The idea behind Muse of Fire was a simple one. We wanted to spend a year travelling the world and find out from as many sources as we could why Shakespeare is both so loved and so feared. We wanted to try and eradicate our own deep-rooted anxieties and help others to remove theirs. This was the goal. How we would achieve all this was the ordeal. It has been a five-year adventure but now the film is complete and ready for its world premiere at Raindance Film Festival, we can say that every moment of an incredible journey was worth it.
Before we became filmmakers we were already actors (and good friends). We met at drama school in London, where we were hungry to learn, feel and experience all we could about acting, cinema and theatre. But we had both arrived with a lot of baggage when it came to the great unavoidable: Shakespeare.
Like many we’d had a dark, desperate experience with Shakespeare at school. Forced to read what we were told was almost impossibly difficult. Made to feel stupid if we didn’t understand. The one certainty about Shakespeare that we took away from school was that he wasn’t for us. It was for other people to enjoy. Richer, smarter people possibly, but not us.
It is an irony then that, as children obsessed with telling stories, making up characters and adventures, we’d completely missed just how much Shakespeare has to offer on all those fronts. It was at that very moment however that someone and something showed us otherwise. Australian director Baz Luhrmann made a new film of Romeo and Juliet starring Leonardo Di Caprio and Claire Danes (pictured). We saw it in our second year and it changed everything. It was like that moment in The Wizard Of Oz when it suddenly goes from black and white to colour. This story was about people like us. Who were young, in trouble, who could love, who knew better than their parents, who were hungry to live life. It was a prodigious moment because a filmmaker - not a theatre director - had said, “This story is yours. Own it. Breathe it. If you want to, tell it.”
With Muse of Fire we want to do for others what Romeo + Juliet had done for us. A film that would attempt to reveal Shakespeare rather than conceal him.
Shakespeare is the great challenge, for students, actors and theatre-goers alike, so we decided to emphasise the challenge we faced in making the film itself. Ultimately the message becomes: this can be done. Having worked at the National Theatre, RSC and Shakespeare’s Globe with some great actors, we wanted to interview them. Ian McKellen was first. He agreed to talk to us and we were off. Over the next two years we travelled to Denmark with Jude Law’s Hamlet, performed Shakespeare in German prisons, finally found Baz Luhrmann in Hollywood, heard Judi Dench speak Shakespeare in her back garden and performed guerrilla Shakespeare in the Natural History Museum with Mark Rylance.
All of these artists we found had wrestled or been afraid of Shakespeare in their time. This surprised and encouraged us. We learned from Dame Judi, from the men we met in prison and from schoolchildren that Shakespeare writes in such a pure way that if you run scared of him he’ll run you over. That, yes, he has a place in the classroom and the lecture hall but he lives in the theatre. That Shakespeare is as much about the heart as it is the head. And that if you can somehow remove the fogs of class, intellect and high art, be they imposed by a bad teacher, an indulgent director or the Victorians, then what will be left is Shakespeare, whose only concern is us.
- Muse of Fire premieres at Raindance Film Festival
- Watch the trailer on the Muse of Fire website
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