The National Theatre production, yes, was set in the 1930s and opened in London in the summer of 1990, almost exactly five years before our first day's shooting.
Richard Eyre, the director of the Royal National Theatre of Great Britain (RNT), had asked me to put together a company of actors, to present two plays which would together tour around the United Kingdom and Europe and, as it happened, the United States. They would originate in the Lyttleton Theatre, which is the RNT's proscenium-arch, 900-seater auditorium, where I have played many times.
I first decided on Shakespeare's "King Lear" then, as the same actors were to be in both productions, I chose to do "Richard III," simply because it cross-cast very well. I couldn't have guessed how significant for my life would be the rather casual way in which I came to play King Richard. Next I had the unusual joy of inviting my employer, Richard Eyre, to work for me as director of Richard III. It's typical of his generosity and of our long standing friendship that he agreed.
Conversations began between Richard Eyre and me with the designer, Bob Crowley. Together we kept describing the story to each other, in terms of the modern day. Nothing new to me in that -- all the Shakespeare I've done in the last twenty years has been in modern settings. Shakespeare's own productions, 400 years ago, were invariably done in contemporary Elizabethan dress: and it's always worth noting with care the playwright's original intention. The idea that there is any "authentic" period in which to set Shakespeare's plays was an invention of the Victorians' interest in medievalism, reflected in their over-elaborate productions. Shakespeare himself was perhaps only interested in historical fact insofar as it might illuminate the present. He was much more concerned with politics generally than the accuracy of historical events, which he happily reconstructed to suit his story-telling. If the plays are re-imagined in modern dress, the modernity of Shakespeare's dramas is underlined for the audience. We don't after all do the plays because they are old -- rather because they can seem ever-new. A classic is defined by its relevance, not by its age.
If Shakespeare was offering a commentary on comparatively recent events for his audience, shouldn't we look for what to us is a modern period? The Thirties are close enough for us to relate to them in the Nineties. Characters dressed in Thirties fashions are easier to distinguish from each other than if they are all done up in floppy hats, feathers and wrinkled tights. In such medieval costume, of the period when the original Richard III was alive, everyone looks the same. For instance, you cannot tell in the Olivier movie what people do for a living, how much money they've got, what their social standing in relation to each other is, simply by looking at them. You can by listening to them; but in a drama about the way individuals interrelate (and their professions), what they wear and own, the sort of buildings they use are as important as their manners.
The Thirties was perhaps the most recent time when the English royal family might have played a major part in politics. Richard III centres on power and the structure of politics. It was a period when a tyrant reminiscent of Richard III might just have arisen in the United Kingdom. On his abdication, Edward VIII visited Hitler with approval and Oswald Mosley aped Germanic fascism in the streets where I live in the East End of London. These reverberations were helpful for the play's credibility, presenting not real history but events that might have happened -- an aid to the audience's suspension of disbelief.
In keeping with recent stage productions of "Richard III", we abandoned the old tradition of "Richard III" being a star vehicle, which it has been ever since it was first performed, or first became a big success. That tradition of the comical baddie, the villain, the Punch as in Punch and Judy, reached its climax perhaps with Laurence Olivier's charismatic performance on stage and screen. Since then "Rihcard III" has been set very much in the context of the plays which preceded in Shakespeare's work and see it as the climax of the Civil Wars of the Roses saga. The climax of that great war series, in which dynasties battled for control of the country, revealed that Shakespeare is just as much interested in the establishment and society from which Richard III emerges, as he is with the character of Richard III himself.
Shakespeare concentrates on the man after whom he names the play, but he doesn't lose interest in the people who surround him, his family -- it's a drama about a family -- and his close friends and associates -- it's a political drama. You don't see England in its entirety as you do in later plays like "Henry IV". To that extent, it's more like "The Godfather" than "Henry". You don't see the effect really that Richard III has on the country at large. It isn't the story of the nation. It's the story of the people who control the nation.
As we rehearsed Richard Eyre's production, he kept saying, "if we were doing this as a film, here would be a close-up."' The style of the lighting designed by Jean made it look very film noir and audiences admired its movie look -- a black and white movie, it's true. So, all in all, there seemed no reason to change the period of the setting when doing it as a movie.
Well, "Othello," which I did immediately before this in which I played Iago for the Royal Shakespeare Company, directed by Trevor Nunn, was done in sort of turn of the century, 1900. Before that "Macbeth," indeterminate period, but about the same 1900, 1920. "Hamlet" I wore jeans and a sweater. "Richard II,", no, that was mediaeval costume -- but that was twenty-five years back. "Twelfth Night" I did for the Royal Shakespeare Company, I played Toby Belch; I wore a tweed suit and knickerbockers.
This was an immensely successful production with audiences throughout the world. They all responded to it and as usual I was thinking "why can't we reach an even larger audience? Why can't we film it? Why can't we put it on television, or something?" I kept saying this to Richard Eyre, who used to be head of BBC TV plays and has an interest in filming. He eventually said look, if you really want this filmed, you've got to go away and write a screenplay. Perhaps he imagined a television version of the full text -- not recording the stage performance in the theatre with an audience: that was already done for the British Theatre Museum in London -- but recorded on film or video-tape, over a relatively short period of time, with the original cast.
What I unwittingly did was to turn Shakespeare's play into a film for the cinema, for the large screen. Two results of this. Richard Eyre could not consider directing it, because of his contractual obligations to the RNT. To set up and to shoot, a film for the cinema takes much more time than one for television. Now [that] it was clear that I was looking for what in Shakespeare was cinematic, or was not cinematic and amending the text and the play accordingly, I embarked on a series of drafts, with Richard Eyre's help. This merrily occupied my spare time for six months or so, once the stage production closed in Los Angeles at the end of its world tour. I was encouraged that three films I made during that time were adaptations; two from novels, Rose Tremain's "Restoration," and Stella Gibbons comic parody "Cold Comfort Farm" and the third from John Guare's play, "Six Degrees of Separation."
What is cinematic about the play?
Well, you can trust the basic order in which the story is told onstage. It's a critical commonplace that one scene follows on from another in Shakespeare with the alacrity of a cinema "cut". Nothing is more dreary or wrong for Shakespeare than to end one scene and then have a big pause while the scenery changes. Speed is of the essence -- appropriate, this, for a 90-minute movie.
The setting of the 1930s could be immensely photogenic. An audience would expect a story set in London, to reveal what is left of London in the Thirties. Well, we're very lucky because there is a lot of Thirties London which is still left and also very photogenic. The costumes, too, would be very good to look at and very clear.
Once the screenplay had been sold to practically the first person I showed it to, The Overseas Film Group in Los Angeles, we started on the journey of wondering whether it was actually practical or not financially. It's one thing to ask the BBC to record a studio version. It's quite another to imagine a multi-million dollar movie which was designed to appeal to an international audience. Now I knew that "Richard III" as a play, and indeed "Richard III" as a film, because of Olivier's version, have all been immensely popular. It can't be stressed too often that "Richard III" is one of Shakespeare's most enduring and best-known dramas.
Olivier, Zeffirelli and Branagh were helpful comparisons -- their financial success could be repeated by our film, perhaps. I was also encouraged that these three based their films on their theatre experience of them.
Olivier had played "Henry V", "Hamlet" and "Richard III" onstage, before he re-created them for the cinema. Zeffirelli's "Romeo and Juliet" was a landmark stage production I saw at the Old Vic. He later filmed it. His "Hamlet" too, he'd done in the theatre two or three times, in English and in Italian. Branagh's "Much Ado," he'd done on stage and his "Henry V" took advantage of the Royal Shakespeare Company's production he had done for Adrian Noble, adopting wholesale its ideas, just as I'm adopting wholesale the ideas from our stage version of "Richard III". I think it's important to remember the drama's origins in the theatre, while at the same time striding out and looking to the cinema. It's a mixture of both that makes them in the end appealing for me.
Every time I rehearse a Shakespeare play, I assume that no one in the audience has ever seen it before. That is the Number One duty -- to tell the story and to tell it in Shakespeare's way. It's exactly the same in the cinema. Yes, I'm very excited by the idea that people may be discovering Shakespeare for the first time; but it's my duty to make sure that what they are excited by is not just another action movie, not just another political intrigue thriller, not just another play about sex and family betrayals and a cruel tyrant with a lot of blood spattered on the screen -- but to point out that these were inventions, not of the cinema, but of Shakespeare. Cinema has adopted so much of the melodrama, the excitement and the thrills which Shakespeare first brought to life 400 years ago and the vital link is Shakespeare's words. So I will not betray Shakespeare and I don't have to betray Shakespeare because one could say he invented many of the clichées of cinema and many of the things that people find exciting in the cinema.
My interest in Shakespeare is very much theatrical as an actor and as an audience, somebody who's seen a lot of Shakespeare and been bored silly by a lot of Shakespeare. If I'm not a great devotee of most filmed Shakespeare, nor am I a devotee of most theatre Shakespeare! It's very difficult to get it right, very difficult. But I do think we have a chance.
There's been absolutely no tension between Richard's determination to make a film which will entertain the broadest possible international audience and my desire to introduce Shakespeare to that audience. We're absolutely on the same side. There was never any request from him, of a serious intent, to distort Shakespeare to make it easier to make a film. In fact -- Richard can speak for himself -- but I think he's enjoyed the challenge of presenting Shakespeare's story and his words on the screen; but that's what I'm interested in, too. So...he constantly tells me what's possible and I'm constantly telling him what I think is desirable and between the two of us there's not a compromise but a meeting and an understanding that isn't anywhere near as difficult as we thought. The difficulty comes if you are so arrogant as to abandon Shakespeare. Nor must you ignore the constraints and opportunities of the cinema.
My purist friends, academics and so on, must remember that Shakespeare is always adapted when he leaves the printed page. No stage production ever does the full text of Shakespeare, for example. We don't know what the full text was. When people show you the full version of Shakespeare's "Richard III", it doesn't mean that was ever a version that Shakespeare's own actors did. It might be an amalgamation of two or three versions. On tour, for example, the plays might be cut to ribbons. The first man ever to have had a success as Richard III, Colley Cibber in the seventeenth century, never spoke the words, "Now is the winter of our disconent..." He cut that speech. And he invented his own speeches, a couple of lines of which were even put into Laurence Olivier's movie. Olivier also used bits of other plays. He also cut out some main characters. He almost entirely removed Richard III's mother. He cutout Queen Elizabeth practically, the part that Annette Bening is playing, which in our version and in Shakespeare's version is the leading woman's part. So adaptations happen all the time and ours is just another adaptation, but an adaptation for the cinema and an international cinema audience.
The hardest thing is to keep in as much of the story as possible, because it's complicated not only in its sweep, not in Richard's ascendancy to power, but in the number of stages that he goes through and the number of steps up the ladder of power and the number of people who are affected by him. The temptation is to cut out too much of this detail. We've kept in an awful lot with the minimum of words but always, always determined that the audience should be able to understand. There's no problem with the language, I don't think, oddly enough; but the number of characters. That's what can be difficult. Yet remember the number of characters in "The Godfather."
Another problem is that [when] you join the story of "Richard III," Richard Gloucester's determination to become King is in midflow. These characters know each other from way back. They have existing relationships. The audience in the cinema has to very quickly cotton on to roughly what those relationships are so that they can follow the story of the movie.
The third major difficulty is one of the play's structure. There's no problem with the story up to the point at which Richard becomes King. It races along. It's very exciting. It's very funny. It's very sexy. It's very violent. The audience I know will love it. He becomes King and it's a decline from then on. Declines aren't very interesting unless you really understand what the decline is about and we have to slightly compensate for Shakespeare by putting into the rise to power, the seeds for the fall and the collapse afterwards, so the audience gets genuinely riveted by the quite detailed psychological examination of his inner life. Some actors have got it wrong in the past. Richard III is not a mass murderer. Richard III doesn't actually kill anybody in this movie, nor in the play. He orders other people to kill and they agree to do it. He's a tyrant. That's the difference.
I take faith that actually audiences like to see the backstage story, that we long to know what happens when the Prime Minister goes into Number 10 Downing Street and shuts the door. What does the President do upstairs in the White House once the cameras are turned off? Those tiny little glimpses we occasionally see of them in their private moments are thrilling, because we think we're getting near to the truth that lies behind the public image. In this play you see it all.
What's more, the man turns to the camera and tells you what he's going to do. He includes you in his privacy. He has a personal relationship with the audience. It's a brilliant device in the theatre and I think it's going to be a brilliant device in the cinema. It's one that most filmmakers of Shakespeare dodge, In Branagh's "Much Ado About Nothing," the principal character which he played never talked to the audience. In Olivier's "Hamlet," he doesn't speak directly to us, either. The fact is that Hamlet and Benedict and Richard III need to talk to us. They need to share their secrets and Richard, my God, has he got some secrets! So it's a film, as it were, about Adolf Hitler actually telling you what it feels like to be Adolf Hitler. I think that should keep the audience going right through the end of the movie and at the end he makes the most extraordinary confession. He thinks he shouldn't have done all the terrible things which have so entertained us.
The professional soldier is at the centre of many of Shakespeare's plays. The hero returns from war to peace achieved, comes back to civilian life and has nothing to do. "Othello" is the story of a group of soldiers who are not fighting and what goes wrong then. "Macbeth" is almost the same story as Richard III, a very good soldier who comes back and has nothing to do until he decides he'll go into civilian politics, as disastrously as Richard III does. "Troilus and Cressida" is about two sides of a war when the soldiers aren't doing any fighting. "Much Ado" is about a group of soldiers who come back from the war and try to cope with the alien world of civilian life.
Richard III is an absolutely dreadful politician, successful, but doing the most dreadful things. Doesn't Shakespeare think soldiers shouldn't become civilian leaders? Why does Richard want to succeed in civilian life? Well, looking as he does, having been treated all his life as he has been by his mother and other people. Very early on in this play a woman spits full into his face at the point at which he has told her that he loves her.
Because of his physical disadvantage, deformity, he has been reviled all his life. If people revile you, and if your mother reviles you from birth, is it any wonder that you turn into someone who hits back at the world? That's a true psychological situation and one I think that a modern audience is interested in.
Yes, it is. The woman who spits in his face, however...he has killed her husband and her father in law. The psychological argument is very interesting; but there are very many people who have very unhappy childhoods for one reason or another. We could have millions of tyrants if that held true, if one were to excuse the lack of compassion one experienced in childhood in that way.
But I'm not in the business, because Shakespeare's not in the business, of apportioning blame. What I think is interesting is that he does provide evidence, explanation. Shakespeare doesn't write about purely evil people nor totally good ones. How could an actor hope to play characters like Iago or Richard III who have been described as "the embodiment of evil"? The things they do can be called evil, but to say that they are even Adolf Hitler are evil incarnate, is no good, because it excuses them, it lets the rest all the rest of humanity off the hook. What about the people who obeyed the orders of these evil people? Where is their culpability? Where is Tyrell's culpability? Where is Buckingham's culpability -- indeed, all the rest of us who are capable of going along with tyranny for our own reasons?
You'renot suggesting that the audience should have sympathy for him?
I'm not suggesting that they do anything, but if they don't I'd be very disappointed. He's very engaging. I think they will catch their breath, hopefully, at his bravado. I hope at times that they will be so convinced by his acting that they will forget what he's up to, which is why he has to keep reminding the audience. "You know what I've just done..." I hope they're going to see not just one person all the way through. They're going to see the different facets of this man's ability and his potential which he channels to absolutely the wrong purposes; but he is undoubtedly an attractive figure and that's why Lady Anne is momentarily seduced by him.
Yes. I find that rather hard to believe.
You find it hard to believe on the stage but you won't when you see it on the screen. The reasons are many, but one is Richard's overwhelming force; the other is her own heightened emotion, she's at a very vulnerable state emotionally. She's exhausted with grief. She cannot keep it up even faced with a man who legitimately killed her husband in battle. She is totally destitute at the point when she was about to become First Lady, Queen of England. She has no family support, apparently. Where is she going to live now? Who's interested in her? Overnight that happens and along comes a very powerful man who is old enough to be her father and says: "Marry me and you can have it all back." Now in her state of confusion, who's to say that Lady Anne is a totally innocent child? She may be, probably is, considering her social class and her upbringing, extremely ambitious on her own behalf and she's fooled, not realising that Richard's wife is never going to get a look in and she regrets it for the rest of her life, of course. Basically, she believes him when she says he loves her -- at a moment when she is bereft of love.
You mentioned his sense of humour. Would you elaborate on that?
His sense of humour comes from the same place as his conscience. He knows what he's doing. It's irony; but he's observing himself and he's pleased with himself, admires himself and asks the audience to admire what he's done, along with him. So he's extremely arrogant; but he just hopefully wins the audience into wanting him to succeed. The audience are accomplices in this journey to power. I hope, when the film is over, they will remember how much they wanted Richard to succeed in becoming king and how like many people in the story they got seduced by the excitement of it.
In other words, I hope they're not just going to sit back and watch this story. I hope they're leaning forward and that humour is one of the ways that they're drawn in. It wouldn't be right to say it's a comedy! In fact, it's interesting that Shakespeare calls the play The Tragedy of King Richard III.
You see it as a tragedy purely in terms of the character of Richard? I think it's a much larger tragedy than that.
Yes, you could say it was a tragedy for everybody. I think if we're looking for a condemnation, it's a condemnation of the whole...a questioning of the motives of people who want to be in positions of great power in civilian and military life. It's about the grouping, really. You look at "The Godfather," that story which is so wonderfully told. Those people do dreadful things, dreadfully selfish things. They stop at nothing, have no morality, all of them. And yet, of course, you're absolutely intrigued by their glamour and the fact that they actually achieve what they do. And the forces of law and order, well, you really can't sympathise with them at all, can you?
There is one difference in "The Godfather," that is that Michael Corleone did not originally act as part of the Mafia family. He was sent away to university so that he would not be part of that business and ultimately he has to become part of that business. So there is a change in character. He is seen as a moral person for a good part of the film.
Our story is very simple and will not be told in three very, very long parts. Ours is a shorter story and less complicated and a few short cuts.
I think Richard does get corrupted by the people he's with. It's a little bit like Don Juan in "Much Ado About Nothing," the bastard, the disaffected bastard, the person nobody really likes, who's going to take revenge because of that, and because, he says, these people are so stupid. They've got so little sense of what's right and wrong and what's proper, so all you've got to do is throw a stone in the middle of all this and there'll be much ado about nothing, which there is. So who is the bad character in "Much Ado About Nothing?" They're all as bad as each other. Some we like and some we don't. Benedict's last line is "I'll devise brave punishments for him." The hero of our story devises brave punishments, and tortures him. That's the last line that Benedict says. What sort of a hero is that? It complicates it and I think like Don Juan, Richard III in a sense is just going to take advantage of what is possible in this world and it's a wicked world.
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