How has Baz Luhrmann made ‘Romeo and Juliet’ accessible and interesting for a young contemporary audience?

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How has Baz Luhrmann made ‘Romeo and Juliet’ accessible and interesting for a young contemporary audience?

        

Romeo and Juliet is a romantic tragedy set in Verona in Elizabethan times. Two families, the Montague’s and the Capulet’s, both noble households, continue their ancient feud, the play starting with a small skirmish in the town centre. However when some young Montagues gatecrash a Capulet party, dishonouring their enemy, Romeo meets Juliet, and the next day they secretly marry. Tybault, Juliet’s cousin, goes looking for Romeo, seeking revenge for the damaged pride Old Capulet had suffered, and when Romeo arrives on the scene, Tybault offers a duel to him, which fatefully ends in Mercutio, Romeo’s best friend’s, death. Romeo then continues to kill Tybault and is exiled to Mantua. By her father’s will, Juliet is bound to marrying Parris, a noble friend of the family. A plot is hatched to fake Juliet’s death and Romeo should carry her away to Mantua. However a mix up leaves Romeo in the dark, and as he arrives on the scene to find Juliet apparently dead, he poisons himself. In his dieing moments, Juliet awakens, and she too commits suicide. In this story, fate and destiny play large parts, ending in an agreement between the two households to end their feud.

In the script there is quite a lot of wordplay between the characters, for instance the first scene dialog about coals. Shakespeare also mixes use of prose, rhyme and iambic pentameter. For example when speaking about Rosaline, his love, Romeo uses a poetic rhyming verse, whereas in Act one Scene two Shakespeare uses rhyming couplets to show comedy, and also parodies the eloquent ornate prose used by people in the sixteenth century. Shakespeare would entertain his audience using different language and verse to show different moods whether it be comedy, romance or desperation.

Baz Luhrmann, then a little known director, has taken this 16th century text and transformed it into a dazzling and accessible film aimed at the young, contemporary audience of today but how has he done this?

He has used many different methods to achieve this, the biggest point is that now, Romeo and Juliet, a classic story, is set in contemporary America. Luhrmann has used many technical film methods, types of editing, sound tracks, length and angles of shots, and special effects. But he has also, short of rewriting the script, completely transformed the play, into this dazzling film. He has changed parts of the plot, cut out large portions of text and even swapped members of the households around. But the film is still exactly the same story, told in a different way, without any new dialog or text. He has stretched the limits Shakespeare had when writing the script, and taken them to new heights in creating this amazing film.

When Shakespeare wrote Romeo and Juliet, the theatre he had, was a stage, with smaller ‘balcony’ above it. Shakespeare had to work around this, and you can see particularly in Act three Scene one where Mercutio’s body would clutter up the relatively small stage; Shakespeare instead kills him off stage, the balcony scene, where Romeo is below the window and balcony where Juliet is, and also in other places. These scenes could have been written differently for a bigger stage, as they were adapted for Baz Luhrmann’s film, but that was the theatre Shakespeare had available.

Luhrmann had quite a large budget for his film; the 20th Century Fox logos showing high production value. He used both high value studios and filmed out of doors, which is an expensive way of capturing a setting. However to partly balance this, the large cityscapes, gas station and other out door scenes were filmed in South America to push down the production cost. The city used is merely a generic cityscape, denoting the contemporary United States of America not any particular American city.

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Luhrmann has modernized the setting, but still in keeping with the text. For instance the gas station in the first scene replaces a communal town square. The gas station is a public place like the square and fighting would certainly not be allowed in either of them.

Luhrmann has used a variety of different issues, relevant in today’s society and intertwined them into the story of Romeo and Juliet, without changing any of the original text. He has mainly done this using visual images and diegetic sounds. For example there is a connection with drug use in Act ...

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