If you haven’t seen director Julie Taymor’s Across The Universe, a musical utilizing the works of the Beatles, than you are missing out on one of the great cinematic visual treats of the last decade. Taymor has now moved on from the Fab Four to the Bard of Avalon, William Shakespeare for her next film, The Tempest. And the trailer below is our first glimpse at how she is handling the material.
Of course, some way raise an eyebrow over the gender swap of Prospero into Prospera with the casting of Helen Mirren in the lead role, but I think the endurance of Shakespeare’s work over the centuries can in part be credited to the universality of their themes and characters, giving them an elesticity that other works from that era may not have. In just the last hundred years, the Bard’s work has been presented on stage and screen in numerous time periods and locations that only came long after they were written, and the transposition of those settings against the original material brought forth interesting parallels that might not have been readily apparent to their audiences.
Of course, this is not Taymor’s first collaboration with Shakespeare. Her debut film was 1999’s Titus, an adaptation of Titus Andronicus.
The Tempest is is for a December 10 release here in the States.
Via Bleeding Cool.
