ROMEO + JULIET
ON THE GENESIS OF THE FILM
Baz Lurhmann: The idea was to play the play in contemporary images. My thing about Shakespeare is this incredible pretense and this mentality about the rule book, about the way in which it is correct to do Shakespeare. Most of those ideas are 19th-century interpretations – very little to do with the Elizabethan stage. So I went to the studio and I told them the idea. [They said] “It’s really great, but just one thing; can you take the language out?”
ON CASTING ROMEO AND JULIET
Leonardo DiCaprio was always going to be Romeo. I just thought, ‘He’s Romeo,’ and I rang up his agent. We met and I said, ‘Look, don’t say yes or no, but come down to Sydney, go diving on the Barrier Reef and we’ll work for a week. If you like it, we’ll talk more…’ So he came down for] saw just how clear a lot of the telling of the story could be, then there was a sense of ‘it might work’.
