From AIFF12 Artistic Achievement Award honoree Julie Taymor comes a live performance of Shakespeare’s classic comedy A Midsummer Night’s Dream, originally presented at the Polonsky Center in Brooklyn, and now captured on film. Featuring fairies, spells, and hallucinatory lovers, the film is a funny, sexy, and darkly poetic visual experience with breathtaking cinematography by Rodrigo Prieto (Argo and Frida) and stirring music by Academy Award-winning composer Elliot Goldenthal. Taymor transforms a major theatrical event into an immersive, cinematic experience. A Skype Q&A with Julie Taymor will follow the film.
Director’s Statement: Julie Taymor
This is one of Shakespeare’s most joyful plays, celebrating every aspect of love in all of its glory. It was amazing to be able to interpret that not only in the stage production, but to transform it into a film. When we decided to shoot the performance live, we put on-stage cameras in incredible positions, so each shot in the film is the absolute best place from which to see that moment. When you’re in the theatre (in the round), quite often you’ll have the back of an actor to you, which is fine, but in the movie we could always get reaction and close-up shots. We got to break the wall because we could shoot and edit it like a real movie, and it works equally well on film in a different way from the stage.
