![]() “He wasn’t interested in that kind of realism. ![]() “Joel was adamant he didn’t want to shoot in a real Scottish castle,” Delbonnel says. The imagery and cinematic experience is in dialogue with the rhythms and themes of the text.”Ĭoen had quickly dismissed the idea of shooting on location. Even though he had been talking to theatrical designers he felt he needed a cinematic approach. “Joel never wanted to deny Macbeth’s origins as a play so immediately that meant abstraction. I could play with the blue and red curves and change how the black and white looked as opposed to baking in a look on film,” Bruno Delbonnel, cinematographerĪccording to production designer Stefan Dechant, Coen’s interpretation uses the language of cinema in conversation with the text. “With digital you have a longer latitude in terms of exposure which meant we could play with a wider scale of grey…converting to black and white really helped us push different colour curves in post. These were versions directed by and starring Orson Welles in 1948 by Akira Kurosawa in 1957 as Throne of Blood by Roman Polanski in 1971 and pointedly his first film after the Sharon Tate murder and most recently by Justin Kurzel starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard. ![]() There have been four previous filmed versions of the play which Coen and Delbonnel reviewed as part of their prep. Yes, it’s about bloody murder but it’s also about the mortality of being barren.” Macbeth is jealous of Banquo for having a child. “In the play, Macbeth and his wife are a younger couple but in this version they are older and they can never have children. “He was much more interested in the humanity of the story,” he tells IBC365. Yet according to cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel, ASC, AFC the director never mentioned this to him. “It’s amazing how this play prefigures 20th-century pulp noir tropes,” Coen marvelled to The Guardian. The mise-en-scène is composed of light and shadow on geometrically exact sets in stark black and white, very much like the German expressionism that influenced American B-movie thrillers of the 1940s. In the event it is only Joel Coen in the writer-director’s chair for an intensely stylised, studio-bound and austere reimagining of Shakespeare’s bloodbath. Kathryn Hunter writer/ director Joel Coen and cinematographer Bruno Delbonnel (right) behind the scenes of The Tragedy of Macbeth
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