by William Shakespeare
Distributed by MGM/UA in the United States
New York & LA Release December 22, 1995
General US Release January 26, 1996

Production Notes

In their adaptation of RICHARD III Loncraine and Sir Ian McKellen are aiming at a truly cinematic version of Shakespeare's work, which will be accessible to the general film-going audience.

The combustion between the literate McKellen, an actor with a profound knowledge of Shakespeare and the visually dynamic Loncraine, once a self-confessed avoider of the playwright, has produced a version of RICHARD III in which the text is entirely Shakespeare's, albeit abridged; but the context is modern and recognizable.

Their film of Shakespeare's most famous villain -- the conquering hero turned ruthless powermonger, who creates hell in peacetime when he sets his sights on the throne -- is set in an imaginary England of the 1930s, embracing all the richness of style and music of the period, as well as he political overtones of rising tyranny in Europe.

The originality of this behind-the-scenes expose of the ruling elite has attracted an exceptional cast. In addition to McKellen, long considered Britain's finest classical actor, it includes Annette Bening (THE GRIFTERS, BUGSY) as Queen Elizabeth, the woman who bravely takes a stand against Richard, Jim Broadbent (BULLETS OVER BROADWAY) as Buckingham, Robert Downey, Jr. (CHAPLIN) as her brother, Rivers, Nigel Hawthorne (THE MADNESS OF KING GEORGE) as Richard's hapless brother, Clarence, Kristin Scott Thomas (FOUR WEDDINGS AND A FUNERAL and MISSION IMPOSSIBLE) as Richard's wife, Anne, Oscar and Tony Award winner, Maggie Smith, as Richard's mother, the Duchess of York, John Wood as King Edward IV, locally renowned actors Edward Hardwicke as Stanley, Adrian Dunbar as Tyrell, Bill Paterson as Ratcliffe and introducing Dominic West and Kate Steavenson-Payne.

Richard Loncraine (BRIMSTONE & TREACLE and THE MISSIONARY) won a British Academy Award as Best Director for BLADE ON THE FEATHER and his most recent film, WIDE-EYED & LEGLESS, starring Julie Walters and Jim Broadbent, was nominated for a BAFTA Award for Best Drama and released by Miramax in the United States as THE WEDDING GIFT. Peter Biziou who won an Oscar for MISSISSIPPI BURNING is Director of Photography.

RICHARD III is produced by Stephen Bayly and Lisa Katselas Paré. David Lascelles, whose credits include several seasons of the successful British television series INSPECTOR MORSE, is Line Producer. Ellen Dinerman Little, Ian McKellen, Joe Simon, Richard Eyre (Director of the Royal National Theatre) and Maria Apodiacos are Executive Producers.

McKellen became interested in creating a film of RICHARD III when he was producing and starring in the play at Britain's Royal National Theatre, first influenced by the Director, Richard Eyre -- also a motion picture director -- who during rehearsals would say, "If this were a film, here would be a close-up" and by the lighting style of the production which people described as film noir.

McKellen sat down to write a screenplay -- his first -- which he completed while performing RICHARD III in Los Angeles. Ellen Little of First Look Pictures was initially involved in the development of the project, until it became clear it would benefit from the involvement of a British company. McKellen then met Stephen Bayly and Lisa Katselas Pare, the Producers who brought the film to fruition.

The choice of Richard Loncraine as Director was pivotal. Many directors come to film adaptations of Shakespeare after staging the play in the theatre. Loncraine, however, has no connection to, or even interest in the theatre and while he had great respect for Shakespeare, did not have a self-limiting reverence. As a result he brought to the project an abounding energy and sense of innovation as a filmmaker.

"Richard Loncraine is constantly bringing you back to a very natural and truthful and modern way of acting and speaking verse that's four hundred years old," says Dominic West, who plays Richmond, "and so it sounds like dialogue in a nineties action movie, so that you savour the richness and the colour and the descriptiveness of the words, but it doesn't sound old fashioned."

Loncraine wanted a unique look for the film and he and his team made every effort to seek out authentic buildings of the period, filming at more than forty locations.

"We've created a completely fictitious world," says Loncraine. "We're saying it's some time, some lace, immediately before the last war. We didn't go to a stately home and say, 'All right. This will do.' Our palace is St. Pancras Station, a London railway station which, with the help of computer technology, we will set on the banks of the Thames. Our royal country retreat, the Brighton Pavilion, in reality located in the heart of town, becomes a beach front property. Our battle takes place in the burnt out shell of a 1920s power station. We cover an enormous canvas, from the decadent to the austere, so there is a feast for the eye.

"We've completely relocated scenes. Shakespeare might have set them in the gardens of a palace, or standing on a balcony looking out over the ramparts, whereas we might have set it on an escalator going down to the subway. Actually we haven't, but we've moved around to keep it modern and interesting."

"This is a very cinematic adaptation," says Annette Bening. "There are some shots that are purely cinematic. For example we're starting the movie out with a huge party which isn't present in the text, but which ultimately really serves the story."

"I've stylized the film, says Loncraine, "in order to mesh the twentieth century imagery and sixteenth century dialogue and make people suspend their disbelief. I want the acting to be very real and the imagery to be very unreal. I want to give it a certain heightened reality, not an unreality. To add to that the film is being shot on anamorphic, wide angle, 235 format and we're using Dolby stereo surround sound."

"For an actor at the height of his career, Ian McKellen was very open to ideas," says Loncraine. "I wanted to make an accessible version of Shakespeare, a version that people who are frightened of Shakespeare could go an see without any preconceptions. Shakespeare was not an elitist writer. He wrote for the people and I wanted the film to be understandable for everybody."

RICHARD III is a fast moving play that revolves around its central character. However it also has some forty-five subsidiary characters and a four hour running time. To pare the text down to a hundred minutes, simplification and clarification were in order. Some characters were merged, or dropped, while the presence of others was developed.

The 1930s context, first used in the stage production, provided useful practical and creative solutions.

"It's the story of the people who control the nation," says McKellen, "therefore it's very important to know, who's in the church, who's in politics, who's an aristocrat, who's royal, who's in the army, what rank they are in the army. It's very helpful to put people in clothes which tell something about their personalities, their professions and their social standing. Almost all the Shakespeare I've done in the theatre, with one exception, has been in 'modern' dress.

"The '30s was Europe's decade of tyranny. It's possible to imagine the United Kingdom falling for a plausible dictator. Edward VIII went off to see Hitler soon after his abdication. Oswald Mosley, a member of the upper classes, aped Hitler's fascism in the streets near where I live in the East End of London.

"Shakespeare purists should remember that Shakespeare is always adapted," says McKellen. "Nobody ever does the full text. We don't know what the full text was. It might be an amalgamation of two or three versions that Shakespeare's actors performed. Their touring versions, for example, were always cut to ribbons.

"The first man ever to have a huge success as Richard III, Colley Cibber in the seventeenth century, never spoke the words: "Now is the winter of our discontent..." He cut that speech. He invented many lines which were even put into Laurence Olivier's movie. Olivier also practically cut out Richard's mother and Queen Elizabeth, 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. This time it's for an international cinema audience."

"I think setting RICHARD III in the 1930s," says Robert Downey,Jr., "makes it so tangible for a modern audience." McKellen has direct experience of that. He took the Royal National Theatre production to the United States, Japan, Egypt, Rumania and Western Europe and wherever he went audiences and critics interpreted the play in the light of the politics of their own country.

"We all like a back stage story," says McKellen. "We long to know what happens when the Prime Minister goes into Number 10 Downing Steet and shuts the door. What does the President do when the cameras are turned off? Those tiny little glimpses we see of them in their private moments are thrilling, because we think we're getting to the truth. In this screenplay you see it all."

"It's not unlike DYNASTY or DALLAS," says Robert Downey, Jr., a fan of McKellen's since working with him in RESTORATION. "I really think it might be the first film that bridges the gap between entertainment and Shakespeare."

"I think that any time Shakespeare's done out of its own period, the task is the same. How to make the story vibrant, alive and emotionally interesting," says Annette Bening. "Its so exciting to be among this group of actors because they know how to make the text personal and even though it's Shakespeare, it's really about brothers and wives and sons and others and all of those relationships and how they work."

Downey and Annette Bening play Americans. Their casting was not, as may appear, a shrewd commercial move to reach the U.S. market. It grew out of the fact that in the play Queen Elizabeth and her brother, Earl Rivers, are outsiders. They are not members of the aristocracy and Loncraine and McKellen wanted to find a twentieth-century equivalent. The fact that an American, Wallace Simpson, very nearly became queen of England in the '30s lent credibility.

Loncraine wants to reach beyond the core audience for Shakespeare. "When my wife, who is better read than I am, suggests we go and see a Shakespeare play or film, my response is, 'What else is on?' I want to get over the 'what else is on' factor with this film. We should be able to reach the likes of me. I'm an educated film director, yet I've been nervous and shy about going to see Shakespeare. To me this film is a wonderful story with great actors and it should just be an exciting evening out."

"I'm always very excited by the idea that people, young or old, may be discovering Shakespeare for the first time,"says McKellen, "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, or a story about sex and family betrayals and a cruel tyrant. After all these were inventions, not of the cinema, but of Shakespeare, the master storyteller. It was the cinema that adopted so much of the drama, the excitement and the thrills which Shakespeare invented. This project took off because film people got excited about the script. Whether they realised it or not, the person who excited United Artists was Shakespeare. I'm happy to be his agent."

Loncraine and production designer, Tony Burrough at first looked at various stately homes. "We decided they were too safe," says Burrough. We wanted to be brave. We were creating our own world. We were reinventing our own history of the 1930s, our own idea about what might have happened if Britain had been involved in a civil war and then Richard of York had come to power. We made a conscious decision to find what I would describe as eccentric spaces and turned them into elements of our story."

The list of eccentric spaces is long. Filming took place at over forty locations. St. Cuthbert's Church in London, needing its roof repaired, became the palace ballroom, where King Edward and Queen Elizabeth danced to "Come live with me and be my love," a Shakespearean verse given a thirties big band treatment. Mst of Richard's "Now is the winter of our discontent..." speech is played in the royal bathroom, actually the Holbein room at historic Strawberry Hill House. Queen Elizabeth and her family are served breakfast in a vaulted area of Lincoln's Inn Fields, which is actually a pedestrian walkway underneath the chapel.

"We decided Victorian gothic was a nice way of placing Richard's older brother, King Edward, in a traditional context," says Burrough. The exterior of Edward's Palace is St. Pancras Chambers -- the Midland Grand Hotel until 1935, when its facilities ceased to be considered modern enough. "The Victorian gothic created a nice counterpoint. When Richard takes over the throne he moves his power base away from the palace. His headquarters are derivative of Albert Speer's Reichstag or Mussolini's Rome."

The scenes at Richard's headquarters were filmed at the Senate House, the chancellery of London University with its large expanses of marble. Although designed and built for the University in the thirties, Senate House was occupied by the Ministry of Information throughout the second world war and information about Dunkirk and the 'D' Day landings was broadcast from Beveridge Hall.

The warm and opulent colours and textures of the old guard give way to a more bleak and austere world. County Hall, an empty colossus on the Thames, once the seat of local government in London provided the interior of the Tower of London. A deep circular crater which originally contained a huge gasometer, became the Tower exercise yard.

Earls Court Exhibition Center is frequently used for rock concerts and operas but no-one has ever shown interest in the bowels of the building. The barren, concrete lower levels produced the behind the scenes area of the arena where Richard held a Nuremberg style rally. Soviet and Italian inspired murals proclaiming a new order of prosperity, productivity and full employment decorated the walls of the green room.

Richard and Richmond do battle -- the Battle of Bosworth in Shakespeare's text -- in the dusty wastelands around Battersea Power Station, a gutted, abandoned monolith, though a listed building in the centre of London.

"We drew on elements we liked about the look of the thirties as they really were and used them as keys. The costumes, for example, were very specific to 1936. Costume designer, Shuna Harwood, first scoured the vintage clothing stores of London and Paris for 1930s originals. We're using thirties furniture, thirties architecture -- the Shellmax Building, the art deco terminal at Shoreham Airport. Richard of Gloucester's car is a 1936 Bentley. The style of the picture, however, is heightened reality. By that I mean we haven't been slavish to period detail. We haven't been frightened to use something which might not be accurate, but looks perfect in the context. That's the great thing about movies. You can cheat. We didn't compromise, however. Richard Loncraine is very uncompromising."

Richard III's military headquarters, for example, was filmed at Steam Town, a train museum at Carnforth in Lancashire. "We used a German engine -- it was originally designed to pull Hitler's train, though never used for the purpose -- with French and English period carriages. We invented our own armoured carriages, by painting them to give them an armour plated look. It's full of anachronisms. Trainspotters and military buffs will be confused; but the important thing is that we created the right atmosphere to tell the story."

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