Romeo + Juliet

Baz Luhrmann moves the play to Verona Beach, an invented coastal city where two rich family empires wage an armed feud, but keeps Shakespeare’s language. The text is heavily pruned and images fill the gaps: a television news anchor reads the prologue, and the balcony scene drops into a swimming pool. Studio production notes quote armourer Charlie Taylor: the guns carry blade names like “Sword” and “Rapier”, so the sword lines stayed. The opening gas-station shootout plays like an action film with loud music, yet the lovers’ deaths come in a candlelit church to a quotation from Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. Per the production notes, the team first modelled the city on Miami Beach, then after three months of Fox-funded research Luhrmann found a closer match for the play’s Elizabethan conditions in Mexico. Filming ran around Mexico City and ended on Veracruz beaches. A videotaped workshop DiCaprio joined in Australia persuaded the studio. At the 69th Academy Awards Catherine Martin and Brigitte Broch were nominated for Art Direction, won by The English Patient. At Berlin in 1997 DiCaprio took the Silver Bear for Best Actor and Luhrmann the Alfred Bauer Prize. A good fit if you want Shakespeare’s verse delivered through a news anchor, branded pistols and a pool. Not for anyone wanting the full text.