This morning, Sunday, at around 8.30, we start filming Macbeth. Patrick Stewart is Macbeth, Kate Fleetwood Lady Macbeth and our director is Rupert Goold. This is the 2007 Chichester Festival Theatre production that went triumphantly to the West End and the Brooklyn Academy of Music and then played for twelve weeks on Broadway. Michael Billington called the production 'spellbinding', adding that 'Stewart has done nothing finer'; Charles Spencer in the Telegraph described it as 'brilliantly inventive, heart-stoppingly scary... the best Macbeth I've seen.' After our adventures this summer, now Seb and I are producing a television version of this Macbeth for Great Performances and WNET.org in the United States and for the BBC here. Good, eh?
Forgive us if -- just for today -- we skip 'Sunday stuff'. There's so much to say about Macbeth, and this morning at least, so little time. But we have three weeks of daily blogging in prospect, rather along the lines of our Hamlet reflections. Headlines? The all-important schedule is 18 days, exactly as on Hamlet. Because the play is a little shorter we need to average some eight minutes of completed footage a day -- and we begin with the 'England' scene (Act IV Scene 3). There were one or two cast changes during the production's life but we have all of the key members returning for the film.
We're shooting once again with a RED camera (in fact, with two) and our director of photography is Sam McCurdy BSC. Rupert Goold has had an astonishing year on the stage, with Six Characters in Search of an Author on the road, and new productions of Time and the Conways, Enron and Turandot -- but this is is his first film. And you'll be relieved to know (as are we) that we have the same caterers as in the summer!
What we can't tell you is where we're filming, but it's a breath-taking location in the Midlands. We've been prepping here for the past few days, and yesterday all of the kit arrived, along with the mobile dressing rooms, costume truck, make-up van and more. There are some of our favourite colleagues among the crew and many new faces. All in all it's wonderful to be back on location.
Strangely for Seb and I, we've produced a Macbeth before: Greg Doran's compelling film of his Royal Shakespeare Company production with Antony Sher and Harriet Walter. We shot that at London's Roundhouse nine (!) years ago. As you might expect, Rupert's vision for this production is very different. If nothing else, you can anticipate a good deal of blood -- and it's no coincidence that among Sam's credits are the exceptional British horror films Dog Soldiers, 2002, and The Descent, 2005.
The bacon rolls are served from 7 this morning. The crew call is 8 and we hope to be turning over by 8.45. The set has very patchy mobile phone coverage but I'll aim to post an update later and if possible to Twitter too. I trust you'll enjoy the ride across the next three weeks -- I know that we will. And one of the things we'll be exploring here is previous television (and film) versions of the play. To whet you appetite, courtesy of the LIFE archive hosted by Google, this is a behind-the-scenes image of a BBC production mounted in 1949, exactly sixty years ago.
Update (around 8pm):
No more reassuring sight could greet us at the location just before 7am than Chris and Hughie from caterers Gentle Butler with coffee brewed and bacon sizzling. We have a crowd of some twenty extras in today, and many are already costumed in DJs and evening dresses. I introduce myself as the co-producer to a group of the men and offer a little background to this version of Macbeth. They look at me blankly, and I could as well have said I was an alien from Mars. I guess it's hard to care too much about the gig when you've had to get up around 4 this morning.
About ten to eight the crew is unpacking the seemingly hundreds of boxes of camera kit, of the dolly, of lenses, of sound equipment, of the hard disc recorders and all the other high-end technology that shooting on RED requires. We're in a beautiful spacious panelled room that was once a library, and our artificial afternoon sun is pouring in through the windows. Outside two of the sparks make adjustments to the really big lamps.
By now the sun has risen, bathing the clouds in pinks and oranges -- a beautiful morning. Inside, Oliver Birch at the piano and (for today) vocalist Hywel John -- they both have other, more significant roles -- are rehearsing a Schubert song. On stage the production used a popular track from the 1920s but we discovered that the film rights for this would cost several thousand pounds for each thirty second cue. The Schubert was Rupert's original choice, although it was replaced in rehearsal -- and as it's out of copyright we revert to it here.
One of the big differences from Hamlet is that we are working on set with a second camera, and so we have twin monitors mounted side-by-side. I'll return to all of the pros and cons of working with two cameras, which we have discussed almost obsessively over the past weeks, but our initial impression here is of speed and flexibility. Sam McCurdy's camera team quickly find their set-ups, and Sam himself makes small adjustments to the lighting that he has already pre-set.
We are rehearsing by 09.06, and at 09.29, our first assistant director Richard Styles says, 'Turn over'. 'Turning' and 'Sound running' are the responses, and then 'One, take one. A camera mark.' 'B camera.' And we're off with a wide establishing shot which runs for more than 90 seconds before we cut. At 10.25 we are on our third set-up, and everything feels very good. There is, however, a very very long way to go.
The focus for the morning is Malcolm, played by Scott Handy, being visited by Michael Feast as Macduff to persuade him to challenge Macbeth's corrupt and bloody rule. Scott was on stage at the Coliseum in London last night in Rupert's Turandot. We picked him up after the show and drove him to the unit hotel, so it was particularly heroic for him to be in by 8am. Not that you'd have any sense of that from his pitch-perfect performance.
We're doing well by lunchtime (a really excellent roast lamb, tasty-looking red mullet fillets and a mushroom and squash veggy option) and the weather holds up too. Cast and crew work hard right through the afternoon, releasing the extras as the drama increasingly focuses on Malcolm and Macduff, with Tim Treloar's Ross bringing grim news for them both.
It's more than eighteen months since the cast played the show, and they've had only four days of re-rehearsals since, but it's quickly apparent that they are all still completely on top of their roles. This is the wonderful thing about filming an achieved stage production -- the actors have refined every nuance and inflection, and there are no hesitations or interruptions over the performances.
By the wrap at three minutes shy of seven we've done 36 set-ups (18 on each of the cameras) and completed everything we had scheduled. Which is just great for a first day -- and for a scene that will last for some 10 minutes or more in the final film. We go back to the hotel happy, relieved and slightly surprised that -- thanks to exigencies of availabilities -- tomorrow is a rest day.
Related posts: 'What, sir, not yet at rest?' 23 November / 'Our point of second meeting' 24 November
Caro (22 November 2009 4:28 am)
Hooray! I'd long to see the production when it was in NYC, but wasn't able to make the cross-country trip for various reasons. I'm very much looking forward to this.