Michael Fassbender has signed on to play Macbeth in a British-Australian co-production of Shakespeare’s play to be supported by Film 4. The director will be the Australian Justin Kurzel, best known for 2011’s “The Snowtown Murders” (aka “Snowtown”). The adaptation is by Todd Louiso and Jacob Koskoff, and the producers are the “The King’s Speech” duo Iain Canning and Emile Sherman, who previously worked with Fassbinder on “Shame.”
According to Screen Daily, they are in talks with “at least one leading Hollywood actress” to play Lady Macbeth. Charlize Theron, who channeled toxicity into the evil stepmother in “Snow White and the Huntsman,” might fancy her chances. So, too, Amy Adams, who was effectively Lady Macbeth to Philip Seymour Hoffman’s cult guru in “The Master.” Only she and Laura Linney, opposite Sean Penn in “Mystic River,” have mustered the Scottish queen’s virulence in recent years. My personal choice would be Rachel Weisz, though Jennifer Lawrence could blindside them all.
Shakespeare based “the Scottish play,” his shortest tragedy, on the account in Raphael Holinshed’s “Chronicle” of the reigns of Duncan I (1034-40) and Macbeth (1040-57). The former was killed by the latter in battle at Bothangowan, near Elgin, in Moray, in northeast Scotland. The new film will apparently be set during the same era and not stint on “visceral” battle scenes.
The three most famous Macbeth movies are those directed by Orson Welles (1948), Akira Kurosawa (“Throne of Blood,” 1957), and Roman Polanski (1971). Welles’s version, shot in 23 days on a Western backlot at Republic Studios, is Shakespeare filtered through film noir, a shadowplay of nightmarish images (thanks to cinematographer John L. Russell), though it never escapes staginess. Jeanette Nolan, making her screen debut, was far more vicious as the corrupt police chief’s wife, Bertha Duncan, in 1953’s “The Big Heat.” MacBeth's spiked crown looked like t might have been thought up by J.R.R. Tolkien or, at least, Peter Jackson's costume designer.
Kurosawa’s 16th-century samurai version, which starred Toshiro Mifune and Isuzu Yamada as the treacherous Washizu and his wife, pared down Shakespeare’s plot and dramatis personae, turning the witches, for example, into a single old woman. It is memorable for its misty moor, its “Cobweb Castle,” and Washizu’s refusal to relinquish his ambition even as he is pierced by multiple arrows.
Polanski’s version, which he co-scripted with the theater critic Kenneth Tynan, was the first film he made after his wife Sharon Tate and her friends were slaughtered by the Manson gang in 1969. The play’s sense of inexpungable evil must have gone very deep with the Polish director. He cast Jon Finch as Macbeth and Francesca Annis, then at her most powerful, as Lady Macbeth – she comes the closest to Ellen Terry’s pale and terrible queen, as painted by John Singer Sargent in 1889. Polanksi’s film is also memorable for its desolate seascapes and the Third Ear Band’s score.
“Polanski’s imagery, evoking a characteristically cruel, irrational, and blood-boltered world,” Tom Milne wrote in London’s Time Out, “is often magnificently strange and hieratic: the death of the Thane of Cawdor, for instance, hanged by way of a massive iron collar and chain from a high tower in a courtyard ringed by cloaked soldiers; or the almost pagan ritual of Macbeth’s coronation, starting with his bare feet stepping into the huge footprints embedded in the sacred stone.”