A notable delayed project due to the COVID-19 pandemic has to be filmmaker Joel Coen’s new take on Shakespeare’s “Macbeth” starring Denzel Washington and Frances McDormand.
Working without his brother Etan, Joel and his wife McDormand recently did an interview about the film and offered their take on how this adaptation is different from others.
In the Instagram Live Q&A (via Indiewire), they revealed the project came about because Coen had been asked by McDormand a number of years ago to direct a stage production of the property, and chose not to. When he saw her in a production that she did, it made him start thinking about the play and it made him want to work with her on it and so thought it would be interesting to instead collaborate on it as a movie.
“Macbeth” has always been one of the most difficult to bring to the screen, the most successful film versions have often been the looser adaptations that take their own spin on the material like Akira Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood,” Roman Polanski’s paranoia-driven version, the comedic “Scotland, PA,” and William Reilly’s “Men of Respect” as opposed to more straightforward ones like Justin Kurzel’s solid but not great 2015 take with Michael Fassbender.
McDormand says their take will follow its own spin on the story, one of the reasons the film is going by the longer title of “The Tragedy of Macbeth,” and that the lead actors ages (both are in their sixties) plays a key part:
“I think a very important thing about Joel’s adaptation is that we are not calling it ‘Macbeth’. We’re calling it ‘The Tragedy of Macbeth,’ which I think is an important distinction. In Joel’s adaptation, we are exploring the age of the characters and our adaptation the Macbeths are older. Both Denzel [Washington] and I are older than what is often cast as the Macbeths.
We’re postmenopausal, we’re past childbearing age. So that puts a pressure on their ambition to have the crown. I think the most important distinction is that it is their last chance for glory. It puts a very specific time pressure on the characters, but also on the storytelling, which I think is the real brilliance of the adaptation that Joel has done. There’s a real suspense and a real ticking clock. The time is running out – not only for the characters, but also it propels the storytelling.”
McDorman added that it’s very important for her version of Lady Macbeth to have never had a child, but has had either stillbirths or children that have died very young – that personal tragedy fuelling her ambition to push her husband to take the crown. Coen adds:
“Yes, [it can be considered a thriller]. I think that is something that I’ve always sort of felt when watching the play and also something that became more clear and more interesting to me as I was getting into it and doing the adaptation. It’s interesting how Shakespeare sort of pre-figured certain tropes in American thriller and crime literature that were common in the early part of the 20th century.”
One big change will be the three witches. Coen has hired famed Laurence Olivier Award-winning British actress and theater director Kathryn Hunter who will play all of the witches in this take. Film fans will recognise her for playing Arabella Figg, Harry Potter’s neighbor who testifies on his behalf in the fifth film of that series. She was also in HBO’s “Rome” and is a voice on Disney’s “TRON: Uprising”. It gets weirder though:
“In this adaptation, the witches are actually all played by one actor, an actor named Kathryn Hunter, who embodies all of the witches. The witches in this adaptation are birds. They are sort of battlefield scavenger birds. They morphed, in a way, from being natural birds to be the actress Kathryn Hunter. That was one of the most fascinating and I think interesting and fulfilling parts of the production for both Fran and I on how that was going to work in the movie. So the witches occupy a big space in this story as well.”
The film also stars Brendan Gleeson as King Duncan whilst Corey Hawkins has a key role which is thought to be Macduff (though not confirmed). A24 will release the film which Scott Rudin is producing. No word as yet when the project will resume filming.
