Word: stoppards
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Still, the movie took a decade to happen. Norman, whose previous films include Cutthroat Island, got the idea in 1988 from one of his sons, who was studying Elizabethan drama, and eventually produced a script for Universal. In 1992 Stoppard--who wrote the movies Empire of the Sun, The Russia House and Brazil, among others--came in to do a rewrite. The film fell apart over casting and languished until Miramax bought the rights from Universal...
...story, structure and the language--I accomplished that in my screenplay." But both men confirm that many of the jokes that dazzle past--the Stratford-upon-Avon mug; the pub waiter offering a special of "pig's foot marinated in juniper vinegar served on a buckwheat pancake"--are indeed Stoppard...
...final scenes are also Stoppard's, and, like his Will, he was rewriting the ending practically until the moment of filming. "We seemed to have a romantic comedy where the boy didn't get the girl," Stoppard explains. "This troubled people, but the whole point was that the experience led him to write the greatest love tragedy of all time, not the greatest love comedy." Instead of that final shot of the beach, he says, "I shouldn't be telling you these things, but in my first go I had a sort of ghostly Manhattan in my mind...
...desire to hunt for Stoppard's touch is understandable. The playwright, who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1937 and educated in India and England, catapulted to fame with a different Shakespearean work: the 1967 play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an existential reimagining of two characters from Hamlet. Since then his work has been known for its wordplay and highbrow subject matter--such as chaos theory in Arcadia, or the life of poet A.E. Housman in The Invention of Love, now running in London. Many of his plays have been criticized for their emotional inaccessibility, but, says Stoppard...
Though he confesses he was initially reluctant to return to Shakespeare, Stoppard says he has been bowled over by the power of the Bard--and the theater--ever since his "first, deep" experience seeing Hamlet: "It alerted you. It jumped you into the central truth about theater, which is that it's an event and not a text." This, he is convinced, is why theater will endure and why he continues to produce a play every few years (of his next he will say only "19th century" and "Russia...