Despite its popularity on the stage, "The Merchant of Venice" has never successfully been made into a feature film. According to "The Merchant of Venice" star Lynn Collins, the reason Radford was able to bring the very difficult story to the screen when others failed is because of his "impeccable vision of layers of drama." "The Merchant of Venice" is a complex story that needed someone of Radford's skill to bring it to life onscreen.
In this interview, Michael Radford discusses his cast, which includes Academy Award winners Al Pacino and Jeremy Irons, adding a little backstory to selected characters to make "The Merchant of Venice" accessible to contemporary audiences, and how he approached bringing "The Merchant of Venice" to the big screen:
INTERVIEW WITH MICHAEL RADFORD:
Adapting “The Merchant of Venice” must have been a daunting task. Was there a specific process you went through?
Yes, there was. First of all, I looked at every other Shakespeare movie and found very few of them actually really engaging. I liked them and could admire them in many ways, but I found very few of them engaging. And my attempt with this was to make a film that was really going to be a movie that audiences who didn’t necessarily know anything about Shakespeare would become involved in. So I looked at them and I discovered that effectively what Shakespeare does is he enters into the middle of the action, and he doesn’t give you much backstory until later. The first thing I did when I was adapting it was create a backstory so that you knew how the characters related to each other, so that eventually when they started to interact you were with them and already involved in the story, which is why you see Antonio spitting at Shylock at the beginning of the film. The other thing that I did was, of course, I cut a lot of the language and just kind of smoothed it out and got the actors to say it very naturalistically. And then I set it in Venice. Very specifically in Venice at the time because Venice is a fantastic place. It has a real atmosphere of its own and a real way of life of its own, and it certainly did in the 16th century. So that’s what I did, and that was basically it.
Was adding a backstory the ingredient missing from other film adaptations of Shakespeare’s work?
Yes, because if you look at Orson Welles’ “Othello,” for instance, or Polanski’s “Macbeth,” you know they are great movies because they look beautiful and all the rest of it, but you don’t give a damn about Othello, nor do you give a damn about Macbeth. You don’t care and you don’t understand why they are like they are.
I felt just completely that if, for instance, just to give you an example, at the scene where Shylock meets Antonio and he says, “Signor Antonio, many a time and oft on the Rialto you have reviled me.“ In Shakespeare, that’s exposition and the scene is kind of dead until, if you like, he asks for his pound of flesh. Well, in my film if you’ve seen Antonio spit at Shylock, you come into that scene going, “Whoa, wait a minute. What’s going to happen between these two?” And it makes it come alive. You know what’s happening between them. Similarly with other characters. When the play opens and Antonio says, “I know not why I feel so sad. It wearies me. I know it wearies you.” When you see it on the stage, it’s just a man telling you he feels sad. But if you’ve seen his relationship already, even with the eye contact between him and Bassanio, then already you’re ahead of the game, if you like. You’re following him. You’re interested in him because you’ve already seen it. You’ve already got some backstory about it.
