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quick info

Release Date (NY/LA) -- May 12, 2000
Relase Date (Elsewhere USA) -- May 19, 2000
Julia's Character -- Ophelia
Distributor -- Miramax

trailers

The following was provided to Julia-Stiles.com Hamlet Headquarters by Miramax Films:

"Hamlet" is a contemporary adaptation of the classic play set in New York City, 2000 -- a world of laptops and limousines.

The President of the Denmark Corporation has recently been found dead, and his wife has re-married the man suspected of the murder. Nobody is suffering more than her son Hamlet – who is not only determined to avenge his father’s murder but is also in love with the enchanting but forbidden Ophelia.

And so begins a series of discoveries, lies, and loss that will destroy the lives of everyone involved.

production notes

The following was provided to Julia-Stiles.com Hamlet Headquarters by Miramax Films:

By setting HAMLET, Shakespeare's enduring tale of love, violence and betrayal, against New York City in the year 2000, director Michael Almereyda (best known for such risk-taking features as the black-and-white vampire comedy "Nadja") provides an astonishing new experience for filmgoers.

In this original rethinking of HAMLET, Shakespeare's words clang, clash against and interplay with a high-tech, corporate, consumerist portrait of the contemporary world forged with audacity and energy by Almereyda. The result is a highly immediate, accessible and emotional take on a classic tale made new. At the core of this HAMLET is one of the most timeless yet urgent of human themes: that of an idealistic young man who boldly decides to take on the corruption he sees around him only to be destroyed by it.

Almereyda's interpretation brings the innate action and lyricism of Shakespeare's play to the fore. Careening through the corporate halls of Manhattan, the aisles of video stores and the hubbub of nightclubs, this HAMLET also lends to the title character a sense of 21st century alienation and dismay at the global media culture of which he is a part.

In Shakespeare's world, Claudius was the King of Denmark, Gertrude his Queen, Hamlet their princely son; four hundred years later, in Almereyda's world, Claudius is the CEO of Denmark Corporation, Gertrude is his wife and renowned socialite and Hamlet is their would-be digital video filmmaker son. Is there any difference between Shakespeare's world and Almereyda's world? It's up to the audience to decide.

FROM KINGDOM TO CORPORATION: THE CONCEPT

At first, Michael Almereyda resisted taking on a play that has been filmed in more than 40 different versions, ranging from the painstakingly faithful and the eccentric to Disney's recent Hamlet-inspired "The Lion King." But, after much investigation, Almereyda felt there was still something left to say on the subject. The director was inspired by Orson Welles' unorthodox adaptation of "Macbeth," which mixed innovative filmmaking energy with the heart of Shakespeare's play. "Welles shot his 'Macbeth' in twenty-one days, describing it as a rough charcoal sketch of the play. I wanted to film HAMLET with that same spirit, roughness and energy," explains the director.

In the beginning, the more Almereyda tried to escape HAMLET, the more the play and the character seemed to pursue him. "References and images kept showing up out of nowhere," says Almereyda. "I passed high school kids quoting it on the street. I thought back to my first impressions of the play, remembered its impact and meaning. It seemed to be all around me."

He soon gave in and began adapting Shakespeare's witty verse to a cool, moody modern setting. His idea was to avoid plugging the plot of HAMLET into contemporary language, which had already been done; but rather to meld Shakespeare's incomparable dialogue with the dissonant imagery of today's corporate, consumer, global, media and youth cultures. "Shakespeare has been done with a contemporary gloss often enough," Almereyda explains. "The key to our approach has been to balance respect for the play with respect for contemporary reality—to see how thoroughly Shakespeare can speak to the present moment, how they can speak to each other."

In Almereyda's adaptation, Denmark is not a kingdom in the traditional sense but a corporate empire, a mega-merger, multinational conglomeration not unlike those of today's headlines – yet hiding the same human fragilities. As he developed the concept further, the high-tech, megacorp world of Denmark became the film's powerful visual subtext, surrounding and barraging Hamlet in his hour of uncertainty. "Global corporate power seems at least as treacherous and total as anything going on in a well-oiled feudal empire of Shakespeare's day," explains Almereyda. "But I intended the corporate media angle to go deeper than just that easy correspondence. It relates to the whole look and scope of the film."

For Almereyda, this meant forging a nerve-jangling ambiance of constant media saturation and corporate messages through which Hamlet's overwhelming emotions emerge. "Hamlet, after all, says 'Denmark is a prison,'" Almereyda observes. "If you think of this in terms of media and consumer culture, the bars of the prison are defined by advertising, by all the brand names, logos, and billboards, all the seductive color and noise that crowd our waking hours. In this atmosphere, it's all but impossible to find evidence of experiences, and relationships, that can be considered truly private or pure.

"So when the ghost of Hamlet's father vanishes into a Pepsi machine, or Hamlet finds himself questioning the meaning of existence in the aisles of Blockbuster Video, or when Shakespeare's verse is interrupted by the roar of an airplane or the hectoring tones of Mr. Moviefone -- it's meant as something more than a bit of casual irony. It's another way to touch the core of Hamlet's anguish, to recognize the frailty of spiritual values in a material world, and to get a whiff of 'something rotten' in Denmark here and now."

"Given this context," Almereyda continues, "it was fitting to make Hamlet a would-be filmmaker, someone trying to bring order to the flood of images that threatens to engulf him. There's hardly a single scene without a camera, a photograph, a TV monitor or electronic recording device of some kind. The challenge was to merge this technology with Shakespeare's themes, to find a visual language that can hold a candle to his poetry."

Once the script was completed, the reaction was swift, and the cast of familiar characters was assembled from some of cinema's most popular performers. But Almereyda stuck to his vision of a fast, furious HAMLET of these times. "We kept to our original intent—to do it low budget, in 16mm, fast and cheap in New York," says Almereyda. "Every spoken word written by Shakespeare but set within—and energized by—a contemporary context. We went in with the sure knowledge that this wouldn't be a definitive 'Hamlet'—it would simply be our 'Hamlet': a collage, a cut-up, a collision of feelings and ideas."

BREAKING THE MOLD: THE PLAYERS

At the center of this new HAMLET is the title character, here given a youthful verve full of angst and grungy melancholy. Michael Almereyda went against the traditional mold of a seasoned, middle-aged actor, handing the role to the young actor Ethan Hawke, a long-time friend. Hawke plays a Hamlet who is still a perpetual college student, still searching for the answers to big questions.

"Looking through so many adaptations, I wondered why all filmed Hamlets have featured middle-aged actors," says Michael Almereyda. " The part is hugely challenging, but I was convinced a younger person could handle it, even fly with it. There has never been a film version of 'Hamlet' with a lead actor younger than thirty. Ethan is the first.""

Hawke received a letter from Almereyda discussing his intentions. "Michael wrote me that he had been wanting to do a film that was rich in substance, and that led him to the idea of a modern version of 'Hamlet,'" Hawke remembers. "I'd been thinking of doing the same thing myself and I quickly agreed to work with him on the project."

Hawke was also drawn by the idea of providing an exciting entrée into HAMLET for a new generation. "What was attractive about doing it as a film," says Hawke, "was the opportunity to make the verse more accessible. A lot of people are either Shakespeare fanatics, who know the text extremely well, or the kind of people who view it as something they discussed in school. And I felt that with cinema there is the opportunity to give Shakespeare a presentation that is more intriguing for a modern audience."

Hawke was also struck by the relevancy of HAMLET to these times. He explains: "The play has a very heavy sense of paranoia. Everybody is watching the other characters. I find that very modern. Obviously there are some things that don't change even though our environment is completely changed."

Almereyda began to collect a vast "library" of all the cinematic HAMLET performances to date in his head for reference in directing Hawke. He journeyed to every film library and museum in New York, and watched every HAMLET on record, even silent films. "I read a few books and, more to the point, I never stopped reading the play, which carries the best advice for any director: 'Suit the action to the word, the word to the action.' This is so simple and smart it's almost stupefying," notes Almereyda.

In the end, Almereyda felt Hawke brought his own distinct touch to the character. "You watch Ethan," says Almereyda, "and feel that he is, on and off screen, always searching and reaching. Hamlet contains within himself a world of contradictions, but for me this essentially romantic searching quality is the core of the character."

It was this quality of Hamlet's that most touched Hawke, who appreciated the terrible dilemma the wronged son faces. "There is this common opinion about Hamlet that his weakness is his indecision," says Hawke. "But I've always felt strongly that he shouldn't kill Claudius—to kill Claudius is to be a vigilante. He deliberates and deliberates about it and he never should do it. I've never understood why audiences always feel so strongly that he should. The smartest idea he has in the play is to make Claudius think about his own guilt. He doesn't need to kill him if he actually lets him know that he's caught him in his guilt. There's nothing in Shakespeare's body of work that suggests he thinks that murder is a good thing."

"And the proof of this," Hawke continues, "is that Hamlet's pursuit of his father's revenge leads to the murder of Polonius, which creates another Hamlet. Laertes is doing exactly what Hamlet is doing, trying to avenge his father. And Ophelia tries to carry out her father's word and she ends up destroyed. All these people are trying to please others and all this violence happens because of it."

With Hawke committed in the title role, Almereyda worked with his producers, Amy Hobby and Andrew Fierberg, to assemble a remarkably varied, distinguished and unexpected cast. The players include Bill Murray, who had attended Shakespeare workshops but never tackled the material on film, as a consummately corporate Polonious; and Diane Venora, who had previously played both Ophelia (opposite Kevin Kline) and, famously, the title role of Hamlet for Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival, as a paparazzi-pleasing Gertrude. Sam Shephard portrays the Ghost who emerges from a vending machine to reveal the truth to his son; Kyle MacLachlan is a power-brokering Claudius; and Julia Stiles is a hip and heart-broken Ophelia.

"Bill Murray is one of my all-time favorite actors," says Almereyda, explaining his choices. "I was grateful for the opportunity to work with him. Same with Sam Shepard, who is routinely congratulated for his 'presence' in films and completely under-rated as an actor. For Claudius, Kyle MacLachlan brought a sharpness, an assurance and dashingness that goes against the conventional grain for the role. Julia Stiles as Ophelia—she has an incredible way of embodying opposites, seeming natural and stylized at the same instant, young but experienced, cool and sharp but breakable and soulful. And Diane Venora, in Bill Murray's words, 'made us all legit.' She knew the play better than anyone, brought conviction to every moment and every line."

"With just a couple exceptions the cast is American, and notably younger than usual for these roles," Almereyda continues. "Diane, Kyle, Liev Schreiber and to some extent Steve Zahn are all classically trained. But the common denominator is that everyone in the film wanted to be in it because they love and respect Shakespeare's language. They recognize how Shakespeare's meaning and emotion are physically embedded in the language."

Despite the cast's excitement about Almereyda's concept, the challenge in front of them was clear: to make the language come alive, to make the words as electric as the modern surroundings against which they are juxtaposed. "The trick, the challenge, lies in working it through so that the poetry isn't like a glass that's so full you're afraid to drink for fear of spilling it," comments Almereyda. "We didn't have much rehearsal time. Most of the actors will admit it's the hardest thing they've ever done. It was certainly the hardest thing I've ever done."

He encouraged the actors to draw on their own experience and traditions, rather than classical Shakespearean technique. "Shakespeare's language is so elevated, the passions are so intense—but that doesn't mean actors have to sputter and shout their way through it," says Almereyda. "We did our best to avoid histrionics, and to apply a tradition of specifically American acting that's emerged over the last fifty years but which is seldom, from what I can tell, applied to Shakespeare. A style that's more restrained and interior but still—all the more so—really committed and connected. I wanted, above all, a feeling of intimacy."

The cast responded to this dictum, each compelled first and foremost by the ways in which Shakespeare's words still speak to the human experience. "I normally begin work by thinking psychologically about the part I'm playing," notes Sam Shepard. "This was my first opportunity to perform Shakespeare, and it was a great pleasure to start with the beauty of the words. I just let that extraordinary language guide me."

"I think it's the greatest play ever written," adds Kyle MacLachlan. "You appreciate the poetry, you appreciate the construction of the play, you appreciate that you have so many characters that are rich, that are exciting for a performer to play. It's a play that no one will ever get 'right' because it's so complex and is always open to more interpretation."

"I think the play endures because the principles inside it endure," summarizes Diane Venora. "The poetry is timeless and it deals with life and death and betrayal, corruption and purity. Whether you are in this century or another century, these are the principles that govern life. These words endure forever because they have life in them and because their truth is absolute."

HAMLET'S BRAVE NEW WORLD: THE SETTING

The world that Michael Almereyda and production designer Gideon Ponte created to bring out the universal themes of HAMLET is a discordantly contemporary one, with computers and surveillance cameras filling angular, high-tech spaces. It is a world in which Hamlet's famous "to be or not to be" soliloquy takes on a new resonance as it is delivered under fluorescent lights along the bright, plastic aisles of a video store.

"We were hoping to give a portrait of contemporary New York, and also to deliver pleasurable shocks from the sight of familiar scenes played out on Park Avenue, in the coils of the Guggenheim, in a laundromat or diner or penthouse hotel room," explains Ponte.

Adding to this moody sense of modernity are the distinctive costumes designed by Luca Mosca and Marco Cattoretti, who had their own vision of how Hamlet and his friends and family might appear in a 21st century incarnation. "We designed HAMLET by trying to pick up elements of the past and incorporate them into modern fashions," says Luca Mosca. "Hamlet wears leather like a traditional Hamlet—but his coat is laser cut whereas the old one would have been hand-sewn. Ophelia mixes a downtown East Village rebel look with the expensive fashions that her wealthy father can afford; her look is baggy chic. Gertrude is a modern royal and dresses like very few women can—she wears European couture collections. Claudius, the young king, always presents an impeccable, beautiful facade."

Similarly, the score by award-winning composer Carter Burwell ("Fargo," "Being John Malkovich") meshes a classical string ensemble with rhythmical electronic loops. "Hamlet carries a video camera in the film and I wanted to echo that in the music," says Burwell. "The electronic loops suggest the endless compiling and reviewing he does with his digital editing equipment - the wheels turning in his head."

Burwell's score is complimented by source cues which include 19th century music specifically inspired by Shakespeare's "Hamlet" -- symphonic arrangements by Tchaikovsky, Liszt and the Danish composer Gade -- as well as a 1986 Birthday Party song, written and performed by Nick Cave, titled "Hamlet (Pow, Pow, Pow)."

Throughout the film, the design and performances draw freely on the many HAMLET versions that have come before while at the same time heading into unexplored territory – and that is exactly how Michael Almereyda wanted it. "The play is a great echo chamber," says Almereyda. "It absorbs and amplifies the voice of everyone who enters into it. Shakespeare anticipates and validates every critical approach, theory, world view. But it wouldn't be read and studied and performed so much if it didn't also have an urgent emotional center. The story and characters are eternal... and eternally new."

history

HAMLET, with its suspenseful story, its complexity, contradictions and emotional core, remains William Shakespeare's most frequently filmed play, which is saying a lot in oeuvre that sees near constant film adaptations. The tale delves into so many vital human themes – murder and violence, temptation and integrity, sex and desire, paranoia and madness – it seems eternally irresistible. With some forty different cinematic renditions, HAMLET constitutes a virtual film genre unto itself. In the silent era alone, seventeen HAMLETS were produced, two of them featuring female actors in the title role (Sara Bernhardt in 1900, Asta Nielsen in 1928).

One of the most renowned HAMLET versions is the shadow-filled, black-and-white 1948 production in which Laurence Oliver directed himself, garnering a Best Actor Academy Award. Olivier's brooding, blond incarnation of the Prince seemed so definitive that no other cinematic versions were attempted for fifteen years,

Soon, however, new HAMLETs began to emerge -- from a variety of countries and perspectives.

Notable classical adaptations include Grigori Kozintsev's 1964 Russian production, Tony Richardson's 1969 British film starring Nicol Williamson, and Franco Zeffirelli's production starring Mel Gibson. More recently, Kenneth Branagh launched an audaciously uncut version of the play with himself in the lead and an all-star supporting cast, receiving an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for his work with the bard’s words.

Michael Almereyda cites several somewhat eccentric productions as influences on his new HAMLET. He was inspired in part by the 1987 Finnish film "Hamlet Goes Business," from director Aki Kaurismaki, which gave the story a hilariously morose, mock-heroic treatment with Hamlet as a bratty would-be businessman who turns out to have poisoned his own father. Two stage productions also influenced Almereyda’s version: one mounted by the great Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose published notes on the play were inspirational to Almereyda; and Ingmar Bergman's stage production featuring Peter Stormare, performed in Swedish at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1990.

The list of significant cinematic HAMLETs would not be complete without acknowledging a cluster of films owing a deep debt to the melancholy Dane: Kurosawa's "The Bad Sleep Well" (1961), Tom Stoppard's "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead" (a theatrical sensation in the late sixties, then a 1991 film) and Disney's "Hamlet" - `derived mega-hit "The Lion King" (1995), among others.

 

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