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What starts out as a love story between Max (Vincent Cassel) and Lisa (Monica Bellucci) soon turns out to be a love triangle when Alice ( Romane Bohringer) becomes involved in the storytelling. Elements which are missing in the first part of the film are revealed in the second and shed a completely new light on the events as they were previously depicted. It just opens it all up.1 The Apartment has a very intricate plot because it tells the same story twice in succession, from two different points of view. I find this much more layered and amusing, and the actors can really go town with it. How hard is that to do in a naturalistic movie? You can’t! And suddenly you’re stuck with realism. I think the mechanicals, when they come out to their “green plot” and they have a grass rug and a grass barcalounger, it’s like their playroom, their dne where their pool table is down in the basement in Brooklyn. You see these 20 young kids with bamboo poles running around the room, trapping the young lovers and being these obstacles - it’s freer. She said, “This is so much better filmed this way than in real environments.” Even though I set both of my previous films in real environments, I tend to agree with her, because the stylization allows for the mind of the audience to be filling in those blanks. Helen Mirren came to see she’s played Titania, Hermia, and Helena, and she was knocked out. It’s very hard to place this in the 1920s or the 1930s and do it in a realistic setting and really believe in the supernatural world. And in the other film versions I’ve seen I felt were far from definitive. It’s very beautiful, but it’s not for us now. The Max Reinhardt, with Mickey Rooney and James Cagney, is very charming, but very old-fashioned. It’s a very theatrical play, which makes it very hard to do on film. This has a real free-wheeling feeling to the camera, and to the actors. Anything on a proscenium is going to be artificial. When you see opera live, it’s artificial. They’re able to face upstage, downstage, sidestage, so when you have these fights going on, it’s really kinetic, and that allows the camera to be everywhere. Because audiences are on all sides, the movement of the actors is much more naturalistic. There’s also something very important about the way this is staged in theater. Your acting can be brought down to an inner monologue, and you can get this multi-layering of styles.” I could say to David Harewood, “You don’t have to project for the last row in the house. Because I could do these daytime pickups, I could be more intimate.
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You know they’re there, but because we’re onstage and in their faces, it’s much more immersive. What you get in this film is you’re aware it’s being performed live, but after a while, you forget the live audience. So many of our leads have acting experience in television or film as well as theater. So I use the locations in cinema to be extensions of what Shakespeare’s ideas are about. In “The Tempest,” when we were in a forest where all the machinations of the court were, it was like a labyrinth of trees - whereas for the two young lovers, Miranda and Ferdinand, they were in this gorgeous sand pit, where their love could flower with this gorgeous color. You are supporting the language and the ideas that are in the play with your choice of landscape. That’s a metaphor for the rape of this woman. For the rape of Lavinia - with the help of Dante Ferretti, of course, the great production designer - I chose a swamp with burned-out stumps from a forest fire, because it was inspired by the language of Shakespeare. Because the environments are literal - in “Titus,” we were in Rome, we had colosseums, we were in forests and swamps - you find the metaphorical landscapes for what in the theater would have been stylized. When I do that, I’m doing an adaptation of an actual play to these environments.
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I’ve had the benefit of shooting two Shakespeare movie-movies, “Titus” and “The Tempest,” both of them on location.