Compare the opening scenes of Zeffirelli and Lhurmann's film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet

The first 200 words of this essay...

Compare the opening scenes of Zeffirelli and Lhurmann's film adaptations of Romeo and Juliet

I am comparing the opening scenes of Franco Zeffirelli and Baz Lhurmman's film adaptations of William Shakespeare's play Romeo and Juliet.

Franco Zeffirelli was born in Florence, Italy in 1923; his father was a cloth merchant and his mother died when he was only 6 years old. His life was made brighter by a group of women known as the Scorpioni; one of the Scorpioni called Mary O'Neill was like a surrogate mother to Franco and she introduced him to English literature and Shakespeare. He started making films in the 1950's and made his reputation by staging and filming classic Shakespeare plays like "The Taming of the Shrew and Ottllo. His last film "Tea With Mussolini" was based on a different but equally dramatic source: his own childhood, this shows that he likes traditional filmmaking.

Baz Lhurmann was born in Northern New South Wales, Australia. He went on to attend the prestigious National Institute of Dramatic Arts in Sydney. In 1985, he was chosen to assist on Peter Brook's epic play, "The Mahabarata." The following year Luhrmann devised and staged the original