“Two households, both alike in dignity. In fair Verona, where we lay our scene.” It’s a familiar refrain if you’ve watched any interpretation of William Shakespeare‘s immortal romance, Romeo and Juliet.
And yet, when audiences went to the theater to watch director Baz Luhrmann‘s Romeo + Juliet on Nov. 1, 1996, they were in for a surprise. The familiar Shakespearean opening became a highly explosive, kinetic recitation with the help of a television reporter, and gunplay playing out on the streets of what looked like a California beach town. It’s propulsive, it’s hyper, and it sets the tone for the highly stylized retelling of the lives and deaths of those star-crossed lovers, played by a pre-Titanic Leonardo DiCaprio and a post-My So-Called Life Claire Danes.
Speaking with Gold Derby, Luhrmann remembers telling his creative compatriots that he wanted to “invent the modern musical,” a dream he’d realize five years later with Moulin Rouge! “At one stage I was really obsessed with doing the Arthurian myth,” the director recalls, thinking back on a pivotal trip to Australia’s Hunter Valley where the idea was born.
“We walked up the top of the hill; we might have had two bottles of wine or something, and at the top of the hill I was so exhausted,” Luhrmann says. “I went, ‘You know what? That musical reinvention is probably going to take a long time. I think I’ll just quickly do the Shakespeare thing because that’ll be quick.'”
Thirty years later, everyone involved with Romeo + Juliet is still surprised at the staying power the film has had. “We were so scared while we were writing it,” co-writer Craig Pearce admits to Gold Derby. “[We thought] they were going to just call us ‘Butchers of the Bard.’”
“I am kind of amazed by its staying power, and the longevity,” echoes Harold Perrineau, who played Mercutio. “People still talk about it, so it feels kind of wild.”
It was that desire to tell Shakespeare differently that enticed Luhrmann and Pearce to make the oft-adapted play in the first place. “We loved Shakespeare, but we hated the way it was taught, very badly often, and people were made to feel dumb,” Pearce says. “People who were educated and loved Shakespeare, if they went to a play and it wasn’t boring, it must be bad.”
The process to make Romeo + Juliet was anything but quick. “We had to understand the play, which we thought we did,” Pearce says. “Then we had to translate that into a world that was both modern but its own thing.” As he and Luhrmann started writing, they soon realized they were spending significant time in the script explaining why the world was contemporary, yet the language was old to the viewer. Take that opening sequence leading into the gas station fight.
“We used to start it with an old guy leading a donkey up a hill,” says Pearce. “And then it would go into a TV, with all these channels switching. There were game shows, except instead of it being Wheel of Fortune it was Fortune’s Fool, and instead of 60 Minutes it was Three Score Minutes.” From there a journalist would be in a helicopter flying over Miami giving the “two households” speech with a “special report” documenting the suicide of Romeo and Juliet.
The pair soon realized they didn’t have to overly explain the world, but rather simplify it. “One of the biggest issues in the beginning was getting everybody on board with the prologue,” Luhrmann says, crediting his editor, Jil Bilcock, with hitting on the idea of opening the movie like an ‘80s TV show and repeating the opening monologue via a TV reporter before Pete Postlethwaite’s Friar Laurence gives the same speech.
Luhrmann says that most people won’t realize the same overture is being performed as background music in that sequence. “Everybody thinks that’s ‘O Fortuna,’ but it’s actually a Latin version of the words,” he notes.
Verona’s streets became the streets of Miami, a place the director had never visited prior to making the film. The ethnic diversity of the city became a direct source of inspiration for Luhrmann and his crew. “Being in Miami, you learnt very early on that half of the population was Latinx,” the filmmaker says. “We wanted two households, both alike in dignity, so it became inherent in the script that one family was Latinx and then the other were WASPs.”
In the film’s reading, the Montagues and the Capulets aren’t just two warring families, but also representative of two distinct social and cultural forces.
Yet neither Luhrmann nor Pearce could have foreseen how audiences would gravitate toward the film’s presentation of Mercutio. After initially writing Romeo’s pal as a white drag queen — a role that Ewan McGregor auditioned for, according to Luhrmann — the writers decided to go in a different direction. “At some point we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if he was an African American character because we had Captain Prince in there,” Luhrmann says, referring to the police captain played by Vonde Curtis-Hall. “It was what amplified the character.”
“Every dude I knew at the time was auditioning for that movie,” Perrineau says now. “At some point, even John Leguizamo auditioned for Mercutio. I went in six different times, which is a lot. I just remember really being inspired by it and thinking if I get to work with this guy Baz Luhrmann, who just seems wild, so smart and crazy and willing to try things, this would be crazy good.”
Pearce and Luhrmann saw the opportunity to bring in more music through Mercutio’s character, and it’s something Perrineau emulated in his performance. “What Baz was looking for is not this standard American speech,” the actor says. “What he was looking for was sounds that you could hear in New York City or the United States. There’s a time in the movie where I’m doing Biggie Smalls in my head just so I could be in the zone, and he filmed it and kept it. That’s the sound I was looking for.”
One of Mercutio’s best moments is his recitation of the “Queen Mab” speech, leading into the hallucinogenic party that introduces Romeo to Juliet. “I remember it pretty viscerally,” says Perrineau. “The night we shot it, Baz said, ‘Let’s just take a shot at it. Just go and do it straight through.’ I do it straight through and it’s silent. No one says a word. And I’m like ‘F — k, I’m terrible. I’m the worst actor around.’ It wasn’t any of that. I think they all watched it and thought ‘Let’s make this work,’ but I internalized it right away.”
Much of that silence also had to do with how long the sequence took to film. The production shot all night, but the group ran into trouble during the close-ups. “We’re in Mexico, and a hurricane comes in and it completely blows away the entire set,” says Luhrmann. The production later moved to San Francisco and filmed the Mercutio’s close-ups on a re-created stage with a piece of blue cardboard behind DiCaprio. “If you have a look at Harold’s wig, it keeps changing in size,” Luhrmann admits now.
Queer readings of Mercutio’s character have abounded for years, and Perrineau, Luhrmann and Pearce say the character clearly had an impact on a generation of young teens coming of age. All three also agree that if the character was written as queer now, he’d be performed by an LGBTQ actor.
“At the time, people thought it was weird,” says Perrineau. “[For awhile] I was like, ‘Maybe I went too far.’ But as the years went on, there were people who were like, ‘I could see myself [in him].'”
Luhrmann knew the entire cast was special and destined for stardom. “I saw a picture of Leonardo, and I went, ‘God, if I do Romeo and Juliet, Romeo should look like that.” The director made the actor — who had just been nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his breakout role in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape — an offer he ultimately couldn’t refuse, securing him two business class tickets to Australia for a casting workshop. “Leo being Leo, he cashed in his tickets and brought all of his friends,” the director remembers with a laugh. “They all flew bucket class!”
Other roles were more challenging to cast. Luhrmann originally cast Peter O’Toole as Friar Laurence before moving on to Harvey Keitel, who also backed out. Then, the director received an unexpected letter via FedEx. “The letter says, ‘From Marlon Brando to Baz Luhrmann,’” Luhrmann remembers. “It goes ‘Dear Baz Luhrmann, I’ve heard that you’re working with my little friend, William Shakespeare.'”
The long and short of it was that Brando offered his services to play Friar Laurence — or Romeo’s enemy, Tybalt. Unfortunately, legal issues with Brando’s son, Christian, ended up forcing him to back away from the project, although Luhrmann has all five letters from Brando regarding the movie to this day. “Pete Postlethwaite turned up, literally, two days from shooting, and he was a marvel,” says Luhrmann.
Thirty years after Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet, another bold visionary is taking a crack at Shakespeare’s play; Nosferatu and Werwulf director Robert Eggers recently announced plans for a new version. Luhrmann and Pearce see that as proof that the Bard constantly evolves. And it allows them to look back on their own interpretation with fondness.
“While we were in Miami, [Luhrmann’s wife] Catherine Martin — our brilliant production designer and costume designer — got us these hats that were embroidered with ‘Butchers of the Bard,'” Pearce says. “We’re like, ‘OK, let’s do it!’”
