Romeo + Juliet: “Appear Thou in the Likeness of a Sigh . . .”
From Australian Style, January 1997. Reprinted by permission of the author.
When I catch up with Baz Luhrmann, the Australian director whose Romeo + Juliet is number one at the American box office, he has “flown the coop” and is on a road trip across America. “I’ve got away from the circus we’ve been doing,” he says of the media blitz. His version of Romeo and Juliet is also a circus in its own right, ultra-modern, splashy, and stylish, melding Latino street cool, pop-culture speed, and Elizabethan stage language with the theatrical dash of Natural Born Killers. After Luhrmann’s first film, Strictly Ballroom, his new one is a quantum leap, with shining performances from its leads, Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. Talking to the filmmaker, one can sense a compacted confidence that spills into the way he emphatically accents words. You can almost feel American success massed underneath and contained. Luhrmann spoke to me from the heart of the Nevada Desert: “My team and I usually spend our time in LA or New York, or Miami, where we wrote Romeo + Juliet. But to understand America, you’ve really got to go into the middle.”
Mark Mordue: It’s funny that you’re in the desert. There was a vicious westerly in Sydney a day ago. It was so dry and bitter, so intense, I didn’t know whether to break down and cry or kill someone.
Baz Luhrmann: Really? Oh yeah, I remember those in Sydney. Spooky.
MM: I’ve always liked that in Shakespeare’s plays—the idea of a cosmos out of kilter—and the way it relates to the souls of the antagonists and their world. Was that important to you?
BL: It was an absolute, given that people then believed natural signs and symbols were indicative of the way in which the world was going. So there’s a very specific reason why there’s a discussion in the film about this kind of wind you talk of, that “blows us from our course.” Every decision made in the film came out of a long and meticulous analysis of the Elizabethan world.
MM: I love the way you’ve adapted Romeo + Juliet to the present by brewing up a pop culture storm with it.
BL: I’ll tell you something about pop culture in terms of this film. At the moment, there’s a storm in the US about it—people are running round saying, “How come William Shakespeare is number one at the box office?” And others are going, “How come the style changes every thirty-five seconds?” The easy answer is that, as everyone says, it’s an MTV version. But in fact we drew our style, if you like “the pop style,” from the pop king—and the King of Pop in the Elizabethan world was William Shakespeare.
I mean, you’d die faced with three thousand drunken screaming punters. You would do anything, but anything, to grab their attention and pull them into focus and tell your story. So, with Shakespeare, you have one moment of stand-up comedy, followed by a popular song, followed by incredible violence, followed by pure drama. All those elements are written into the text, or already existed in the Elizabethan productions of Romeo + Juliet.
MM: I found the energy inspiring, although a part of me felt an odd kind of sadness. I guess, in this weird way, because I’m thirty-six, I felt a strange sense of divorce from that passion. Even, if I’m honest, almost a bit of jealousy about it.
BL: That’s interesting, Mark. And I think it’s exactly what the piece is about. I mean, lots of young people rush out to see it and go, “Hey I get the idea of love as an out of control sports car, as a drug.” But we people who have passed through that—once you’ve had that first hit and it doesn’t kill you, as it does Romeo and Juliet—once you survive that, you control it. You learn to drive your car. But the memory remains.
So the really big idea in the piece is about what it means for the adult world. Which is: don’t go passing your prejudice, or your judgment, or your bitterness, or your anger, down to younger people. Because in a world of learned hate, innocents are going to get killed and you’re going to lose something you love. So the point is that you sit there as an older person and go, “Yeah, I remember what that was like. I remember how it was to be out of control with love.”
MM: Lately a new cinema language seems to be evolving. Oliver Stone’s Natural Born Killers is obviously a part of that. I wondered how it influenced you. And I also wonder how you see cinema language shifting generally and what you make of those who dismiss things as “MTV.” It’s as if people are living in an old narrative space and don’t know how to cope with this new language.
BL: Look, I agree with all those points. It’s a huge subject. I remember being at an early screening of Natural Born Killers with Oliver Stone, before he did the final cut, and he actually was mimicking MTV. But I think the choices we made for Romeo + Juliet came from the understanding that Shakespeare would do anything to engage audiences and tell a story. Having said that, the reason our audience can make sense of how we’re telling them the story has something to do with MTV. And with television news and commercials.
I wasn’t influenced by Natural Born Killers. . . . Maybe I was . . . I don’t know. But I’ll tell you, I have been influenced by the style of Hindi movies. If you look at an Indian movie, a really great Indian movie: it goes for three hours, and it has a Busby Berkeley musical routine, and then it will have the most violent murder scene next to it. . . .
It makes complete sense for us to do that too. You think of Victorian eclecticism. Because what we are doing is: we are summing up. We are moving towards the end of a millennium. We’re at the end of a big period. And we’re summing up everything that has come before.
MM: As soon as I saw Romeo + Juliet, I thought, “Wow, teenagers are going to see this and go oooff!”
BL: Well that has certainly happened. I’m trying to avoid saying this, but in fact it’s true: younger people just get it. And if there’s a fight in America over it being good or bad for Shakespeare, Europeans and Australians just go “yeah!” Because people outside of America look at the world as . . . Australians particularly look at the world as being made up of bits, and have no problem with a Europeanness mixed with an Americanness that ultimately, I hope, makes up a third element.
MM: What about your style of filmmaking, which has a very camp and flamboyant edge? I wondered how much gay culture’s been an influence on you?
BL: Well, I think the whole of Australia is a bit gay. . . . Camp is a style that’s been around for a long, long time. To quote Oscar Wilde, it’s dealing with a very serious subject matter in a very silly way, so that you can deal with it. It’s really just a style of wit. The world has been bogged down by an over-cerebral perspective on things. I think to disarm those who take a basic cold, intellectual approach to everything is a great strategy. That’s not to say that what we’re doing has no meaning. Everything we do is strong, everything we do is decorative, and everything we do is our style. You can say it is camp or gay or whatever—what that means, in truth, is that it’s disarmingly fun, but it deals with something of meaning. Certainly of meaning to us.
MM: In the wake of Strictly Ballroom and Muriel’s Wedding and Priscilla, a certain kitsch stylisation is now embedded in Australian cinema, something a little too stereotypical. Have you been held to account for that?
BL: A little bit. But the choice is this: I could have been a very, very rich man today by accepting the many, many offers for millions of dollars to simply fit into the system and say, “Oh yeah, we’ll do that American movie with that American script.”
But we didn’t. And I must say “we”: Romeo + Juliet is an Australian-Canadian co-production, but it is an Australian film. We “pre” and “posted” it in Australia and it was shot with an Australian team. We worked with Fellini’s hair and make-up people—different people who we thought were brilliant from around the world—but we made our thing. We decided to make it. We went out and made it. And we made it in our style.
The European press refer to it as “Fellini-esque.” They don’t say it’s “Australian kitsch stylization,” not that I mind if people say that. It’s our style. It’s the way we tell. You think we’re going to relinquish that? For what? To embrace what some pretentious person decides is art? What is less artful about what Fellini does or what Oscar Wilde does? Does it have less meaning!?
I don’t mind being held to account for opening a door to do that. I don’t say it’s the only style, but it is the way we see things. One of the things I learnt from David Hockney—whom I got to know because he’s a great fan of my operas—is that he makes a decision about the way he sees things. He says, “Whatever you do, don’t judge the way you see it.” I’ve seen many, many Australian pure creatives become self-conscious about their style because a whole bunch of people have said, “Uh oh!” Big deal. In truth, style is truth to us. That’s all that really matters.
MM: You have a thing about reacting to institutionalization. . . .
BL: Yes, I do.
MM: It was a prevalent theme in both Strictly Ballroom and Romeo + Juliet. Can you comment on where it comes from?
BL: There is something linking both the films. I don’t want to get too self-conscious about it, but let me say that, clearly, the trick with Strictly Ballroom was to create something very simple that, like Shakespeare, could be read both as a simple story, as light entertainment, and in terms of its bigger ideas. And the bigger idea of Strictly Ballroom is about artistic repression.
With Romeo + Juliet, we actually took about a year to convince the studios that we should do it in this manner. And while it might be about the adult world telling these young lovers that they can’t love this person because of their names, it could easily be because of their race, their sexuality, or their religion.
I get angry about this, about the way that institutions are constantly at odds with creative endeavours. We were told when we were trying to make Strictly Ballroom, “Oh, Australian films aren’t like that. It’ll never work; no one will want to see that.” We had to fight.
And I am passionate about this subject because I think that one of the distinctive things about Australians is that we allow ourselves to be repressed because a lot of fear-loaded people say, “Uh, that makes me uncomfortable.” I remember once driving in Sydney with a taxi driver. It was in 1988, the year of the bicentenary, and there was discussion about how we should spend the money to celebrate the occasion. He said, “I reckon they should build a museum to all the truly great, great ideas that Australians have had, that they’ve had to go overseas and make, and that have been sold back to Australia.” That really stuck with me. I thought, “You’re right, you know. The beginnings of the computer. The beginnings of television. . . .”
It’s changed now, and that’s why I’m coming back to Australia to make films from there. Imagination is so potent in Australia, but the struggle continues. We have to believe in our own imagination, because—let’s face it—in a world where technology takes care of the rest, imagination is the only valuable asset. I don’t think I’m the only person to say that. I think Einstein had a little phrase that wasn’t too dissimilar. It’s true. What is going to become more and more valuable as time goes on? Only imagination.
MM: Which is an instinct or a map?
BL: It is an instinct. Hollywood is a place full of scared people. And people who do what we do are paid to have an instinct. It’s not that we know. It’s not that anybody knows. It’s that you have a strong instinct. And people come to say, “Hmm, that Baz Luhrmann and his team, they seem to have a strong instinct about what to tell and what to do.” That’s really all it is.
MM: Can you tell me about Leonardo DiCaprio? You’ve said you feel that he “defines a generation.”
BL: I have never anything but great things to say about D. Think of this: at the same time that we were trying to get this film made, he was being offered the incomes of small nations to make other movies. I mean three to four million dollars for a picture. But, for no money, he came to Australia, flying coach, and put himself up with his father twice to work with me to get Romeo + Juliet made. And that is something to do with his generation. Because, unlike the eighties Brat Pack, here is an extraordinarily talented young actor who is saying, “Hmm! In the end a lot of money is only a lot of money. How many hotels can you stay in? How big a pool can you have?” What he really cares about is fine acting. That’s what I love about D. He is just in love with the art of acting.
MM: That’s interesting because, when I look at him, I wonder whether he is primed for fucked-upness, and whether he is another River Phoenix on the burn?
BL: He is an incredibly down-to-earth guy, just absolutely adorable as a human being, fantastically bright, and just remarkably talented. When you have all of those things and are the focus of such adoration, it is a hard, hard thing not to be consumed by it.
If anyone has a chance of surviving it and growing, Leonardo does. It’s very easy for those of us who don’t have to deal with it to say, “Oh, what’s he got to complain about? He’s a movie star.” But I know, because I see D. a lot—he’s currently doing this big Titanic film with James Cameron and is having to deal with the explosion of this film, at number one, doing Shakespeare—he’s gone from being “that interesting young actor” to the Beatles. People can say what they like, but that’s not an easy thing to do.
MM: I love that line: “Appear thou in the likeness of a sigh.” One of the qualities that struck me about Leonardo is he manages to do that. There’s quite a feminine quality to him. I was wondering if you were aware of making that feminine quality heroic in the film.
BL: Oooh, yeah. The thing about it—why is he such great representation of a generation?—is that he’s neither man nor woman and neither boy nor man. He doesn’t have these pumping muscles. He’s a sort of anti-hero. We based the character of Romeo on James Dean and Kurt Cobain. I mean, he comes on the screen and girls scream, but at the same time he’s this very wispy looking character. So you have to say, “What is it they’re connecting with?” And I think they’re connecting with the fact he is androgynous and is, as a person, so comfortable in himself. I’m not sure the rest of the world is all that comfortable with him, and I hope that that doesn’t become a problem.
MM: How about Claire Danes? I noticed her first in Little Women and even though she was only on the screen for a short time, she radiated this luminous, calm quality. It was so pure.
BL: Well, Mark, I looked all around the world for Juliet. I saw maybe sixty Juliets, some of the most famous and finest young actors. I knew I had to find someone who was strong and grounded. And ultimately it was the same with Claire as it was with Leonardo—it was like a flash of lightning. She was the only actress who came up to Leonardo and kissed him on the lips, and Leonardo actually took notice. D. always says she was the one that really made him go “Whuuur!” The strength of her against Leonardo was a key requisite. But she is sixteen. And that’s the difference.
Pete Postlethwaite was playing Father Laurence, and he was saying for a while, “Oh, Bazza, the age-old problem of finding a sixteen year old who can act like a thirty year old. Good Luck!” And it was very difficult. It was only because Jane Campion said, “Have you seen Claire Danes?” She was casting Portrait of a Lady at the time, and she said, “You should check out Claire Bear,” as she calls her. And I did. Then I had someone who could handle Leonardo and not be blown off the screen by him, and that’s no easy task.
MM: Yeah. She just struck me so strongly. This sounds over the top, but it was almost like seeing a saint.
BL: Well, I’ll tell you what. When I was a kid I worked with Judy Davis. And she has that quality too: fragile but strong. Claire is really similar to that. She brings you that unearthly quality.
MM: America is such a bizarre, copycat culture. It imitates so much. Did dealing with the topic of suicide worry you? How to treat it? How you might be accused of ennobling something like that?
BL: It was a huge issue for us, a huge issue. And a lot of the time there was discussion with the studio about doing the suicide off-screen. But, unless you change the end of the story, ultimately the story is about two young people who commit suicide. And I wasn’t about to do that. While we were making the film there was almost an identical teenage suicide in an identical setting in Miami. The fact that it happens all the time is the reason that the story exists.
I think the most dangerous thing would have been to treat it like a soap ad and not deal with it in a strong way, to have it pleasantly happen off-screen: and there they are, dead in a pretty manner. To deal with it as a confronting thing was really the only solution.
But it is an issue. We simply dealt with the story as honestly and as simply and as powerfully as we could. And then the ramifications of that . . . because it will happen: at some point the story will happen again, because it does. And then someone will say, “Oh, influenced by Romeo + Juliet.” But whether or not that is the case you can never tell. You can only tell stories honestly.