets for the Apple TV+ drama as “a visual haiku” allowing to play with “psychological space.”