Baz Luhrmann and Shakespeare's Words

VICKI BOTNICK: One thing that I was thinking about in terms of teen adaptations is that the purists are often really horrified by them.

Baz Luhrmann's Romeo + Juliet, for example, took a lot of liberties with the story and with the visual style, so that it's got a very modern, hip-hop, violent, sexy kind of flair to it, and many critics said that it was kind of sacrilege to play around with Shakespeare. Whereas the truth is that Shakespeare played around with his own plays all the time, and the real sacrilege is with the other teen adaptations that tend to cut out all of the Shakespearean language, which Romeo + Juliet didn't do at all. It kept a lot of the actual text from the play and didn't assume that a young audience couldn't understand it or wouldn't relate to it, or that it would get in the way somehow of the modernization and of feeling really contemporary

It is a gamble for Luhrmann to make a teen adaptation and keep all the Shakespearean language, but the truth is, he cut it down to pretty bare bones, and a lot of the language in a Shakespearean play is dependent on the way it's read and the background that you can see to help you to interpret the words. So I think that a lot of the lines that Luhrmann left in were not the ones that have a lot of difficult vocabulary or that would be hard to interpret, even to an audience that's not very familiar with it.