Drama
Synopsis
After a chance meeting with the famed director, a high-school student (Zac Efron) gets a small part in Orson Welles' famous production of ``Julius Caesar.''
Cast: Zac Efron, Claire Danes, Christian McKay, Zoe Kazan, James Tupper, Leo Bill, Eddie Marsan, Ben Chaplin, Al Weaver, Kelly Reilly, Iain McKee, Simon Nehan, Imogen Poots, Patrick Kennedy
Producer(s): Detour Film Production, CinemaNX
Crew: Director - Richard Linklater, Screenwriter - Holly Palmo, Screenwriter - Vince Palmo, Producer - Richard Linklater, Producer - Marc Samuelson, Producer - Ann Carli, Executive Producer - Steve Christian, Executive Producer - John Sloss, Executive Producer - Steve Norris, Cinematographer - Richard Pope, Film Editor - Sandra Adair, Original Music - Michael McEvoy, Production Design - Laurence Dorman, Supervising Art Direction - Bill Crutcher, Art Director - David Doran, Art Director - Stuart Rose, Set Decoration - Richard Roberts, Costume Designer - Nic Ede, Casting - Lucy Bevan
Distributor: Freestyle Releasing LLC
Release Date: 12/04/2009
Running Time: 107 minutes
OFFICIAL SITE
| PG-13 | Parents Strongly Cautioned |
Production Notes:
- Notes provided by Freestyle Releasing. -
Based in real theatrical history, ME AND ORSON WELLES is a romantic coming-of-age story about a teenage actor who lucks into a role in Julius Caesar as it's being re-imagined by a brilliant, impetuous young director named Orson Welles at his newly-founded Mercury Theater in NYC, 1937.
The rollercoaster week leading up to opening night has the charismatic-but-sometimes-cruel Welles (impressive newcomer Christian McKay) staking his career on this risky production while Richard (Zac Efron) mixes with everyone from starlets to stagehands in behind-the-scenes adventures bound to change him.
*****
ME AND ORSON WELLES
Production Information
Ben Chaplin, Claire Danes, Zac Efron, Zoe Kazan, Eddie Marsan, Christian McKay, Kelly Reilly and James Tupper lead a talented ensemble cast of stage and screen actors in the coming-of-age romantic drama ME AND ORSON WELLES. Oscar®-nominated director Richard Linklater ("School of Rock", "Before Sunset") is at the helm of the CinemaNX and Detour Film production, filmed in the Isle of Man, at Pinewood Studios, on various London locations and in New York City.
The screenplay by Holly Gent Palmo and Vince Palmo is based on the novel by Robert Kaplow, a thoroughly researched piece of historical fiction, set in the heady world of New York theatre. A teenage student, Richard Samuels, lucks his way into a minor role in the legendary 1937 Mercury Theatre production of "Julius Caesar", directed by youthful genius Orson Welles. In the words of Kaplow's protagonist: "This is the story of one week in my life. I was seventeen. It was the week I slept in Orson Welles's pyjamas. It was the week I fell in love. It was the week I fell out of love."
Ben Chaplin ("The Water Horse: Legend of the Deep") stars as Mercury Theatre regular George Coulouris, Claire Danes ("Stardust", "Romeo + Juliet") is production assistant Sonja Jones, the older woman who enchants Richard, played by Zac Efron ("Hairspray", "High School Musical"), Zoe Kazan ("Revolutionary Road") is aspiring writer Gretta Adler, Eddie Marsan ("Happy Go Lucky") stars as Mercury co-founder John Houseman, newcomer Christian McKay, an alumnus of RADA and the Royal Shakespeare Company, plays Orson Welles, Kelly Reilly ("Mrs Henderson Presents") portrays spiky diva Muriel Brassler and James Tupper ("Men In Trees") is the future movie star Joseph Cotten.
The featured cast includes Leo Bill ("Becoming Jane") as Norman Lloyd, Al Weaver ("Colour Me Kubrick") as Sam Leve, Iain McKee ("Housewife, 49") as Vakhtangov (William Alland), Simon Lee Phillips ("Burlesque Fairytales") as Walter Ash, Simon Nehan, making his feature film debut as Joe Holland, Imogen Poots ("28 Weeks Later") as Lorelei Lathrop, Patrick Kennedy ("Atonement") as Grover Burgess, Olivier Award-winner Janie Dee as Richard's mother, with versatile British TV actress Marlene Sidaway as his grandmother, Garrick Hagon ("The Walker") as Dr Mewling, newcomer Megan Maczko as Evelyn Allen, Aaron Brown as the Longchamps Kid, Travis Oliver ("Footballers Wive$: Extra Time") as John Hoyt, Nathan Osgood ("Sahara") as the radio announcer, Robert Wilfort as the radio director, Michael Brandon ("Jerry Springer - The Opera") as legendary radio host Les Tremayne, Saskia Reeves ("Heart") as Barbara Luddy, Aidan McArdle ("The Duchess") as Martin Gabel, Emmy Award-winning composer Mike McEvoy as Epstein, Thomas Arnold ("The Golden Compass") as George Duthie, Jo McInnes ("Birthday Girl") as Jeannie Rosenthal and Daniel Tuite ("Lesson 21") as William Mowry.
The film is produced by Richard Linklater, Marc Samuelson ("Stormbreaker", "Wilde") and Ann Carli ("Fast Food Nation", "Crossroads"), with Steve Christian, John Sloss and Steve Norris as executive producers, Holly Palmo & Vince Palmo Jr and Andrew Fingret are co-producers, Jessica Parker and Sara Greene are associate producers and Richard Hewitt as line producer.
The behind-the-camera talent includes director of photography Richard Pope BSC (Oscar®-nominated for "The Illusionist", "Vera Drake"), production designer Laurence Dorman ("Flashbacks of a Fool", "Asylum"), editor Sandra Adair A.C.E. ("Fast Food Nation", "School of Rock"), hair and make-up designer Fae Hammond ("The Darjeeling Limited", "Stardust"), costume designer Nic Ede ("Wilde", "Nanny McPhee"), music supervisor Marc Marot ("Notting Hill"), visual effects supervisor Rob Duncan ("Mr Bean's Holiday", the "Harry Potter" series) and casting director Lucy Bevan ("The Duchess", "The Golden Compass"). The film also features music re-arranged and performed by Jools Holland, accompanied on stage by chart-topping singer Eddi Reader.
Filming began in the historic (and beautifully restored) Gaiety Theatre in Douglas, capital of the Isle of Man, which hosted the stage performances and backstage scenes at the Mercury Theatre, to which it bears an extraordinary resemblance. From there, the production moved to a New York street set, constructed on the backlot of Pinewood Studios, with interiors being filmed on Pinewood's sound stages. Other key scenes were shot in a variety of period locations around London, including the British Museum, which represented the interior of New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, Bloomsbury Square and Crystal Palace Park.
CinemaNX and Isle of Man Film, in association with Framestore Features, present a CinemaNX and Detour Filmproduction, a Richard Linklater Film, ME AND ORSON WELLES. Cinetic Media are handling domestic sales and Cinetic Media and Odyssey Entertainment jointly represent foreign sales.
The Cast
Richard Samuels (Lucius) ZAC EFRON
Sonja Jones CLAIRE DANES
Orson Welles (Brutus) CHRISTIAN McKAY
George Coulouris (Mark Antony) BEN CHAPLIN
Gretta Adler ZOE KAZAN
John Houseman EDDIE MARSAN
Muriel Brassler (Portia) KELLY REILLY
Joseph Cotten (Publius) JAMES TUPPER
Norman Lloyd (Cinna the Poet) LEO BILL
Sam Leve AL WEAVER
Vakhtangov IAIN McKEE
Walter Ash SIMON LEE PHILLIPS
Joe Holland (Julius Caesar) SIMON NEHAN
Lorelei Lathrop IMOGEN POOTS
Grover Burgess (Ligarius) PATRICK KENNEDY
Mrs Samuels JANIE DEE
Grandmother Samuels MARLENE SIDAWAY
Dr Mewling GARRICK HAGON
Evelyn Allen (Calpurnia) MEGAN MACZKO
Longchamps Kid #1 AARON BROWN
John Hoyt (Decius) TRAVIS OLIVER
Radio Announcer NATHAN OSGOOD
Radio Director ROBERT WILFORT
Les Tremayne MICHAEL BRANDON
Barbara Luddy SASKIA REEVES
Martin Gabel (Cassius) AIDAN McARDLE
I.L. Epstein MIKE McEVOY
George Duthie (Artemidorus) THOMAS ARNOLD
Jeannie Rosenthal JO McINNES
William Mowry (Flavius) DANIEL TUITE
Virginia Welles EMILY ALLEN
Longchamps Kid #2 JOHN YOUNG
Singer EDDI READER
Band Leader JOOLS HOLLAND
Mercury Trumpet Player STEVE PARRY
Mercury Percussion Player JAY IRVING
Mercury French Horn Player DAVID GARBUTT
Production Team
Director RICHARD LINKLATER
Screenplay/Co-producers HOLLY GENT PALMO
VINCE PALMO
Based on the novel by ROBERT KAPLOW
Producers RICHARD LINKLATER
MARC SAMUELSON
ANN CARLI
Executive Producers STEVE CHRISTIAN
JOHN SLOSS
STEVE NORRIS
Co-Producer ANDREW FINGRET
Associate Producers JESSICA PARKER
SARA GREENE
Line Producer RICHARD HEWITT
Director of Photography RICHARD POPE, BSC
Production Designer LAURENCE DORMAN
Editor SANDRA ADAIR, A.C.E.
Hair& Make-up Designer FAE HAMMOND
Costume Designer NIC EDE
Music Supervisor MARC MAROT
Visual Effects Supervisor ROB DUNCAN
Casting Director LUCY BEVAN
1st Assistant Director MATTHEW PENRY-DAVEY
Sound Mixer COLIN NICOLSON
Supervising Art Director BILL CRUTCHER
Property Master BRUCE BIGG
Location Manager JANE SOANS
Post Production Supervisor MIRANDA JONES
Production Accountant LINDA GREGORY
The Mercury Theatre
Time magazine once described the Mercury company's origin as "at first just an idea bounded North and South by hope, East and West by nerve." The co-founders were 35-year-old European émigré actor and producer John Houseman and 22-year-old Wisconsin-born actor and director Orson Welles. Houseman had spotted Welles in a production of "Romeo and Juliet" and was impressed with the young actor's creativity and drive. In 1935 Houseman was about to join the Federal Theatre Project, a New Deal initiative supporting live performance in the United States during the Great Depression and invited Welles to join him.
In 1936 Houseman assigned Welles to take charge of a project for Harlem's American Negro Theater and the resulting "Voodoo Macbeth" established the young director as an extraordinarily precocious talent. In the summer of 1937, he and Houseman embarked on an ambitious plan to start a classical repertory theatre in New York City, based on the youthful nucleus of the company they had assembled for their staging of Marc Blitzstein's controversial opera, "The Cradle Will Rock", their final project at the Federal. The new enterprise was incorporated a few days later as the Mercury Theatre and they eventually found themselves a home in what had been the Comedy Theatre, on 41st Street and Broadway.
Built in 1909, the building had fallen into disrepair, but the company spent a month restoring and preparing the stage area for the first production, Welles's version of Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar", billed as "Caesar: Death of a Dictator", which would open a mere ten weeks after the Mercury Theatre was conceived. The stage was to appear bare, covered with platforms and steps and ramps of varying heights and rakes. These had been acquired from a warehouse which stored lumber from the sets of other productions, hence the lack of uniformity, which Welles and his production team utilised with a particular creative flair. The rear wall of the theatre was left visible, also painted a rusty red, together with its steam pipes and heating ducts.
Another feature of the production design, which was based on Welles's original drawings and executed by Sam Leve, was the use of a series of open traps, from which steps led to the under-stage areas. These hazards were beloved of the director, despite the cast's apprehensions, although, following a blackout at the first dress rehearsal, the lights came up on the conspirators waiting to assassinate Caesar and one of their number was seen to be missing. Brutus, played by Welles himself, was found unconscious beneath the stage, fortunately with no lasting damage.
Welles's production was stunningly contemporary. The Roman senators and citizenry wore Fascist military uniforms or sharp suits with turned-up collars and black hats and the action was accompanied by Marc Blitzstein's martial music, the thump of the mob's feet on wooden boards and the forest of dramatic, vertical shafts of brilliance - the so-called 'Nuremberg lights' - reproduced by technical director Jeannie Rosenthal. Pared to an economical hour-and-a-half, without an interval, this "Julius Caesar" lived up to the Mercury manifesto, which had been published in the New York Times on August 29th, 1937. Written by Welles and Houseman, it declared: "By the use of apron, lighting, sound devices, music, etc., we hope to give this production much of the speed and violence that it must have had on the Elizabethan stage."
John Mason Brown described the show as "by all odds the most exciting, most imaginative, the most topical, the most awesome and the most absorbing of the season's new productions. The touch of genius is upon it." The first outpouring of an avalanche of critical praise, this presaged the extraordinary success of what is still acknowledged to be a landmark in the history of American theatre and the anointing of the "boy wonder" who would go on to create cinematic legend.
When it came to reproducing the visual impact of this groundbreaking production, the filmmakers were determined to be as faithful to the original as the budget would allow. Basing the look of the theatrical performance on contemporary photographs taken by Cecil Beaton, as well as copies of the original stage plans, Richard Linklater and his team have recreated the dramatic lighting and stage effects, the Fascist imagery of sets and costumes, all to the accompaniment of Marc Blitzstein's original score.
Orson Welles and company
Orson Welles was very much the leader of the Mercury Theatre Company, despite his relative youth. Born in 1915 in Kenosha, Wisconsin, to an inventor and manufacturer father and a concert pianist mother, both of whom had died before he reached fifteen, Orson was blessed with a commanding physique and a deep and resounding voice. During a visit to Europe at the age of 16, he managed to persuade Dublin's Gate Theatre that he was a Broadway star and made his stage debut there in "Jew Süss". He became, in fact, a Broadway legend and a ubiquitous and groundbreaking radio star, following the stage success of "Caesar" with more than a year as the voice of The Shadow in the popular radio serial. All this by the age of 24, when he began work on his enduring cinema classic "Citizen Kane". Although many felt that his controversial 50-year career was one of unfulfilled promise, his legacy included such classic films as "The Magnificent Ambersons", "Othello", "Chimes at Midnight" and "Touch of Evil", his iconic performance as Harry Lime in Carol Reed's "The Third Man" and the memory of his notorious 1938 broadcast version of H.G. Wells' "The War of the Worlds".
John Houseman, whose collaboration with Welles was to prove so fruitful, was born Jacques Haussmann in Bucharest, to a British mother and Jewish father from Alsace. Educated in England, he emigrated to the United States in 1925, becoming a U.S. citizen in 1943. President of the Mercury Theatre (Welles was vice-president), he went on to become a successful film producer and an accomplished character actor, winning an Academy Award® as Best Supporting Actor in the 1973 academic drama "The Paper Chase". He died in 1988.
George Coulouris was born in Salford, England, in 1903 and educated at Manchester Grammar School and at Elsie Fogerty's Central School of Speech and Drama, where he was a contemporary of Laurence Olivier and Peggy Ashcroft. He made his stage debut at the Old Vic in 1926 and his Broadway debut three years later. He met Welles in 1936, who cast him as Mark Antony in "Julius Caesar" and as financier Walter Parks Thatcher in "Citizen Kane". A regular on stage, on radio, on television and in more than 80 films, on both sides of the Atlantic, he received an Oscar® nomination for "Watch on the Rhine" in 1943 and died in London in 1989.
Joseph Cotten, although cast by Welles in a minor role in "Julius Caesar", became a star of the big screen, despite his comment that: "I didn't care about the movies, really. I was tall. I could talk. It was easy to do." Born in Virginia, he began his theatre career as a critic, a profession echoed by his later role in "Citizen Kane". Making his Broadway debut in 1930, he met Welles and joined the Mercury company. Their successful collaborations also included "The Magnificent Ambersons", "Journey Into Fear" (which he co-wrote with producer Welles) and, most memorably Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt" and Carol Reed's "The Third Man". An enduring star, Cotten died at the age of 88 in California.
Norman Lloyd's career in entertainment has spanned more than seven decades. The scene of his murder (as Cinna the Poet) in "Julius Caesar" was the production's coup de theatre, producing the play's most chilling moment. He became a favourite of Alfred Hitchcock's, appearing in "Saboteur" and "Spellbound" and being closely involved in the production of the television series "Alfred Hitchcock Presents". As a TV performer, he is probably best remembered as Dr Auschlander in 132 episodes of the hospital drama "St Elsewhere". His films include "Dead Poets Society" and, most recently, "In Her Shoes".
Arthur Anderson appeared in the Mercury Theatre's "Julius Caesar" as Lucius, memorably photographed by Cecil Beaton as a 15-year-old, singing "Orpheus with his lute" for Brutus (Welles), an image which inspired novelist Robert Kaplow. The largely fictionalized template for Richard Samuels in ME AND ORSON WELLES, Anderson remained with Orson as a member of the Mercury Theatre On The Air and became one of the leading voice artists on radio, as well as making regular appearances on stage, in films and on television.
Of the other key members of the Mercury family portrayed in ME AND ORSON WELLES, Martin Gabel (Cassius, although he lacked the requisite 'lean and hungry look') made numerous appearances on "What's My Line" with his wife, series regular Arlene Francis, and won a Tony Award in 1961 for "Big Fish, Little Fish". He appeared in twenty films and is perhaps best remembered in America as the narrator/host of CBS's 1945 broadcast of Norman Corwin's epic dramatic poem "On A Note of Triumph", commemorating the fall of the Nazi regime. Joe Holland (Caesar), was born in Virginia and trained at RADA in London. He had a long career in the theatre and appeared in a number of Shakespearean plays including the Basil Rathbone productions of "Julius Caesar," "Coriolanus" and "Hamlet".
Leading ladies Muriel Brassler (Portia) and Evelyn Allen (Calpurnia), though accomplished stage actresses, were described by Houseman as 'decorative, adequate and hardly memorable'. Grover Burgess (Ligarius) appeared in Jules Dassin's classic 1948 film "The Naked City", after more than 20 years as a Broadway regular, including a leading role in William Saroyan's comedy "The Time of Your Life". John Hoyt, who also performed under his real name as John Hoysradt, topped the bill in 1938 at New York's Rainbow Room as 'The Master of Satire' and made hundreds of appearances on television and in films such as "Spartacus" and "Desperately Seeking Susan". George Duthie and William Mowry were also regular Mercury Theatre members, both on stage and radio. William Alland, whom Welles playfully dubbed Vakhtangov, after the great Russian actor/producer, was the director's general factotum at the Mercury, but went on to his own success as an actor-producer, including playing the young reporter, Thompson, in "Citizen Kane".
Behind the scenes, the company included top Broadway stage manager Walter Thompson Ash and Sam Leve, whose realisation of Welles's original concepts had a lasting impact on stage design. Perhaps the Mercury's greatest asset was technical director Jean Rosenthal, who went on to design the original stage lighting for such Broadway hits as "West Side Story", "The Sound of Music", "Hello Dolly!", "The Odd Couple" and "Cabaret".
Recreating 1937 New York
According to producer Marc Samuelson, "one of the issues that you face is that it's very hard to shoot 1937 New York in New York, so you're not shooting it in the actual place. New York has changed so completely that everything in the background is wrong, everything in the foreground is wrong, the people all look wrong, every building's been changed. It's enormously difficult. So you then end up shooting New York in some other North American city which looks vaguely like it did in 1937. By the time you've done all of that, you may as well have shot it anywhere."
As an independent feature, ME AND ORSON WELLES needed to make creative use of every penny of its limited budget and found a solution in basing the production in London, where a combination of Pinewood Studios and some imaginatively chosen locations brought New York to life. And thanks to some visual trickery, the imposing scale and distinctive architecture of the bustling city has been vibrantly recreated on a comparative shoestring.
"This movie doesn't really exist any longer in New York," says Richard Linklater. "If you go to where the Mercury Theatre was, you would never know. It's an office building - there's not even a plaque. That street looks so different, it didn't really matter to me where we shot the film. As a filmmaker, wherever I could make this film, I would, (and I did)".
"It's been wonderful working with production designer Laurence Dorman", continues Linklater. "We went over to New York together - he wasn't that familiar with the city, so we went to a lot of the actual addresses in the movie and I showed him around."
Dorman's visit inspired his design of the street set on Pinewood's Orchard Lot: "It was worth every second actually, because we were able to visit the site of the theatre and I was able to get the geography of 41st Street into my mind, with Bryant Park and all the things that are mentioned in the script. And even though 41st Street was completely different to how it would have been in those days, I was able to just wander around the neighbourhood and take pictures all over midtown and all the way down to 22nd Street. I was picking out all of the old stuff, the architecture that I imagined would have been there at the time and turning it into our little composite street. I've taken a selection of buildings based on my photographs and put them together to suit my purposes.
"For the exterior of the Mercury Theatre we found a single photograph taken in the early 1900s when the building, then the Comedy Theatre, was putting on its first production. We took a little bit of licence here and there, but it's great to see that original picture and then to be able to look at our street - it's quite thrilling to do something like that."
Crucial to the success of the enterprise was finding a theatre that could play the interior of the Mercury itself. By a stroke of good fortune, CinemaNX, the production company, is based in the Isle of Man and there, in the capital, Douglas, is the magnificently restored Gaiety Theatre, an almost exact contemporary of the Mercury. "I don't think we would have been able to make the film if we hadn't been able to shoot it there," says Marc Samuelson. "It was just the most fantastic set for us. It worked really well, looked great in the film, was just the right size - in every way it fitted the bill."
The theatre opened originally as a large pavilion in 1893 and, following a redesign by Frank Matcham, it re-opened as an opera house and theatre in 1900. After early success, years of neglect began to take their toll and the building was acquired by the Isle of Man Government in 1971. A comprehensive programme of restoration was launched in 1990 and completed in 2000. One of the last elements to be restored was the famous Corsican Trap, the only known original version of this classic stage effect.
"I really fell in love with the place," admits Linklater. "It was almost too nice, too ornate, but I thought if we brought it down a little bit and didn't look up at the beautiful domed cathedral-like ceiling, it had similar proportions to the Mercury Theatre in seats and size. The stage was about the same size and the below stage area and its trap door arrangement with locks and pulleys was far more complex and interesting than you would ever be able to realize if you were building your own stage. So all of that felt great, and to shoot on the Isle of Man for those weeks was just kind of perfect. Some films are just meant to be. It just feels like it lines up and it's meant to happen."
Robert Kaplow, on whose novel the film is based, is eager to see Welles's production of "Caesar" for the first time, on screen. The original inspiration for his book was an image captured by the great photographer Cecil Beaton, showing young Arthur Anderson as Lucius with his lute, seated on stage next to Orson Welles's Brutus - a scene which has been faithfully recreated in the film. "Part of the pleasure for me in writing the book was to imagine what it would really look like. And how would it move? Richard Linklater got the original blueprints, they still exist, for the stage, for the columns and the trap doors and the ramps and they are to perfect scale on the stage of the Gaiety Theatre. No one has seen it since 1937. It's been gone and now they are rebuilding it again. It should be exciting."
A key element in the recreation of the period was the skill and experience of the Oscar-nominated cinematographer Richard Pope. "I had a great meeting with Dick," remembers Linklater, "and I just saw him as a kindred spirit. He had that wild attitude - he seemed like a kind of mad scientist. And what you want in that position is enthusiasm - and skill, obviously, that goes without saying. Other than that, it's a personality match. He seems in the spirit of the film and he said he fell in love with it when he read the passage in the script where one of the actresses, Muriel Brassler, played by Kelly Reilly, is talking about lighting and gels and about getting a little butterfly shadow under her nose. He just thought that was so amusing.
"I think people maybe know him for his Mike Leigh films, but it's some of his other films that are, I think, just as impressive. It's been really fun within this film for both of us. You rarely get the opportunity to recreate theatrical lighting. With most films, even a stylised period piece, you bend a little towards naturalism. But when you are recreating the exact lighting of this highly dramatic, very theatrical stage show, it's just fun. It was like shooting an old studio film with high contrast lighting and it's probably the only time I will ever get to do that. The story goes that the great cinematographer Gregg Toland saw this production of Julius Caesar and when he heard that Welles was going to Hollywood to make 'Citizen Kane' he told him he wanted to work with him, because of the lighting he had done for the play.
Establishing the look of the Mercury Theatre involved costume designer Nic Ede in researching the Fascist imagery of the original Caesar production. "Thank goodness, there is a lot of visual reference, a lot of photographs and a lot of people wrote about it. When we were on the Isle of Man, filming in the Gaiety Theatre, I looked at the way Dick Pope had lit it and the way Laurence had done the set - identical to the original - and it sent a shiver down my spine."
In addition to reproducing the uniforms on stage, there was the small matter of costuming the audience for Nic Ede and his team. This required clothing some 570 extras, who also needed to be fully made up and coiffed by Fae Hammond and her assistants, for the scenes involving a full theatre. "I love huge crowd scenes," says Ede. "I don't know what it is - something rather perverse. It's playing at make-believe and that's always a great, great thing to do. The joy of filming, from my point of view, is to create something that the audience will look at that they absolutely believe. Every extra that comes into the fitting room is a bit of a challenge. You want to make them into a character, it's not just a body to put clothes on, it's somebody to represent... a fishwife... or a sweetcorn seller....
"The thing that was exciting for me in this film was the fact that in the thirties, leisurewear was much more accepted in America than elsewhere. I don't think it existed in Europe in the same way and certainly didn't unless you were rich and were wearing beach pyjamas! It made a change from the usual 1930s stuff I have done which is pretty upper class and extravagant, whereas this was a chance to do real people leading real lives. It's interesting, trying to achieve totally believable people through their clothes and their make up and hair."
The '30s music for the film was selected by Linklater himself, a big fan of the music of the period and of the arrangements of maestro Jools Holland, described by the director as 'an English national treasure'. Another key element in recreating the sound of the era was the speaking voices of the Mercury Theatre players, which benefited from the specialist attention of distinguished Shakespearean Dramaturge Giles Block and veteran dialect coach Judith Windsor. Block, Master of Verse and Play at London's celebrated Globe Theatre, worked with the actors on the Shakespeare scenes during the rehearsal period, coaching and advising them on the authenticity of their verse speaking. Judith Windsor worked on the actors' delivery throughout the production, paying close attention to the fine details of their accents.
As an American, married to an Englishman and resident in England, Ms Windsor was particularly attuned to the challenges inherent in the script. "You have to remember that, at that time, American standard stage English was very English. Although, were we to hear Shakespeare as spoken in Shakespeare's time, it would sound more American than English!
"Of course, we have worked on the speaking of Shakespearean verse and the mode followed goes back to the Central School of Speech and Drama in London - it's mentioned in the text by George Coulouris that he learned to speak Shakespeare there with Elsie Fogerty. This tradition can be traced down to the Royal Shakespeare Company - it's a sort of energising of the last of the line, so that the imaginative experience for the actor comes, not between the lines or the words, but on the words and as a result of the scansion. It's a wonderful thing - it frees the actor to experience, through the text and through the pentameter, things he would never have thought of. They speak with rapidity and clarity - I'm always delighted and constantly re-surprised at how skillful the British actors are.
"Orson Welles himself was, in terms of accent, a kind of hybrid. He sounded English to Americans and American to English people - we listened to a great many tapes of Welles speaking, some of which were of the original Mercury production and in those you can hear that he is sometimes very English in how he pronounces things."
And the Mercury rises
Richard Linklater is a director with an eclectic back catalogue of popular and critically-praised movies and when his long-time associate and first assistant director Vince Palmo recommended Robert Kaplow'
