Baz Luhrmann - The Mentor

Baz Luhrmann acted as a mentor for first-time director, Paterson Joseph, during the making of My Shakespeare. Joseph's Romeo and Juliet production took place in London, England, with Luhrmann communicating via satellite link from his production studio, the House of Iona, in Sydney, Australia. Baz therefore wasn't actually present during the production process, but he did assist and influence the cast and crew with his comments and advice.

The following text features direct quotes from Baz that were shown throughout the duration of My Shakespeare, which I have manually transcribed. During the programme, Baz is shown speaking from a variety of rooms in the House of Iona, so either a camera crew visited Sydney, or Baz had his own production team shoot the footage and send it over to England!

Baz's comments were interspersed with the happenings of the production of the play. Despite this, his comments do make sense as a transcript, and so I have decided to quote them here in the order they were said. Some additional quotes can be found in my review of the programme, featured above.

In the following quotes, Baz gives some very thoughtful interpretations of Shakespeare's text, as well as sharing some of his experiences with Shakespeare, with some references made to his own version of Romeo + Juliet which is now, unbelievably, a decade old.

(Sitting on a balcony at the House of Iona)
"I grew up in this tiny little country town and we had a school which had only three rooms in it, and we had the hallowed wooden shelves with the books on it, and I went to it and I plucked one of them up, and I opened the book and on the cover of it it said 'The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare', and the nun who was teaching to me, Sister Chantal, she said, 'Yes, that's our most treasured writer, William Shakespeare', and I can remember opening the book up, looking at the lines written on the first page, and thinking, 'I will never be able to understand that as long as I live.'"

(Standing outside the Sydney Opera House)
"Cut to 15 years later and I'm in Sydney now, and we were taken along to this sort of high school production that you're forced to go and see of Twelfth Night."

(Back on balcony)
"And suddenly we were in Club Med. The whole theatre was done up with lights and it was a party and people were serving coloured drinks and there was a band going, 'da da da da da...'"

(Sydney Opera House)
(Baz claps his hands and gets into the rhythm!) "'da da da ba ba ba wha!'"

(Balcony)
"Silence. A door swung open. Blackness. A shaft of white light. And this guy walks out in a white linen suit and hat and he goes, 'If music be the food of love, play on.' Bam! More music - more noise! Two hours later, I was going 'What happened? What was that?' I could understand every word. I knew every person. It was that incredible moment when you realised that that was the power of the theatre.

(Sydney Opera House)
"Someone had drawn the curtain back on the mystery and the obstacle that stood between myself and the power of what Shakespeare has within his work."

(Balcony)
"I mean I made my work of Romeo and Juliet - it's 10 years old. And God knows it's been too long - some new group of actors have got to come along and do a kind of cinematic interpretation, or indeed what is happening in this programme, which is, I really think it is a great thing to say well, now, in this time, in this place, with that material, how are you going to awaken us again to it?"

(Sitting in his 'red room' at the House of Iona, with a Romeo + Juliet poster on the wall, and various artefacts on a mantelpiece behind him)
"The thing that defines great storytelling is that which moves through time and geography. That which reveals its value and its usefulness, no matter the time, no matter the place. And at the very very top of the list of the work that does that, and particularly when it comes to storytelling, is the entire canon of William Shakespeare's work."

"With Shakespeare, we are talking about a man here who invented one quarter of the English language."

"Every line's a hit, you know. And it's incredible too, the thing about Shakespeare, is that as you go on through the work, you keep going, 'oh, he's got that old saying in there', like 'a rolling stone gathers no moss', and then you realise he wrote it.'"

"He was able to tell a story that everybody got, no matter how complex. But the message or messages you received were different depending on who you were. So the genius was a way of telling a story that could play for all kinds of people with all kinds of backgrounds."

"Understand it, get it, make it clear, reveal it, how are we going to do it? That was our mission. That's your mission. Your context, your theatre, your space, these actors, that audience, this situation, this material, this idea, how are you going to reveal it and engage the audience in the larger ideas through emotion moment by moment, there's the job."

"If you get out there, particularly in the streets, which is where this invented language came from, the language of gangs is as rich and as ornate and as full of resonance and wit, in the same way that rappers might use venial language, and complicated syntax, to say quite simple things, that's exactly what's going on in the language of Shakespeare."

"The problem with us was, when we set out to do Romeo and Juliet, was that the idea of what Elizabethan Shakespeare was, was completely confused. If you ask just about anybody, they believe that a classic rendition of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet that was Elizabethan should have had dublet and hose and round vowels, and soft (Baz begins bizarre rendition of Romeo softly saying, 'What light through yonder window breaks? It is the east, and Juliet is the sun.'" :-)

"The thing with the Romeo and Juliet storytelling is that it deals with youthful love. Now that youthful love I like to talk about as kind of a champagne love. It's about the first discovery of true romantic passion but, more importantly, of the power and danger of that passion, it's a wild, exhilarating, exciting, dangerous, out of control love."

(Sitting on the end of a long rectangular pine table in a room in the House of Iona, a fireplace laden with white candles in the background)
"Shakespeare wrote this when he was in his 30s, and yet he's managed to make such a delicate observation of youth, such a precise observation of the characteristics of the young, and particularly in that age when they first come to love, that that observation has been so finely drawn, that it has lived as our kind of bench mark for those kinds of characters for 400 years."

"Romeo, he's the super romantic hero. He's in love with the idea of being in love. He's in love in an almost ridiculous, almost chemical way. It's like he's addicted to love for the sake of it."

"There's this evil little spirit - 'Queen Mab hath been with you' - and she's just like this, and she gets across, and she makes all kinds of human beings do all kinds of crazy things. Mercutio is definitely saying, 'Look, love is not real, it's an illusion of love. Beware of it, be done with that, otherwise it will do with you. Don't get wrapped up in that craziness!'"

(Back in the 'red room')
"At the same time as dealing with youthful love, it deals with old age hate. It deals with something that older people are dealing with all the time, and that is they get exhausted from having to resolve their emotions. They find it easier sometimes just to fall into hate. And then they teach it to their children, and this goes on and on and on and on until it bursts all over everybody."

"Actually reveal what's there, that's all you have to do. Yes, number one you have to understand the audience - who is it that you're trying to reveal it to? 2) You have to look at the elements in your hand, what is the team you've got, who is the group of actors, what is the context, what is the environment, what are the bits and pieces? And 3) You have to take those elements in the time you're in, the the place you're in, with that audience, and all you have to do is reveal what's in the text, reveal that material afresh and new."

"So how's it going? Hmmm, yes, it's that difficult, isn't it? It's actually the process of any creativity is that it's a continual roller coaster ride of huge ups and huge downs."

"What I would say to a group of actors who are going to address the text is, first of all, why, why are we doing this? Why are we wanting to tell the story? Who? Who are we telling it to? If we're going to tell it to these people, in telling it to them, not only are we going to make it useful to them , how are we going to sustain our passion for it?"

"The message that you're left with at the end of it is, look, if you, the generation that is controlling the world, pass on your feud, pass on your hate, your young are going to come back in body bags. And it's easy to say, I think, two households, both alike in dignity, in fair Palestine where we lay our scene, and look at children coming back in body bags, because of a conflict many many many years old, where an older generation is propagating that hate. That is the message of Romeo and Juliet, and that is its eternal relevance."

"As long as you start with a very very good map, and you've got good people, and a compass, and that compass is always here. I mean, here's the compass (holds up a manuscript), at any time, just look down at the compass, look into those words, and it will tell you ultimately where to go. You can rely on that."

"The [Globe] Theatre itself had 4000 folk in it in the middle of the day. On the ground you had people selling pigs and dogs and getting drunk and making noise, and at the top you had the Queen of England. And you had to play to everybody in that social structure all in one moment. It was a fight. His magical sword was language."

"The big idea at the end of the play, is that it took the loss of their children for the adult world to realise that it is their hatred that has brought this about. What the Montagues and the Capulets learn at the end of the play is that the problem was with themselves. The problem wasn't the other person's hatred, it came about because of their own hatred, their inability to resolve it. And if you have that inability, then one day you will wake up, and your children will be gone."