Joel Coen, Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand & More on The Tragedy of Macbeth | NYFF59

[Music] uh good morning and welcome to our first press conference of this film festival i'm jenna slim the festival's director of programming i'm very pleased to have uh quite a few special guests with us so i'm just going to call them all out on stage we have the screenwriter and director of the tragedy of macbeth joel cohen um the producer of the film who also plays lady macbeth francis mcdormand [Applause] lord macbeth himself denzel washington [Applause] bertie cavell who plays banquo [Applause] moses ingram who plays lady macduff and uh harry melling who plays malcolm uh thank you thank you so much to all of you for being here this morning uh i will start it's a little echoey i'll start with a few questions uh and then we'll we'll take we'll take them from you um maybe a question first for the director and producer uh of the film um fran i know that you did macbeth on stage a few years ago at berkeley rep also playing lady macbeth did the conversations about making a film macbeth start for you and joel around that time or did it predate that production i think i had asked joel a couple times if he was interested in doing it on stage and he said absolutely not had no interest in doing theater though i tried probably over about a 15-year period and then gave up was very fortunate to do it at berkeley with dan sullivan who knows his way around shakespeare and the theater and then um more i think though that that did inspire joel to think about it as an adaptat a screen adaptation joe yeah um it's interesting because dan very generously let me sit in on some of the rehearsals that they were doing when they were putting it up on stage at berkeley rep which was really great for me actually and uh you know i i really uh appreciate it and thank thank him for that um but as fran was saying i i my feeling was always that i'm not a stage director i i i i really wouldn't know what to do honestly i i but i did say to her at a certain point if you want to think about it as a movie or if you let me think about it as a movie i might get somewhere with it and maybe we could do something interesting what does that mean for you to think about shakespeare as a movie well i i i just it means that unlike doing something on the stage where there's one sort of visual metaphor for the whole thing which is essentially the sort of primary stage set in terms of what you're looking at i don't it's just not the way my brain works you know i mean movies are very much about where you're looking from where you're looking and how long you're looking at a very particular thing from a particular angle and that's that's really one of the i mean that's what distinguishes it from theater in many ways i mean that's one way of looking at it it's a little um but but just going to how you think about something in terms of adapting it dramatically for somebody to look at so since we have so many of the amazing cast with us i thought maybe we could talk a little bit about i think something that's always very important for shakespeare whether on stage or on screen is just putting your your company together uh and starting of course with denzel washington and in one of i think one of his great roles uh here um very early on did you think of denzel in this role and how did you fill out the rest of the cast and and what was great was it was a pretty short conversation you said yeah you were like yeah let's do it yeah you don't make lists for the best uh for a generation's macbeth you one is born and then they play it from my point of view so denzel you just said yes right away yes i did this is a fascinating journey for me i went to school a thousand feet from here and played othello at 20 didn't know what i was doing so just the long thousand feet you know but uh when you're working with two not just two but i almost used the word old but uh more states whatever the word is masters elders and then witnessing these young er masters chasing us down like but the the cool thing to go back to what you were saying was that we were a company the way joel and fran led the led us we sat around the table people played different roles i should be talking right people played different roles in the readings we we became i think a company uh my daughter had maybe one line in the film and a wonderful actress and the first day of whatever day was a reading joel was like well no you're going to read the king and this and he threw everybody under the bus and you had to sink or swim and you know that's what we i we live for so i'm i'm honored and fortunate that they said yes to me what was it like for you to return to shakespeare on screen i mean you've throughout your career you've you've done shakespeare several times some major productions um richard iii and julius caesar of course but you know to come back to doing this role on screen can you talk about what that was like for you that's how it was you know you you you that's the ultimate challenge it's the ultimate reward and uh you know it's where i started and where i want to finish it's it's a very um i think very diverse group of actors in in many ways not at least in terms of their backgrounds i mean you have american actors british actors you have people you know who have a lot of theater experience some people with less can you talk about just harmonizing all of that like you know was that a process of rehearsing or i'm sorry was that just the process of rehearsal oh right um yeah it's really true and there was you know we had brandon who is irish and harry and birdie who are aunt alex hassell who who played ross who were and catherine hunter and catherine right all coming from england and and then pretty much the rest of the cast all americans so you had this you know it was very interesting because we were i was also we were all working with kate wilson who's at juilliard here um and one of the earliest discussions with kate was you know accents what's the and and i think actually if i remember right i think didn't we like in an early rehearsal we sort of experimented with taking the accents down to a sort of more it wasn't an experiment you said to kate ask them to do do it all in american tomorrow and 201 they all did it perfectly do you remember that and then the next day joel said no go back right like oh that was fun yeah i just thought it it i i i liked the the the mix of it and i also thought that it wasn't going to be a barrier to essentially uh uh accepting the world that we were making you know um and uh and that's kind of how we how we uh landed there um um but you're right i mean beyond that it's the the cast is diverse in in in other ways obviously and i think that proceeded um from a couple place one was that the the the imperative for me at the beginning was who's who's playing macbeth here you know and and and and that was a that was an easy and short thanks to denzel um uh and everything else just sort of proceeded from there um so it's that's the that's the the way you got to what do you want the yale and the juilliard mafia yeah with all the youngsters right there there's a bunch of yalies and a bunch yeah yeah yeah i know i mean that that the diversity in the in the dialects and the in the background of theater and film and and and training was kind of exciting in that room and it was in by invitation only too for at least three of the weeks was anybody that wanted to be in that room made themselves available to be in that room and um i don't think many people decided not to almost everybody showed up it was great i'd love to hear the other actors maybe say a bit about that um birdie moses harry it's extremely rare to um rehearse um in this medium right and to rehearse in a meaningful way so i think that was an enormous privilege and one of the things i love about the film i want to say pay a huge compliment in every direction is that um i think it um pays homage to the like both the cinematic and the theatrical traditions that this play has sat in and um but um it finds a kind of vocabulary that is both i feel like um we're talking about dialect um you you want the play to to be heard through whatever you're doing right you want to sort of put a layer in the way and i think that's what's so amazing remember joel in rehearsal talking about the aesthetic and i was sort of drilling him trying to trying to figure out what the thing was and he used the word sculptural i mean and very few other words which is his mode right you know it's quite hard to get him to commit to saying what it was and that was very useful but when but what was clear was that it was about taking things away and getting out of the way of the play and when i watch the film that's very much the impression i have it's very um uh it it allows the and the way everybody handles the language i mean everybody comes from their own different place and whatever but you you you hear the play and you you see what's going on in these people's souls and i think that's extremely hard to accomplish and i'm sure that having time in a room together to to sort of marinade in the world of the play and um is key in that it was a real privilege yeah yeah i mean just what betty said really the fact that we had was it three weeks or four weeks just together um setting the language of how it's going to work and everyone really pulling toward the same vision which is sometimes rare in films because everyone's sort of coming at it from a different angle but to have those three weeks where we sort of set out the mission of what we want to achieve was just i think vital and why why it's such a such a striking piece i think one of the biggest blessings for me in this process was just being in the room and watching i think people wait their whole lives to be in rooms like this one and to be in rehearsal and it's like finding out everybody poops you know you know like watching them like be in rehearsal i'll be back you know like watching them be in rehearsal and figuring it out right in front of me and me very much just not wanting to [ __ ] it up you know but them just so free and so graceful in it um it just was a privilege like watching the movie back like i i came on set a lot of days when i wasn't working just to watch like the archway scene i was like oh i was right there outside the arch like watching it happen and i feel so blessed that like 50 years from now when like a class of students is like watching this movie i get to be like you know i was in the room it's a beautiful thing uh denzel and fran you you refer to yourselves as elders um a bit ago i think that's one that's one change from what we usually see uh in in macbeth productions uh in films you know i think when the when polanski made his in the 70s he co-wrote that with kenneth tynen and tynan actually said and in a piece that he didn't want the actors were in their 20s and he thought that was because um he didn't want people who were quote too old uh to be ambitious so and i think you know this i think this is an interesting change that alters the the dynamics um of the story i wonder if you or the actress want to speak to that uh oh i'm sorry what was the question about about being an older couple well you know part of what joel and i talked about really early because i i the first the first thing i ever did the first thing that got me hooked on wanted to be an actor for the rest of my life was the sleepwalking scene from the tragedy and i did it when i was 14 and then it that then so i've i've pretty much been practicing and rehearsing for it for 50 years so i feel like it was it kind of had a faded inevitability to it and and and that it ended up being in this and sculpted in this way seems absolutely perfect you know at some point we have to talk about the the the ceremony that we had for our four elders that used the this film as their fun their punctuation point on their film careers remember when we we had them kneel before us and we took that yes that's right that's correct we had four colleagues oh that's right carl and yeah and they they decided to make this film their last film and so we had a ceremony we made these really beautiful medals on a beautiful ribbon and we had the sword out and they knelt we helped them get up knelt we made them nights and and ladies that was really really but symbolically there is something perfectly punctuated this is a perfect punctuation point in so many ways for me i know in so being an older couple take take it for a second because you know what when i hear our company talk i'm it's like this is the other thing about being an elder i just get choked up over and over again i can't believe we did this it's fabulous [Applause] i think these plays get um done again and again uh because they can take uh they can take the weight of reinterpretation so um of course every actor brings themself to every part they play and um but the great roles um can take they have that depth of field i think so there something new is illuminated i don't want to see um the same version of you know that there's nothing as a definitive version of these great places i don't think and so of course yeah i mean i think it's um revealing to um put any given lens on on the play and um yeah it's a built-in sense of urgency this is it this is the last go round and they've been stepped over by the king and they want it you know and and we understand and we understand you know you might think oh maybe they don't understand but guess what we understand because when we first talked on the phone denzel and i and not gonna it's our own private conversation but we but we both understood about each other that there's always been a fight we fought it as gracefully as possible but the fight's never going to be over so you know we brought that to it we still knew how to fight maybe we were limping a little bit maybe it took us a little bit longer to get but the fight was still there still knew how to win we just still knew how to win okay i'm just gonna ask one more before we open it up um question for joel uh obviously you know i think a big part of the the power of the film it's it's the performances it's the text which is you know you're very faithful to but it's also the question the staging and the look of the film and there's a lot of choices that i think account for this very strong atmosphere of the film i wonder if you could maybe talk about some of them black and white um academy ratio the um and just the staging i mean it's you know it's um bertie was saying you find a kind of middle ground between the cinematic and the theatrical and i think that comes across in how it's staged as well it's not you know i think a lot of people would do a film shakespeare and try to naturalize it by finding you know certain landscapes or whatever and you have these um yeah right well i i sort of started from the place of you know there are two ways of approaching this which are as you just said that sort of naturalistic way you rent a castle somewhere and you go out in scotland and ride around on horses and and and but for me the and i think this proceeded a little bit from the first impulse that fran asking me to do it on stage in a way is is i i didn't want to abandon the notion of the play i it was that it was taking a play and making a movie of it that was interesting to me um not trying to make a play into a movie i i didn't want to hide the play and i think a lot of what what bertie said earlier on is really kind of you know i hadn't actually believe it or not thought about it this way until you just said it but a lot of the motivating sort of impulse in terms of design was taking things away it isn't just about uh you know it's it the design was about stripping it down in in a strange kind of a way and in that respect i had you know the probably the longest gestation process for any design that we've ever because everything i've done in the past has been um at least at least brushing up on naturalism you know brushing it no matter how how amped it may have been but i i uh um but this was a seemed a totally different exercise and uh and i had the uh privilege and the good fortune to be working with bruno del binell and steph and dave both of them on this long process of figuring out what it was going to look like the idea of shooting in black and white in the um and the aspect ratio were actually pretty much there from the beginning but the the thing about shooting it in black and white which i've always loved and i love black and white i love it in general not just in terms of this movie is that black and white is a way of instantly abstracting an image in a way that everybody understands you're abstracting it by taking the color away but it's not like people read it as being abstract in quotation marks and and and that kind of abstraction uh seem particularly suited to the enterprise of sort of preserving this as a play in the theatrical experience okay we're going to take questions um if you could raise your hand i'll call on you no past microphones so i'm going to ask you to please project and if you could be concise that would be helpful hello everybody congratulations joel i wonder if uh when you were doing this in black and white shakespeare if you saw this linking perhaps to the uh 20th century like brook flair olivier yeah sorry i should just repeat that right a question about shooting in black and white and whether there's a connection with wells brooks olivier i think you mentioned yeah okay yeah i mean there are you know those there's wells also did a a film of this play he did chimes at midnight um which is particularly a very beautiful movie um i think his adaptation of this play is a very strange movie um but it's interesting to look at um so there was that a little bit but to be honest it was from a visual point of view and from what seemed like it would be interesting in connection with this play we were looking more at like drier than we were at you know wells because of the way he sort of strips everything down i mean again going back to that same thing that birdie was talking about um the lighting is also kind of like german expressionist or film noir yeah danish but also german expressionism and myrnow sunrise how you do big outdoor spaces on soundstages which is this beautiful beautiful thing he could do which nobody else has ever come close to um that was a big inspiration and these sort of mind-boggling things that are so simple and so beautiful and so theatrical and and and seems so in keeping with again with the kind of enterprise of keeping it a play okay uh yes right here question is for francis about having played lady macbeth before and finding something new every time you approach this character in fact i haven't played it before i had only played it once at uh at berkeley rep and i think i was like 56 58 i'm not sure i don't remember but um uh and then at 14 the first time i thought about it i mean i didn't really play it then i just memorized the lines i'm not kidding myself um but but i feel like there there's a there's been a process towards the character for 50 years and i'm really really glad that my the that the the interpretation that i was able to give the role has been captioned on film this way because i'm i feel really gratified that we were able to bring the idea not only that that this was their last chance at ambition but that also to maybe illuminate something about the female condition and the female power structure of what i think macbeth was using and that and that you know using from that period and especially in this couple and um uh i feel like we really maybe like i kept saying to joel nobody in 400 years everybody's done almost anything it's not like we're inventing anything new but i think we've the way that we uh our cellular structure mixed made it a little different and we certainly had that in mind when we were interpreting the character and for me that's really gratifying i'm going to try to call somebody in the back yeah yes what was your greatest challenge a question for joel was the greatest challenge in adapting the text into a screenplay adapting it into a screenplay um well um i i'm trying there were certain there were certain things that i saw in other movie adaptations of shakespeare that i was trying not to do and trying to figure out how not to do them for instance you know it's common in movie adaptations of shakespeare that when there's a soliloquy you don't actually see the actor speaking the soliloquy you hear it in voiceover and while he's i don't know thinking about his launch or something you know you never know what the the connection between what the actor is saying is recorded a voice over and now he's wandering around or mooning around the set um it never really worked for me so i i thought how do you do that and and sort of preserve the language and the speeches and the soliloquies but have them speak but not have it be but still have it be in a at least quasi-realistic context um as opposed to you know going to the edge of the stage and um or whatever the device might be um so that was that was part of it and there are soliloquies there are parts of the what macbeth says in the in the uh play are soliloquies that we incorporated into scenes um so that they're actually spoken it was that kind of a thing i guess that's kind of getting close to what what you're asking um there were problems you know or issues or challenges like that one of the things that i thought was interesting joel you you you trans like scenes that happen on stage have a beginning middle and end and they follow dramaturgically whereas joel intercut back and forth between scenes because in a film that just makes it more dynamic that was i mean i don't think that was a challenge but i think that was something that for me was really uh was really exciting about his adaptation well when yeah you know it's in that's in particular that's interesting because macbeth is a play that at the end of the play shakespeare himself shakespeare at the time in the play is doing something which is essentially parallel editing in film he's he's he's going from this scene to that scene back to this scene to that scene to this that are all supposed to be happening essentially in the same time right he's doing it theatrically which is i found really interesting um i we when we made the movie and and in the adaptation we kind of exaggerated i mean because you can in a movie so um yeah that's that's that was another example of the uh how the how the play got adapted into a movie and and also how how brilliant shakespeare was is a dramatist to anticipate that kind of storytelling oh i think he'd be pleased don't you uh yes yep okay yeah just quickly just quickly summarize the question is about working uh second second time you're working with a streaming service the film will be released theatrically and also on on apple tv and and i guess just your your feelings about this this development in how we watch movies you know as a filmmaker you want an audience to see your movies on the best most sophisticated and biggest platform possible that's just you know that's why you spend all this time we're just talking to denzel about the movie that he's finishing right now you know tweaking every little detail and the sound mix and the color and the you know whatever it happens to be um however um uh you know i mean one of the nightmares i think any film director is when someone says i saw your movie on an airplane you know um but i uh but here's the thing about streaming services from a personal point of view when i first got into the movie business which was you know almost 40 years ago 35 78 years ago the reason i was able to make movies with ethan the reason we were able to have a career is because is because the studios at that point had an ancillary market that was a backstop for more risky films which were vhs cassette or you know all of these home video markets which is essentially television right so the fact that those markets are sort of responsible for my career make it you know i'm not going to bust on them now because they've become very successful you know and are sort of overtaking the market i mean it's the reason i'm here and able to do this stuff so i i have mixed feelings about it obviously which is the first thing you want people to see it on a big screen but the other part of it is is that's been part of the history of our movies since the very beginning um and um that's the best answer i can give you to that i think we have to wrap up in five minutes so let's try to squeeze in two quick questions um yeah right here you could you hear me um barely was it let me let me know if i'm repeating correctly you were asking everybody if there was a particular passage in the text that that helped you unlock something in the process was there a particular passage in the screenplay i suppose that helped you unlock something in your process i think it's the best i can shakespeare now is that willie on the phone will's calling sorry i'll call you later out sorry i love that phone um yeah so you ask us that again whether or not there was a particular passage in the play that helped us unlock what we wanted to do i think for me um i uh i i pitched joel the idea that you know what i was about to talk about my own performance which is always a bad idea so i'm going to stop right now i mean look i think um a part like the one i play can be played in so many different ways and um for me the key was about a sense of foreboding that maybe banquo sees very early on almost in the instant that macbeth receives the news from the witches the prophecy he knows his friend well enough to worry about where that might go and that was a hook for me and so the line is something like um that trusted home might yet in kindle you under the crown besides the thing of corridor but to strange and oftentimes to win us to our harms the instruments of darkness tell us truths win us with honest trifles to betray us in deepest consequence which is just a great line and it's so true isn't it and and it's so um so the ambivalence of that warning it's you know for me it's i i wanted it to be a warning but you can warn something of some someone of something you don't know um you know like it's like giving advice to someone isn't it you you have to be careful with advice because you don't really know what the future holds um that was the key for me and the eyebrows and the eyebrows which are um supratextual i would say um i i i struggle to find a uh yeah now the eyebrows are very important um well i can't remember speeches like bertie's done so um i can't quote anything but i just remember i just remember thinking the most important thing about malcolm is just how woefully unprepared he is for what happens to his dad um and that was kind of i think the crux for malcolm and then from that he is spurred onto having to grow up very very very quickly so that was kind of that was the thing i held on to really um i i think oftentimes at least growing up shakespeare's words seemed like something very um hard to understand not very much for me and i think what i appreciate about what happens here in this film is that the language doesn't feel unattainable in that way um i think a lot of times it just gets put in a category all by itself shakespeare this massive thing but in reality i think which kind of sounds pretentious that shakespeare is really universal and it's for everybody and it and it does lend itself to beauty and magic and i think um it's been captured really beautifully uh there was uh there was joel said no no and or friend too said no no stick up the butt acting remember that you know we didn't no no couches with buttons no no upholstered sofas yeah the one one of the things that i found in in working uh on uh the role a dramaturg once sent said to me and i don't know if this is true you guys might that that the the meter and the words are in violet but the in violet uh but the punctuation you can mess with so in the uh in the text that i originally memorized or worked with in the when we were rehearsing the play uh macbeth says to lady macbeth what if we fail and her response is we fail question mark and the dramaturg suggested to me try taking the question mark away and when i put an exclamation point on it then it became my lady macbeth what if we fail we fail but screw your courage to the sticking place and will not fail because for us it's not a question of whether we're going to fail it's a question of whether we're even we're going to attempt to fail which is all from my point of view let's go kill him now let's go get him he's in aaron we can't get to him the king's and aaron okay i've been told we can take one more so uh let's see uh yeah right there yep about um and uh you you've created this sort of narrator messenger figure as a kind of counterpose to the witches perhaps in the uh film and you see him at the end with pleiades i just wanted some comments on that um well there's a there's a tradition in productions of macbeth that use ross in [Music] in different ways i should you know um and also in movie adaptations so for instance in the polanski version that dennis was pointed out was written by ken tynan and i have a feeling this was tying something time and brought to it you know he made ross uh the third murderer which that is not uh something that there's a there's a production history of that um um but he kind of expanded that a little bit and and i thought that was really interesting and wondered how it could be expanded even further i don't know in what ways it has been in the past but it was an interesting way to think about that character and uh and uh that's what kind of led to that ending and the sort of ambiguous um the ambiguous sort of passage with fleonce when he finds him in the field um you know i think um obviously i've seen lots of productions of macbeth um there are only so many productions of macbeth on screen that's one of the more interesting ones i i attribute a lot of it to tynan actually i i love i love about it that um uh like i've spoken about how i think banquo maybe sees the writing on the wall earlier than others but i love that scene where lady macbeth faints and immediately afterwards malcolm and donald bain decide to flee and you can tell that from that point onwards nearly everybody's seeing the writing on the wall and the reason it's appazite to the ross thing is that i think what makes the play so political is that there will always be murderous tyrants opportunist ambitious people led down the primrose path but it's what everybody else does around them that makes it really dangerous and um a figure like ross who in alex's performances you know at times seems archly evil but at other times just seems like somebody who is existing in a in a in a tyrannous state trying to live on his wits and seeing which way the wind is blowing feels very um feels very present and very kind of relevant and it's the reason that these plays get done again and again and don't lose their um sting because you know you don't have to look very far to see that kind of stuff in the corridors of power anywhere in the world today so i think it's a really smart gesture great i think we do have to wrap it up now but i want to thank all of you for being here um we're thrilled to open the film the festival with this phone thank you very much you

Channel: Film at Lincoln Center

Views: 157,514

Keywords: Film at Lincoln Center

Id: gNcGggqJhCY

Length: 43min 2sec (2582 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 27 2021

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[u/Testicular-Fortitude]

One of the films I can’t wait to see, thanks for posting the video. Some serious talent up on stage, sounded like they had a great time making it too which is cool