SOLDIERS YELL
I was conscious of trying to keep things simple and really, er,
kind of do the film from the inside out and be driven by the themes
and what I was kind of interested in.
The script was very cinematic, it definitely read like a Western,
and it was, er, very simple,
and the idea of shooting it in Scotland
and bringing that landscape into the film,
er, I think kind of started to define everything.
I actually really enjoyed just kind of having this thing come to me
and being kind of inspired by the world around me.
And Michael being involved
definitely set a certain tone to what this Macbeth was going to be.
Live you? Or are you aught that man may question?
Speak if you can, what are you?
Justin's vision was such a strong one,
and he had such a good handle on it and grasp
that I just really followed his lead.
But definitely I had to find something
that was a personal connection for me to Shakespeare and to that piece.
Each day when I finished work, it was like,
"God, there's a thousand other ways to do that scene."
It's never-ending, you know?
It's kind of depressing,
and it's so, you know, uplifting as well at the same time,
and I think, you know, that's why it's still around.
O, full of scorpions is my mind.
What's done is done.
He talked about those characters,
and what he wanted to do with the play.
It was very beautiful, and he really wanted to understand those people.
I think they're two desperate persons.
It's like when you're drowning, and you have two persons,
and you try to grab this person, and it's going to kill this person,
but you need to survive.
And the way they want to escape their fears...
..and they create a wall of power to protect themselves from fears
instead of facing them, and that will drive them to darkness.
(If we should fail...)
(We'll not fail.)
It was really kind of just finding what felt right,
but I never wanted the verse to feel as though
it was the cherished thing in it all.
I-I really wanted to kind of allow it to just organically flow
within the scenes and the story.
That's the beauty about doing a piece of cinema with it,
is that you can bring the camera right there
and the verse can just go here, and to be able to do that is a joy,
so to hear the verse whispered
or to hear it spoken as in conversation, um,
and to have the camera, erm, sort of touching it just here,
er, was...felt really exciting.
I think even with the soliloquies, a lot of the soliloquies,
I just tried to kind of make sure that they were to someone else,
or, um, or they were like confessions,
um, just to avoid, I guess, the verse leading
and dominating the whole film.
Ambition's there, of course,
but I always think that it's more Lady Macbeth sacrifices herself
for her husband, and this idea that he's suffering heavily
from post-traumatic stress disorder
was something that never occurred to me until Justin said it to me,
and then I was like, "Of course, this is like everything."
So foul and fair a day I have not seen.
And we get those little hints then, like in the banquet scene,
she says, you know, "Don't worry, you know,
"you've seen this sort of behaviour from him before.
"He has these moments, but it's all good."
The trick was the dance between what you saw on-screen
and what the characters were describing,
that you were showing it, to having these incredible hits
and moments of... of the, er...
of the verse where they all sort of dance together
and come just at that moment
and overlap each other in a really powerful way.
The text is so integral to Shakespeare, obviously,
but it was just through sort of repetition of the text
and working with the text and just reading it over and over again,
and to try and sort of find the rhythms,
and that is the thing about the text,
the text will dictate a lot to you if you follow the rhythm of it.
That's why he was so brilliant,
that you could give an interpretation of the same play,
two things totally different.
And I think that Justin's vision is very, very close, um...
to, er, humanity.
CROWD CHEERS Hail Macbeth! Hail Macbeth!
Hail Macbeth! Hail Macbeth! Hail Macbeth!
Hail Macbeth! Hail Macbeth! Hail Macbeth! Hail Macbeth!
Hail Macbeth.
Subtitles by Ericsson