Have you heard from Shakespeare purists? How have your additions to the story been accepted?
It’s pretty much been accepted. Obviously there are people who have their absolute perception of “The Merchant of Venice” and sometimes it doesn’t fall in with mine. I don’t really care. What I tried to do is make something that’s coherent, human, and alive. That keeps people on the edge of their seats because the thing about Shakespeare is, the more you do it, the more you love it. You take a kid from the Projects and if you get him to play Hamlet as opposed to read it, he’ll start to love it because it’s such great stuff. Big themes, stuff that you recognize.
The real problem for an audience is that they only get to see it once, unless they come again. And so you’ve got to balance what you know about the text because you’ve rehearsed it, you’ve shot it, you’ve worked on it, and what the audience knows about it. And this was the same in the 16th century. You know, people didn’t speak in poetry in the 16th century either (laughing). And Shakespeare was a businessman. He got people into his theatre. He got bums on seats, basically. And he did that because the plots and the stories were so great. So I tried to emphasize that in this, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.
“The Merchant of Venice” hasn’t really been done on film, but it is Shakespeare’s play that is produced the most on stage. Why hasn’t somebody made it into a film before this?
I think it’s a very difficult one to get a handle on. It’s got a lot of comic stuff in it and it’s also got this deep tragedy. Some people have said it’s a Christian comedy mixed with a Jewish tragedy. And it has all sorts of strange things in it. Also, of course, because it is about anti-Semitism, about a racially abused minority in a particular period in history, in the middle of the 20th century when we’ve been through the Nazi holocausts, when we’ve been through the Russian pogroms of the 19th century and all the rest of it, at that moment you don’t really want to bring all this stuff up again. But the anti-Semitism of the 16th century, although it was anti-Semitism it was about something different. It was about usury – the lending of money at interest. So you have to see it in historical content because lending money at interest these days doesn’t mean anything at all.
What I feel about this play is that it’s about all humanity. There are so many universal themes in it. Just to give you an example, in England at a preview, a guy got up in the audience and said, ‘I’m a Muslim and I totally identify with Shylock in this film.” For me, that does it for me. I’m just happy because that’s what I want.
So it really does connect with contemporary audiences?
It really connects with contemporary audiences. Why? Because of the psychology. You know, Shylock is a man who has had a wrong done to him. He gets into a rage like we all do. And then at the end of that, he goes too far. You might say that on a national level America had a great wrong done to it on 9/11, and then in a rage attacked Iraq. Do you see what I mean? The psychology of it is absolutely correct. The problem with Shylock is he goes too far. You cannot be inhuman in your rage. There has to be some mercy, at some point. And in that point of view, I don’t see him as a Jew. I see him as an oppressed member… A man of great dignity who loses his way completely, and that’s universal.
I read something that was very interesting. Is it true that the studio asked you to cover up a naked cupid? Have we become that repressed in our intolerance of nudity?
No, no. Actually that’s gotten wildly out of hand. No, no, no. The studio didn’t ask me at all. What happened was that… We have got to that point because they are terrified of what the FCC is going to say when it comes to television. For the television version, they put down a list of things that might offend the FCC and one of them was a naked cupid in the background. I just thought that that was so funny (laughing). I was on a radio show when someone asked me if there was anything funny that happened. I said, “Yes, I’ve been asked to cover up part of the Paolo Veronese frescoes.”
That’s just crazy – but that’s only for the TV version?
Right. It’s only the paranoia that American TV is in since Janet Jackson exposed herself.
