Although Fran is a very gentle presence, he’s also super buff and very good at conveying that sort of mixture of wide-eyed innocence and completely wrought tension. I mean, he’s the guy who defeated Don John, there’s something in there that’s a little powerful. He believes everything he hears and it always makes him angry. “If I do not love her, I am a Jew” that’s not going to fly, because there’s no context wherein you can deal with it, whereas Claudio, you know, Fran and I were in lockstep about the fact that his character is kind of a dick. One of the things when you’re really looking at the text, and you ask yourself whether or not you’re going to show it, is ‘What is this person doing in between the times that I see them?’ and because it’s always a bit of a buy that Hero and Claudio are going for it at the end, I thought, if she sees him, if she really watches him mourn and sees that he’s sincere about it, then her forgiveness doesn’t feel as distasteful.ĭid you think much about changing things to fit the social mores of the different contexts? You obviously changed the “Then I am a Jew” line, but got a great laugh out of the ‘Ethiope’ line… ![]() Yeah, I mean, they send Hero off and then she disappears from the narrative entirely. The funeral procession you added also offers a sound emotional explanation that the original text doesn’t to the question of why Hero would accept a man who’s humiliated her and turned his feelings on a dime like that? It changes the text in useful ways too, like when Beatrice tells Benedick “I know you of old”, now she’s not just saying ‘I’ve got your number’. He was like ‘I’m going pretty far with this’, and I was like ‘Yeah, you are, but the way Amy’s looking at you, the way she’s just challenging you, like ‘What have you got?’ and she’s just putting you down in front of everybody, I think it’s going to play. When Alexis was calling her a harpy, he was worried. The idea of ‘Oh, they have a one night stand’ and then we see a brief glimpse later and it’s clearly very passionate, it’s like something was exposed that night that neither of them could be comfortable with afterwards, and so that changes the texture of how they behave towards each other. It works perfectly well without it and probably originally did not have it, but we were going for something that was a little more painful and intimate than just witty and barbed. We realised that the play works with that interpretation. With that first scene, starting with the idea that Beatrice and Benedick had been intimate years before and clearly neither of them were able to deal with that, that’s something that Alexis and Amy and I decided. So your approach to changing the text was to sort out potential problems for a modern audience then? Your cast with Much Ado included some experienced Shakespearian actors and others for whom it was a new challenge. If I thought… ‘Well, the star wattage of this is going to carry it into the stratosphere and it will make more than The Avengers!’ Then you know, they would lock me up next to the guy who thinks he’s Napoleon, who turns out to be Bryan Singer, lovely man… I mean it’s a production of Much Ado, there’s never no reason to see a production of Much Ado. Well, hopefully their treat would be to see a great play by the greatest writer in our language performed excellently by talented and beautiful people. What do you think is the film’s treat for audiences unfamiliar with your cast and work? ![]() That intimacy was part of the treat for me. As… (okay, I’m going to try and maintain a level of professionalism during these next fifteen minutes, if I don’t achieve it then I apologise in advance) … as someone whose adolescence was made infinitely more bearable by your work and the people I shared it with, I came out of Much Ado feeling as if I’d been invited to a Whedon wrap party. So now that’s all out of the way, we can get down to Much Ado.
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