Looking for Richard The Bard is up for another busy year, and his popular appeal can no longer be in doubt if Troma have enlisted his inspiration for their upcoming classic, Tromeo and Juliet. At the Berlin International Film Festival, Sir Ian McKellen gave his interpretation of the scheming king in Richard Loncraine's Richard III (with American duo Annette Bening and Robert Downey Jr), set in the 30s, where he screamed in the final climactic moment, "A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse", from a jeep stuck in the mud.
Now the 'Method Man' himself, Al Pacino, gets to grips with the subject in his latest feature, Looking for Richard, screening today in Un Certain Regard.
Pacino, an eight-time Oscar nominee - eventually bagging a Best Actor Oscar and a Golden Globe for his role in Scent of a Woman - is, among other things, a long-time member of David Wheeler's Experimental Theater Company in Boston, and has been in stage productions of Richard III both in Boston and New York.
In the tradition of François Truffaut's La nuit américaine (Day for Night) and Federico Fellini's 8 1/2, Looking for Richard - produced and directed by Pacino who also plays the lead - is a simultaneous telling of the classic drama and an exploration of artistic and practical battles to understand the play, make Shakespeare accessible and, ultimately, finish the film.
"You don't need to understand every single word that's said, as long as you get the gist of what's going on… Just trust it and you will get it," says Pacino with confidence. "When touring colleges in the late 1970s, letting the students know I was going to read Shakespeare, at first they were reluctant to listen. But we would talk informally about the play, and then I would read an excerpt. Soon, they found the [link] from their world to the world of Shakespeare."
In the film, he takes the cameras through the streets of New York to the birthplace of Shakespeare, and finally to an emotionally-charged production of Richard III, with a stellar cast including Harris Yulin, Penelope Allen, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey and Winona Ryder. Measuring the public opinion of the play in New York afterwards, he receives a range of responses varying from "Richard who?", to Shakespearean eulogies, such as the interviewee who proclaims: "He helped us and instructed us in the art of living."
"By juxtaposing the day-to-day life of the actors and their characters with ordinary people, we attempted to create a comic mosaic - a very different Shakespeare," concludes Pacino. "Our main goal with the project is to reach an audience that would not normally participate in this kind of language and world."
Jorn Rossing Jensen
Prod Co: Jam Productions
Prod: Michael Hadge, Al Pacino
Dir: Al Pacino
Scr: Al Pacino, Frederic Kimball, William Shakespeare
Ph: Robert Leacock, Nina Kedrem, John Kranhouse, Steve Confer
Ed: Pasquale Buba, William A Anderson, Ned Bastille, André Betz Prod
des: Kevin Ritter
Mus: Howard Shore
Cast: Al Pacino, Harris Yulin, Penelope Allen, Alec Baldwin, Kevin Spacey, Winona Ryder
Running time: 117mins
International sales: Fox Searchlight Pictures
