Romeo and Juliet

Cinema enables you to see into a characters soul, a subtle flicker in the eye, a mischievous smile that the camera picks up but no-one else in the room. It allows the viewer into a characters intimate emotional journey, the private confusion of hope and fear, that’s why I made this film, I wanted to see how in a movie, the intimacy of the lens could give us a unique and new understanding of characters we’ve all heard of but that perhaps never fully felt real.

Romeo and Juliet is a story most people have heard of but for many, it conjured up feeling of boredom and dread, having studied at school idealised star cross lovers. The truth is there is nothing to idealise about the title characters, their tragedy lies in the same naïve impetuous emotions we all feel when first in love. Despite having a love for Shakespeare from a very young age, Romeo and Juliet is play I really didn’t care for. Like most fourteen year old boys I quite liked reading in Tybalt and Mercutio but had no interest in the rest and positively disliked the soppy Romeo. If you told me back then I’d directed it as my debut film I wouldn’t of believed you. It wasn’t until years later when I was talked into a playing Mercutio on stage that I really began to understand not just the play but develop my own passionate to explore the detail and raw heart of the story that is so often over looked. The title characters in the stage production portrayed by Daisy Watts and James Paul Taylor suddenly had a real innocence, of people not destined to be together but convinced they were. Romeo wasn’t a perfect young lover, he was impetuous young man, at times sulky and annoying, clueless on love but convinced his love was life and death. Watching James play the role I realised though at fourteen I wanted to believe I was like Tyablt or Mercutio but actually we were all Romeo! When you’re older you can look back and realise, gosh I was an idiot. That first girl you dated or first love wasn’t perfection, she didn’t make the world stand still, but at that age we convince our self that that first love is death or glory and being with them the only thing that matters. Anyone who tells us otherwise simply doesn’t understand. Any wisdom or advice seems totally patronising and irrelevant when first in love or perhaps just its lust we convince ourselves is love; that love must be the one and we would die proving it. When teenage years are far behind us we’d cringe at the things we said or did but at the time we were so certain. For me that was the starting point for the film, to smash the stereotypes and allow the humour, danger and delusion of love to resonate through the film. Impulsive behaviour of youth blurs our judgement and makes us feel the world around us is distant. As the film progresses we see how the event force Romeo and Juliet to grow, to try and shake off their naivety and make adult decisions, but as Juliet’s nurse no longer gives her the comfort she seeks and with Mercutio now dead and unable to provide the elder brother type influence Romeo seeks they must now make their own choices. In their bid to prove and keep their love true their actions mean they descend on a deadly path.

Too often Shakespeare is stolen by its true heart by pretentious elite and in their bid to idealise young love they rob the characters of truth and leave children like me hating the play. Shakespeare didn’t write for over blown budgets or expensive theatre tickets, he wrote for the pit, the mob, not sequin drench ball gowns but presenting stories to a raucous and wild audience, giving us a legacy of real people with complex and conflicting emotions that we can recognised in ourselves. The poetry resonates because of the emotional truth within the word, not because it’s spoken by beautiful looking poets but because it allows us to understand our own lives and emotions. I wanted to create real people not a deified version of reality. I wanted the style of the film to avoid the characters getting lost in epic set pieces, or attend grabbing guns.

The films setting is inspire by 1950’s Britain, a time when youthful optimism and frustrations were beginning to challenge the old order. Romeo and Juliet are played by actors who are not teenager but embody that spirit. In the film we watch their innocence we see them desperately try and assert themselves and transform into adults and take control over their destiny. I become intensely annoyed when female leads are reduced to being little more than a pretty and passive catalyst in the male story. At the core of this film is a powerful trio of female characters, Lady Capulet, Nurse and Juliet. I wanted to ensure in this film the female characters and their complex relationships are explored and Juliet’s own fascinating journey makes us smile, laugh and cry. Daisy’s performance as Juliet brings and energy and personality, we see a girl quickly having to become a women; a mother who struggles to connect with her daughter and Nurse who despite her strength and love for the young girl she’s helped raise ultimately finds herself powerless to protect her.