It would be helpful to have available a copy of both the Baz Luhrmann and the Zeffirelli versions of Romeo and Juliet, as some of the tasks refer to them.

The programme makes reference to the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, and it would be good to have one of his best-known films to show, so as to highlight the style copied for the fight scene. A list of suitable films is provided below.

Some of the activities below require access to copies of the play. There are also references to the books Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman and Film Art — An Introduction by David Bordwell and Kristen Thomas, which you may wish to follow up.

Baz Luhrmann decided that they would work with the original Shakespearean language and find a visual means of bringing the sometimes-obscure references to life — relying not on the power of the spoken word alone, but on the directness of film to show what was being described.

The programme also explains the importance of the setting in bringing the script to life. Romeo and Juliet is set in a world of violence and of religion. It is also one in which women are less powerful and more protected than men. The decision to film in Mexico was based on the need to find a place in the modern world in which such factors could still credibly coexist. In order to create an imaginary world, the film-makers also needed a location that was not immediately recognisable but would be immediately understood as a believable urban landscape or, as Catherine Martin puts it, ‘a generic cityscape’.

Baz Luhrmann explains his choice of Mexico in the official notes to the film: ‘There are textual facts in Romeo and Juliet, having to do with Elizabethan England that exist in Mexico. The population was very involved in politics; there was a very small percentage of people with great wealth and a large population of poor: it was violent: and people were openly armed. We’ve interpreted all of these Elizabethan things in the context of the modern, created world. In fact, much of this occurs in modern day Mexico, in varying degrees. You could virtually set the piece in Mexico City itself and just play it. It has mysticism.’

The opening sequence (not shown in the programme), a montage of 96 shots used to illustrate the prologue, is played out in a rapid flow of images. It provides a good illustration of Luhrmann’s method and the importance of the location he chose for the film.

The film opens with a news anchorwoman reading the prologue from the play. It is read in one go and there is nothing offered to the viewer to make it clearer. It is almost as though Luhrmann wants to set up a traditional presentation of the words so that when his vision appears it is even more explosive. The following are the first 18 shots of the film after the static television sequence:

• Shot 2: Travelling shot down a trench.
• Shot 3: Title card: ‘In Fair Verona’.
• Shot 4: Continue down the trench. These are buildings.
• Shot 5: Title card: ‘In Fair Verona’.
• Shot 6: End of a zoom that matches the travelling shot. The movement is from a set of buildings to a hundred-foot-tall statue of Jesus.
• Shot 7: Title card: ‘In Fair Verona’ (held so that it can be read).
• Shot 8: The face of Jesus from the statue — a ‘rack zoom’ out to show that the statue is flanked by two buildings twice its size. The building on the left is crowned with a red sign ‘CAPULET’, the building on the right with a blue sign ‘MONTAGUE’.

The next series of images are more chaotic and resemble news footage:

• Shot 9: Pan (horizontal movement) across the wheels of a moving limousine.
• Shot 10: Zoom out of the side door of a police car that reads ‘Verona Beach’.
• Shot 11: From a high vantage point zoom in on the statue of Jesus — ending in a close-up on the face.
• Shot 12: Different version of shot 11 — ending up on Jesus’ mid-section.
• Shot 13: Shaky pan from Montague to Capulet signs.
• Shot 14: Near-repeat of Shot 6.
• Shot 15: Helicopter view of the city.
• Shot 16: Police helicopter flying next to the church topped with a modern statue of the Virgin Mary.
• Shot 17: On the ground, footage of Verona Beach police car and police as we zoom in on them ‘subduing’ a handcuffed suspect on a mattress.
• Shot 18: Helicopter view of the statue of Mary.
• Shot 19: The face on the statue of Mary.

(Source: Creative Screenwriting magazine, Vol.5 No.2 (1998).)

What messages are conveyed by this rapid-fire sequence of shots? In particular, consider:

• the role of the church
• the position of the two households in relation to the church
• the world of Verona Beach
• the way the news-style footage contributes to the ‘realism’ of the events

Gradually work your way through the opening montage and make a note of the key shots. Analyse how the film introduces information about the characters and what will ensue.

Production Designer Catherine Martin said of this section: ‘The whole title sequence is designed, not only to introduce you to the world very quickly, but also to introduce the characters because they are difficult to remember... and so of course it is good to see names up against the people... the intention was to create something like the TV show Hawaii 5-0 or Miami Vice.’

Contrast Baz Luhrmann’s treatment of the first Chorus speech with that of the Zeffirelli version of the film. Which do you find the most effective, and why? Is it necessary to flesh out every image with a visual, or can a clear reading of a speech do the job effectively?

Act 2 of the play starts with another speech for the Chorus explaining how Romeo has forgotten his first love Rosalind and fallen for Juliet. It describes how he feels he must speak to his ‘foe suppos’d’ and how she will ‘steal love’s sweet bait from fearful hooks’. It ends by suggesting that ‘passion’ will lend them the power to meet.

Create a montage that conveys the information provided in this speech. Try to be subtle and bring out some of the points suggested in this speech — for example, the notion that Romeo is ‘bewitched’ and that his love is based on ‘looks’, while for Juliet and Romeo there is terrible danger attendant on their attraction.

According to the official film notes for Romeo and Juliet, Baz Luhrmann was determined to get Leonardo diCaprio to play Romeo. ‘I thought that Leonardo was an extraordinary young actor (he had recently been nominated for an Oscar for his part in the film What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?), and I thought he would make a great Romeo. It’s important to reveal these eternal characters anew for every generation, and Leo is particularly suited for this. He does seem to symbolise his generation.’

The process of bringing diCaprio on board was an extended one. He was seen as a rising star, so getting him to agree to the project would boost its credibility with the money people at Twentieth Century Fox. Having an American lead would at least give such a potentially risky undertaking a chance of success in the USA — the crucial market for all films if they are to turn an immediate profit.

Winning Leonardo diCaprio involved the following stages:

• DiCaprio was invited to Australia for a week to take part in a series of workshops and readings. It was a no-strings-attached arrangement, and at the end of it he was interested in the project.
• DiCaprio was intrigued by Baz Luhrmann’s determination not to make a traditional version of the play. In the film’s official notes, he said: ‘I wouldn’t have done it if the movie had been a period piece. At first, I thought why do it again? It has been done so many times and so many people loved the Zeffirelli film. But what Baz has done is reinvent it, and in the process, he’s discovered new ways of treating the play and the characters.’
• DiCaprio returned to Australia and was filmed by the cinematographer Donald M McAlpine. The videotape was then shown to the studio executives, who then gave the green light to the project.

The programme discusses the importance of having a recognisable star involved in a film project. What are the benefits that are mentioned, and what are the disadvantages? What do you think are the advantages to a director of working with a relatively unknown cast rather than major stars? There is an excellent discussion of the impact stars can have on films in Adventures in the Screen Trade by William Goldman.

Do you feel that if the film was being made now, diCaprio, basking in his fame following Titanic and The Beach, would come with too much ‘baggage’ and so distract from the ‘created world’ that Baz Luhrmann and his team wanted to create for Romeo and Juliet?

The programme hints at the problems that surrounded Claire Danes’s casting in the film. The film-makers liked her ‘girl next door’ appearance, but the studio were wary. Do you think some of the success of the film might have hung on Claire Danes being neither impossibly beautiful nor a star — particularly among the adolescent girls who came to adore diCaprio and could in some way identify with Danes?

If you know the play, write down the kind of emotional range an actress playing Juliet needs, and the changes that occur to the character between her first girlish appearance and her awakening in the Capulet tomb to find Romeo dead. Can you think of any other actresses currently who might suit the part? A good source for this exercise is the annual publication by the magazine Vanity Fair of the new film faces to look for in the year ahead. Explain your choice.

In order to cast the film, a series of powerful images was created to give actors and agents an idea of the ‘look’ that Baz Luhrmann was hoping to create for his version of the play. Imagine that you had a similar task, but instead of a modern urban setting, the decision had been taken to fit Romeo and Juliet into another kind of genre, such as western, science fiction, or musical. Choosing two or three key scenes from the play, devise the visual prompt cards for those scenes in the genre style of your choice.

Note the reference in the programme to the use of computer-generated images of the actors in costume and settings — created to provide early visual confirmation that the scenes would work visually, long before the film crew had been assembled.

Kym Barrett, the film’s costume designer, suggests the thinking behind the choice of Romeo and Juliet’s fancy dress for the Capulet masked ball. Again the decision to dress Romeo as a knight in shining armour and Juliet as an angel is prompted by the language: the words receive a visual underlining. The costumes are also suggestive of Romeo’s romanticism and Juliet’s innocence and possibly her imminent death.

Search through the play and try to identify any key words or images associated with other key characters. For instance, one of the first references to Tybalt describes him as ‘fiery’. Build up a pattern of such lines or words and then decide what kind of fancy dress you might provide for each character if you were the costume designer. As well as providing drawings, write notes to explain your choices to the director.

Look at the ballroom scene and make a note of the actual costumes that were allocated. What connotations do these costumes carry?

Craig Pearce explains that the petrol station was an ideal modern-day equivalent for the marketplace or town square in which the fight in the first scene is usually staged.

It is mentioned in the programme that when the actors took to the traffic in their cars with their guns, ordinary people thought it was real. This would not have been the first film production that almost ended in a shoot-out with the police.

Many cities try to make it as easy as possible for film-makers to consider them as locations. They do this by setting up a dedicated service designed to help smooth the path for film-makers through the endless red tape that might otherwise result if streets needed to be closed or access were needed to historical sites. In most places in Britain these responsibilities lie with an area film commission. There is a full list of these online at: http://www.britfilmcom.co.uk/network/details.htm.

Contact your local film commission and ask for their brochure, their film-makers’ code of practice and details of any films that have been made in your area. Find out about the economic importance of film-making in your area.

Imagine you are a location finder for a film company hoping to make a version of Romeo and Juliet in your area. Produce a report suggesting some of the locations that could be used for key scenes in the play. What hazards and difficulties might the film-makers face on location in those places, and what measures would need to be taken to ensure the filming went smoothly?

This section of the programme provides a useful insight into the choices that cinematographers face when shooting a scene. Usually the director works from a detailed storyboard: all the key shots will have been worked out in advance. It is far too expensive to just turn up on site with a film crew and hope for the best, but directors do vary in the extent to which they will experiment to take advantage of special circumstances or light conditions.

It took over 170 shots taken over a week to create the opening fight scene which enjoyed a screen time of only five minutes. The editor has the power to squeeze new meaning from individual moments through subtle changes in the arrangement of images and sounds.

The following shots constitute the basic range of shots open to a camera operator:

• extreme or big close-up
• close-up
• medium close-up (head and shoulders)
• medium shot
• medium long shot
• long shot
• extreme long shot

It is very hard to lay down the precise meaning a shot may have out of context, but it is fair to say that the closer the shot is to an object or face, the more significant is that object and the more intense is the audience’s perception of that character’s emotion. The further the camera pulls back from a character, the greater the sense of their location. Thus in the extreme long shot, the figure may be tiny and the geographical context is everything. Such long shots often signal the opening of a scene, and as such are called ‘establishing shots’.

The programme suggests that high-angle shots can be used to make a character seem weak and low-angle shots can suggest the opposite. Can you think of ways in which these shots could be used to suggest just the opposite?

For an excellent discussion of the variety of meanings that shots can generate depending on their context, see Chapter 5 of Film Art — An Introduction by David Bordwell and Kristen Thomas.

Note down the effects of different filming and editing strategies mentioned in the programme. Use the ideas of the programme to think about how you might make a trailer or an advertisement as part of a media studies practical project.

Scriptwriter Craig Pearce explains how the scene was partly modelled on a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. If you are not familiar with this director or his style of film-making you should try to look at some of his work; for example:

• The opening of Once Upon a Time in the West
• The final stand-off in A Fistful of Dollars
• The final duel between Clint Eastwood and Lee Van Cleef in The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

As a practical film project, set yourself the task of filming a confrontation in a school context filmed in ‘spaghetti western’ style.

Make a list of the key ingredients that make up a character and can determine his or her impact on an audience. Now consider the way Tybalt is ‘constructed’ so that the message that he is a lethal fighter is utterly plain. Also note the way the flamenco dance is combined with the gunslinger appearance.

Imagine that you have been set the task of adapting Romeo and Juliet so that each character has a corresponding animal. Which animals would you choose and how would you weave the suggestion of these links into the style of the film?

The pressure that the film-makers came under to show that the bullets were hitting objects rather than people is interesting. It suggests that there was a strong desire to ensure that the film was awarded as low a certificate as possible. If the film had received a 15 certificate in the UK, young adolescent and pre-teen girls — one of the biggest constituents of the likely audience — would have been excluded.

Baz Luhrmann was determined to devise a ‘created world’ in which the language and the more obscure elements of the plot could be ‘demystified’. This world was constructed from a collage of modern and traditional images drawn from religion, theatre, folklore, technology and pop culture.

The following is taken from the official notes for the film: ‘It’s a made up world comprised of 20th Century icons and these images are there to clarify what’s being said, because once you understand it, the power and the beauty of the language works its magic on you. The idea was to find icons that everybody comprehends.’

Production Designer Catherine Martin invites us to look at the detail that went into the world the film-makers created: Verona Beach. The programme dwells in considerable detail on the guns and shows how the Costume Designer Kym Barrett solved the problem of the constant references to ‘swords’ and ‘blades’ by making these brand names for the weapons. The weapons then became a helpful way of distinguishing between the Capulets (Latinos) and the Montagues (Anglos). In this way a simple object in the film can serve multiple functions.

‘Mise-en-scene’ refers to the effect of all the objects placed before the camera as a part of a scene.

Consider the kinds of cars used in the opening scene by the two tribes. What decisions do you feel were made concerning their design?

Later in the film there are a number of scenes set in Juliet’s bedroom. What do you feel the mise-en-scene reveals about her character and the stage she has reached in life?

This section of the programme offers an insight into the complex nature of a film’s soundtrack. At any given time there can be up to 100 different soundtracks built one upon another, giving a scene auditory realism.

One crude division that can be made between types of sound is:

• diegetic (motivated): Sound that seems to occur as a natural backdrop to a filmed sequence.
• non-diegetic (unmotivated): Sound that is clearly superimposed. Music is the classic form of non-diegetic sound in films (unless it is there because someone is playing an instrument or a radio is playing, in which case it becomes diegetic).

The best way to consider the complexity of the sound recordist’s job, and then those of the dubbing mixer and editor, is to go out into a public place and note the range of sounds that are present. Many of these you would probably not usually notice; but if you were making a film, you might try to include them in order to give depth to the film’s soundtrack. A few of them are probably essential to the credibility of your scene.

In the programme, Roger Savage, Dubbing Mixer on Romeo and Juliet, explains the use of exaggerated sounds, such as the tinkle of spurs for boots that do not have any spurs, and strange ‘wooshing’ sounds for abrupt camera movements. This kind of ‘cartoon’ sound effect is described as contributing to the flashiness of the opening scene and underlining the cowboy elements. Once you are sensitised to this technique, watch out for other moments when it occurs during a viewing of the full film.

The programme looks at the resons behind the decision to film most of the balcony scene around a swimming pool.

Notice how the film-makers are very sensitive to the ‘pulse’ of Shakespeare’s scene. They have detected both a romantic element and a comic element, and these are brought together by having the characters fall into the pool. Here, a single action is both an ordinary event in the narrative — a girl was surprised and pulled a boy into the water — and a means of playing with the audience’s emotions.

Catherine Martin, the Production Designer is interviewed. She explains the origins of the fish tank scene and the continual references in the film to water. A rich household might possess a fish tank; but consider the mass of other associations and functions that such a thing can generate in a film already rich in symbolism:

• a barrier between Romeo and Juliet — ironic given that they will soon be in a swimming pool together
• a suggestion of the sensuality that is developing between them
• a subtle way of suggesting quiet and calm after the riot of the party occurring elsewhere in the house
• a hint of how observed the two of them are: their lives will be played out in a kind of ‘goldfish bowl’ from which there is no escape
• a quirky way of emphasising the extraordinary nature of their first contact: the presence of fish swimming in front of their faces gives the scene a visual freshness

The water in the swimming pool serves many purposes and is richly symbolic. As well as the meanings suggested by Craig Pearce, what additional significance could this scene contain? Think of all the associations that come to mind when you consider water.

In the prologue to the programme we are asked to consider the great number of people who receive a credit at the end of a film such as Romeo and Juliet. We are told that the work of over 368 people contributed to the final product. The programme looks at some of those who made the greatest creative contribution to the film. But if the film is the result of the combined skills of a team of specialist designers, photographers, sound recordists and editors, how can it be said to be Baz Luhrmann’s film?

The auteur theory holds that certain directors make utterly distinctive films. The prime example is Alfred Hitchcock. He often regarded the actual film-making as a mechanical process, so thorough had his planning of every shot and scene been before the cameras started rolling. Like Hitchcock, Baz Luhrmann gets what are called ‘possessory credits’: rather than just being ‘Romeo and Juliet’ it becomes ‘Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet’. The main reason for this may be that having already made a hit film, his name is considered sufficiently helpful as a marketing tool for the next film he is associated with.

What comparisons can you make between the films Strictly Ballroom and Romeo and Juliet?

Consider the central drama. Both films are concerned with love and the obstacles to love. Both are based upon meticulous research and intricately created worlds with their own rigid structures against which the young rebel. Both are made in a highly flamboyant, often exaggerated style, rich in film references.

What other comparisons can you find? Baz Luhrmann has been described as the master of a kind of ‘MTV’ telling of his stories — what do you feel critics might be implying by this comment?

Baz Luhrmann was at pains to find visual ways to enhance the audience’s understanding of the language and world of Romeo and Juliet. The film is full of witty links to the original play and beyond to other works of Shakespeare. Look out for references in the following and consider their effect:

• The business signs on Verona Beach.
• Advertisements throughout the film.
• The equivalent of the sycamore grove where Romeo wanders nursing a broken heart at the start of the film.
• Many of the characters in the film resemble other well-known character types, either invented or real. For example, Mercutio becomes a version of the transvestite performer RuPaul at the Capulet ball; and Gloria Capulet is apparently based on the character Blanche duBois from the Tennessee Williams play A Streetcar Named Desire.

Baz Luhrmann's films are rich in reference to other films too. These are part of a deliberate attempt to make the story and script comprehensible. You will have already encountered in the programme some of the quotations from other films and film styles; now you may wish to follow up some of the others. For example, the final police stakeout has been compared to the end of the James Dean film Rebel Without a Cause.

The object of this activity is not to become a film buff, but to understand the debt that all artists owe to those that have gone before, and also to better appreciate this particular film. It is important to think about why each film and cultural reference has been made. Does it underline the function of a character, or provide an ironic comment on what we are seeing?

Wooing the reviewers is a major part of the marketing of any film. For the really big blockbuster there will be a spectacular launch screening and a round of interviews with the stars. But critics often watch the films in small screenings weeks before the official launch.

There are no hard and fast rules for writing a review — all that it really requires is an argument that you can support and maintain. You will need to comment on aspects of the actors' performances and the film's direction, and you may wish to make reference to other film versions. Sometimes critics will focus on particular moments they felt did or didn’t work; and sometimes they will alert the reader to some of the themes or visual motifs in the film. Remember, your readers want to know whether or not to spend their money on seeing this film as opposed to another; and you are there to influence that decision.

Try writing your own review of Romeo and Juliet.

Alternatively, at A Level, you may be creating some film marketing materials for a film of your own invention as part of a practical project. Find some film reviews and promotional pages on the Internet and then create an invented review or web page design for your film.