'Juliet & Romeo': Shakespeare meets pop music for Timothy Scott Bogart's film with Rebel Wilson, Jason Isaacs
Set in 1301, filmmaker Timothy Scott Bogart takes on William Shakespeare's story about star-crossed lovers with the intention of being authentic to the Medieval time period, overlayed with pop music. Bogart also wanted to flesh out more underserved characters from the original story.
Before Bogart stepped behind the camera he was an actor, initially making the transition by directing theatre, including Romeo and Juliet multiple times.
"I have to be honest, ... there were moments in the piece, there were characters in the piece, there were arcs of the piece that never quite felt fully developed, because there's only so much you can put in the play," Bogart explained to Yahoo. "It was something that had been kind of haunting me from my own inability to feel like I could crack it on stage, and it just kept coming back."
In terms of creating the pop music in Juliet & Romeo, Bogart enlisted the help of his brother, Evan Bogart, and Evan's writing partner Justin Gray. Evan famously wrote the Beyoncé song "Halo," alongside Ryan Tedder.
But how pop music even came into the equation for Bogart's film started more than a decade ago.
"I remember saying to my brother, why do you think iambic pentameter? What do you think that was about? And in the most simple, kind of off the cuff way he said, 'I think that was the poetry of their time,'" Bogart said. "I said, interesting. What's the poetry of our time? And he said, pop music."
"Now my brother, of course, who wrote 'Halo' for Beyoncé, he's going to come from pop music, but he started going, think about your world. When you see kids, what are they doing? They've got headphones on. ... They're listening to music. That is how they are expressing themselves. So about 10 years earlier, this idea of music as a central way to really get inner voice, which ultimately is what Shakespeare did so beautifully and brilliantly, ... it kept coming back."
The concept of the songs representing inner voice was core to Bogart's vision, particularly in how to integrate the music with the story.
"I don't think there's any more important subject that we wrestled with on how best to do it," Bogart said. "There's the musicals where the milkman clearly knows he's in a musical and is singing, and even the cow knows it's in a musical and it is singing. And I didn't want anything to do with that, it's just not my cup of tea. I really was trying, from the very beginning, to use this as inner voice."
"There's a scene in the movie [where] Romeo and Juliet meet in the church, and suddenly they have this wonderful song. Well I don't really think they're singing in the church. I think they're they're two young people getting to know each other in the church, but it feels like they're singing about their love. ... I believe this kind of age demographic lives in a musical world. So throughout the movie we kept finding locations and places where songs would organically be occurring. ... Their Saturday night with your pals and that's what you would be doing."
But of course, Bogart had to face the task of finding his Rome and Juliet, coming after a long line of actors who have played the roles in a variety of different on-screen adaptations.
"Finding Romeo and Juliet, perhaps one of the hardest things you could ever do," he said. "You start going, well OK Leonardo DiCaprio. We know what that is. You know what Claire Danes is. ... You got Tom Holland doing his version, Rachel Zegler during hers."
"I wanted our Romeo and Juliet to feel like fresh faces that would bring us into this new world. And so it was finding authenticity of people that just felt so real and so human, great voices, which thankfully, Clara and Jamie absolutely have."
Adding to that was Bogart commitment to research and really crafting a story that was true to what was happening at the end of Medieval times into the Renaissance, and with that came Bogart's desire to actually make this Juliet & Romeo story into a trilogy. The opportunity to look at things like royal families fighting against Pope Boniface VIII, largely recognized among the worst Popes in history.
"If Star Wars was the first, then Empire Strikes Back, and that's not terribly dissimilar to what we're trying," Bogart said. "The origin of the franchise really was birthed from my exploration of the real life story."
"It really is a much bigger story about really the exciting characters of that time at perhaps the most transformative moment of that time."
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