There’s a bit of buzz about this week being the 30 year anniversary of the release of Baz Luhrmann’s film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet, and the film is also getting a re-release in cinemas.

Although – shouldn’t it be next year? The film was originally released in the US in November 1996, and in the UK in March 1997 – so by my maths that means the 30th anniversary is later this year in the US, and next March over here in the UK? Weird.

When I saw the film back in ’97, I remember loving it, and being utterly wowed by the art direction. It was stylish and cool – a modernised tale of Shakespeare’s star-cross’d lovers – and the art direction was exquisite. Seeing some of the recent publicity reminded me of a fantastic article about the making of film, in the April 1997 issue of The Face, which featured imagery from the film with captions by Baz Luhrmann.

So I picked up a copy on ebay, and have reproduced the spreads here (if you click them they should open up as larger versions), and I’ve copied the text below. 

The film was nominated for Best Art Direction Oscar at the 69th Academy Awards (March 1997), but lost out to The English Patient – another great film, to be fair. The Production Designer was Catherine Martin (who as well as being a multi-award winning costume, production and set designer, is also Luhrmann’s wife), with Set Decoration by Brigitte Broch.

“GUNS AND ROSES

Gang violence, drugs and teenage lust have always been at the heart of Romeo & Juliet, Shakespeare’s greatest romantic melodrama. The new film version won’t let you forget it.

All pictures captioned by the film’s director Baz Luhrmann

“These are the essential elements of the film. You’ve got religion and power mixed together (i). You’ve got a love story – Romeo and Juliet (ii). And this identity bracelet hints at the world of learned hate in which the two warring clans exist.”

“Film director Baz Luhrmann has a favourite analogy to describe the creative tussle of movie-making: “You’re the court jester who is fighting to get the king, instead of putting on a tits and feathers show, to let you make something you want to do.” In this case, the king is Hollywood’s Twentieth Century Fox, and what court jester Luhrmann wanted it to sign up for was a hyper-stylised, modern-set take on Shakespeare’s Romeo & Juliet. Is this, the studio must have wondered, why they’d signed the Strictly Ballroom director to a two-year production deal? What was worse, he was plaguing them with books and video footage showing in intricate detail what the film would look like: Hawaiian shirts, gas-guzzling limousines, palm trees, ripped-up cityscapes, guns and neon. Eventually though, with boy wonder Leonardo DiCaprio on board as tormented lover Romeo, the studio caved: ‘They were like: Yeah, I get it, it’s kind of like gangs,’ says Luhrmann. ‘Look, it’s crazy, but give him $15 million and get him out of here and when it stiffs he’ll do Strictly Ballroom 2 for us.’ It didn’t stiff. In fact, when it opened in the US last November, it took $11 million in three days, powered by stellar performances from DiCaprio and fellow rising star Claire Danes, by an awesome soundtrack, and by a promotional campaign showcasing the film’s relentless eye-candy. Baz hotly denies that the film is ‘MTV Romeo & Juliet’, and he’s right to, but it is a movie thoroughly informed by the form, energy and marketing savvy of pop culture. In other words: you won’t be bored. The film opens here on March 28, by which time we’ll know if its Academy Award nomination for Art Direction has translated into Oscar gold – it will be a travesty if it doesn’t.”
Charles Gant

“These are the pages from one of the books we created to evolve the look of the film (iv). They’re collages of our visual ideas. We started with images of our imagined world, and then as we began to cast the actors we scanned them into the computer and started adding them in. This image of Verona Beach (top right) was created before the movie was made. Leonardo was shot in Sydney. The arch is a 3D drawing. We dropped in the palm trees on Photoshop. But it you see the actual film, it’s all there. We created the beach from scratch, replicating our original conception. There’s not a telegraph pole, not a palm tree that was originally there. It was a desert – in fact, a very crappy piece of beach, in Vera Cruz, Mexico.”

ROMEO
“Romeo (vi and ix) is your first rebel without a cause, he is your first Byron-esque character. He’s in love with the idea of being in love, he’s rebelling but he doesn’t know why. We went for a James Dean meets Kurt Cobain imagery. All of the Montagues wear Hawaiian shirts. They’re defined by what we call the From Here To Eternity look, the Gl Joe look. The story of casting Leonardo is I saw a picture of this beautiful boy and thought, ‘My God, he looks like Romeo, I wonder if he can act!‘ So I rang him up, and I had a meeting with him and his fantastic hippy dad, George. We showed them our book of how we wanted the film to look, and it turned out that George was a book distributor and collector and a lover of comics. I said to Leonardo: ‘Don’t decide, come and stay with us in Sydney: we can go diving’. The second time he came down, we did video footage of key scenes shot hand-held by our cinematographer Don McAlpine, with quite sophisticated post-production. And it was after the screening of that material that the studio greenlighted the film. The shirt ended up in the movie – in fact, on the CD and poster – but this photo was shot two years earlier by our local guy in in the back streets of Surrey Hills, Sydney.”

RELIGIOUS ICONOGRAPHY
“Religion is a plot point. you’ve got to understand that the whole world believes in religion, very big time. Romeo comes up to Father Laurence and says, ‘I met this girl, I want you to marry us’. And Laurence (xi) goes, ‘Hang on, if I marry these warring families, they’re married in the eyes of God, nothing can pull them asunder.’ That’s why he does it. And when Romeo falls for Juliet, he doesn’t say, ‘I don’t really believe in marriage or God. We can have sex. It’s no big deal.’ Everyone believes in God, so religious iconography everywhere is really important. The crosses, the giant Jesus statue, the waistcoat worn by [Capulet gang member] Tybalt (x) – it’s all about saying this is a world of religion”

MERCUTIO AND THE PARTY SCENE
“Everything has come from the text of the play. Whichever way you chop it it’s clear from the text that Mercutio (xii, centre) is in love with Romeo. There’s no question. Every time a girl turns up it’s, ‘Why is he with this wench Rosaline that will sure send him mad?’ Our reading is that they’re young and they haven’t really resolved their sexuality anyway, so he’s kinda like the guy that is always turning up being camp, and when it comes to the Capulets’ costume party is the first one to say ‘I wanna go in a dress!’ And years later when he turns out to be gay everyone goes ‘Of course, he’s gay’, but at the time everyone is saying ‘Oh, isn’t he funny!’. Mercutio’s savage electricity comes from his not being clear of his sexuality or his relationship to Romeo. That’s what makes him run a million miles an hour and what finally kills him. In this scene, of course, when you see Mercutio sing ‘Young Hearts Run Free’, it’s through the eyes of a drugged Romeo. It’s pretty clear that it’s an abstracted, unreal scene.”

DRUGS
“Can you believe that this film has been all over the world, it’s a huge hit in the US, and apart from in Australia hardly anyone has mentioned the fact that they take drugs in the middle of it? Queen Mab (xiv) is that pill they take. Mab is the famous Mercutio speech: ‘I see Queen Mab hath been with you. She is the fairy’s midwife, and she comes in a shape no bigger than an agate stone on the forefinger of an alderman’. Mab is actually a fairy that gets into your head and makes you believe in love, and Mercutio is saying to Romeo: ‘Beware Queen Mab because she’s going to fuck you up!’ So our notion of it was, the Elizabethan world was very drug fucked; there are many references to drugs throughout the text. Father Laurence just to begin with, grows rather strange plants and does weird things with them. There are also the potions and poisons (xiii). Mercutio is saying: ‘Here dude, take this pill because you can drop a love pill and have this experience but it’s not real!’ Now the pill is not Ecstasy and it’s not acid, it’s Queen Mab. In Australia there was a huge controversy. One camp was saying: ‘Luhrmann is absolutely correct to have drugs mentioned; the Elizabethan world was full of drugs’. Others were going: ‘Surely we are living in the time of Sodom and Gomorrah when an innocent Shakespeare play is turned into as debauched a production as this one’.”

WEAPONS
“We built an Elizabethan world in twentieth-century images. But dealing with weapons was a big worry for us: how to represent the idea of an armed society when the text talks explicitly about swords and daggers and rapiers. So we said, right up front, let’s not change the names of them: a gun is a sword, tell the audience in a witty way with close-ups showing the weapons’ brand names. The idea of an armed society also fed into how we conceived the Montagues and Capulets. We thought of the Capulets as Hispanics who came out to Miami; they were basically gangsters, they got very very successful. Capulet wants to become legitimate, takes over legitimate businesses, runs for mayor, marries Lady Capulet, the Southern Belle – but he’s still a gangster. Montague is more white bread, a bit like Donald Trump.”

THE GAS STATION
“This is the scene where the rival gangs clash. In the Elizabethan Verona, you had a centre of town where boys paraded. In a modern American city, a gas station is the one place where enemies are forced to cross, so this diagram (xvii) is an early investigation of how the scene might work. It was the most difficult shooting day. If you can imagine millions of cars driving by, the fumes were suffocating. Mexico is the most polluted city in the world. I’d been ill so I was directing from a wheelchair with this breathing mask. This is [Montague gang member] Benvolio, played by Dash Mhok (xvi). When we came to this shot, he ran down the wrong street. So he’s running down a real street and he jumps up on a real car with real people a family, and starts shooting back at us and all the cops jump out, people are screaming and I’m going ‘Cut cut cut cut!’ We kept the shot in the film.”

PUNS
“How do you deal in a modern context with the idea that a letter doesn’t get there or a communication doesn’t arrive? Why don’t they just get out the mobile and phone Romeo? But of course we eternally suffer from the late overnight delivery package. Romeo’s in exile out in the outback in the caravan park, they have to FedEx the note out there that Juliet isn’t really dead, and the guy leaves the thing on the step. In the text, they send the message ‘post haste’, so hence we have the Post Post Haste Despatch company (xix). Everyone who’s ever suffered at the hands of overnight delivery services laughs at that moment – they’re ‘Yes! Finally, revenge!’ But there are thousands of other secret gags and devices like Out Damn Spot dry cleaners, the Shylock Bank, the Globe is the pool hall. It’s layered in there in great detail. There’s even a picture of me on the Verona Beach money (xviii).”

THE AQUARIUM
“This is Romeo’s first glimpse of Juliet. He’s in the bathroom at the Capulets’ costume party, he throws up, and he looks up and sees this beautiful face through the fish tank (xx). He still thinks he’s having an illusion. I got the idea when I was writing in Miami: we went to this nightclub called The Dome, and while I was in the bathroom I was thinking about how Romeo could meet Juliet in a surprising and interesting way. And I’m looking at this fish tank that was there and next thing I know I see this girl combing her hair. The foyer parts of the bathrooms where you wash your hands are connected by a giant fish tank – you could see the girls in their side through the tank. I thought, ‘I’ll take that.’ The look of Juliet – and of Romeo – is oddly reminiscent of Franco Zeffirelli’s 1968 film version. This is the image of what people think Romeo and Juliet should be, sort of like a Sixties romantic couple. Because the rest of their world is so mad and aggressive and out-of-control, we wanted there to be a visual comfort with the two main characters, a familiarity – you’re not also trying to work them out.”

MEXICO
“This was a real building (xxi) being built next to the gas station that we shot. In Mexico you can get anyone to do any-thing, you just have to pay people. So we just put a big sign up: ‘Montague Constructions’. We were also able to get choppers and fly them through the centre of town. We settled on Mexico as our location for several reasons: one is it’s cheap, second we needed big sound stages to build in, but most importantly it is Verona Beach. You go to a restaurant and they have shotguns outside; we hire our own police force; the hair and make-up people get kidnapped and get their legs broken and we buy them back for $360. Luckily, I had this great assistant whose father is the Minister of the Interior.”

THE CITY
“Verona Beach is like a fusion of Miami (where we wrote the screenplay), Mexico City and Los Angeles. It’s all of those cities but it’s none of them. It’s got a sense of the Third World: the Montagues and Capulets are busy ripping the earth up and building things. We couldn’t place it in a totally contemporary-imaged world – for example, a concern about the environment does not fit into this avaristic, sexy, violent world we wanted to create. We didn’t want to have little bubble cars suggesting a society concerned about burning too much gas, so we had the opposite (xxiii). It’s got a Seventies / Fifties feel about it, clashed together. We also wanted to work in the idea of the LA riots – ‘When civil blood makes civil hands unclean’ – so this is a page from our book (xxii). In a town like Verona in Elizabethan times they were really comfortable with the idea that warring gangs might cause the whole city to erupt. That might seem a bit far-fetched in a modern-image city – not so in LA, so we borrow that imagery. These are TV screen grabs.”

THE SOUNDTRACK (text Kevin Maher)
“I think I have a little psychic gift. If ever there was a talent that I have, it’s picking these projects, or these projects picking me, or just having hunches about what will work!” 

When Karyn Rachtman, kick-ass Capitol Records exec, Reservoir Dogs / Pulp Fiction music supervisor supremo, and now Romeo + Juliet’s key power-broking soundtrack orchestrator, has a “hunch” about what will work on a soundtrack – it works. The woman responsible for turning “Stuck In The Middle With You” into the ear-slicing tune of the decade has yet to back a loser. This one – an empathetic meld of otherwise disparate talents like Radiohead, Des’ree, The Cardigans, Everclear and Butthole Surfers that has gone triple platinum in America – is no exception.

“I met Baz Luhrmann when Romeo + Juliet hadn’t even been shot,” recalls Rachtman, “and he had books about what the film was going to look like – he spoke about how this film was in this world and how the music fits into this world, and immediately I said, ‘I want this record: get Capitol to pay the advance – I’ll do whatever you want to get this record.’”

“The film began with the question, ‘If Shakespeare was making a movie, what kind of movie would he make?’“ Luhrmann says. “If you look at the Elizabethan stage they knew their audience was like 3,000 drunken punters, they had stand-up comedy one moment, then pop song, and then tragedy, all cut within the same piece. The notion of sticking popular music into the piece was written into the text.” 

Rachtman, Luhrmann, and their chosen musical artists have shaken together a liberating, innovative and utterly visceral cocktail that denies there ever existed a hierarchy of image, dialogue and soundtrack. But it’s a style that balances on a knife-edge between stunning and specious. As Rachtman says: “I hate that so often there’ll be a so-so movie – like The Crow II – and the audience for the movie will be an MTV audience, so they just throw music in there and make it like an MTV soundtrack, and show videos on MTV to advertise it. That’s just bogus.”

For Romeo + Juliet each track was commissioned and positioned with absolute attention to detail. “Take Radiohead’s ‘Talk Show Host’,” offers Luhrmann. “Thom Yorke is a brilliant writer, and we heard that track and immediately said ‘that is thematically Romeo’. Your placement of the tracks does tell a story and therefore you have an emotional experience – when you hear that song you relive that emotional moment.

“We’re working on a second soundtrack album now. That will be dialogue scenes, original score courtesy of Nellee Hooper and Craig Armstrong, and ‘When Doves Cry’ [as sung by a church choir]. But really Romeo + Juliet is in a sense a musical. The language is musical, it’s rhythm with metaphor and simile. It’s essentially rap...”

You can stream Romeo + Juliet on Netflix and Disney+, and rent it on Prime Video, Apple TV, Sky and YouTube. It’s also screening at various Vue, Everyman and Picturehouse cinemas – check locally for information.

Oh, and while digging up old stuff related to the film, I also found this R+J cross I had lying around, which I guess must have been some sort of promotional piece for the film.

FURTHER READING
Pauline Adamek interview with Baz Luhrmann from November 1996
Guardian review, November 2016 (on the film’s 20th anniversary)
Time magazine review, October 2021 (on the film’s 25th anniversary)