Roland Emmerich's 'Anonymous' Seeks to Unmask Shakespeare

Roland Emmerich’s ‘Anonymous’ Seeks to Unmask Shakespeare - NYTimes.com 6/25/12 1:19 PM

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Reiner Bajo/Columbia TriStar Roland Emmerich on the set of “Anonymous.” By ARI KARPEL Published: October 21, 2011

LOS ANGELES RECOMMEND TWITTER TicketWatch: Theater Offers by E-Mail SINCE his career began three decades LINKEDIN Sign up for ticket offers from Broadway shows and other Related ago, Roland Emmerich has let his advertisers. ArtsBeat Blog: Shakespeare Trust SIGN IN TO E- movies speak for themselves. And they MAIL Hides Playwright's Name to Protest See Sample | Privacy Policy have done so, rather loudly. There was 'Anonymous' (October 25, 2011) PRINT the alien-shot laser beam zapping the Enlarge This Image REPRINTS White House to smithereens in MOST E-MAILED RECOMMENDED FOR YOU SHARE “Independence Day.” Then a superstorm partly buried the Statue of Liberty in ice in “The Day After Tomorrow.” Most recently tidal waves leveled Rio, New York and the White Reiner Bajo/Columbia TriStar House (again) in “2012.” PRESENTED BY Rhys Ifans and Vanessa Redgrave star in the film “Anonymous.” Aside from incidental witty banter, dialogue isn’t Enlarge This Image paramount in Mr. Emmerich’s oeuvre. That makes it all the more surprising that the master of disaster’s latest release, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/movies/roland-emmerichs-anonymous-seeks-to-unmask-shakespeare.html?pagewanted=all Page 1 of 5 Roland Emmerich’s ‘Anonymous’ Seeks to Unmask Shakespeare - NYTimes.com 6/25/12 1:19 PM

“Anonymous,” opening on Friday, is at heart about words, their meaning and their true source. A drama set in the Elizabethan era, it boldly questions the authorship of Shakespeare’s works. In doing so, it prompts consideration of the intersection of art and politics and the role of the artist in society.

“Any art is political, even disaster movies,” Mr. Emmerich said, then continued later: “You can dumb them down. Just Selective storytelling from the give them exactly what they want. Or you can make them stump 20th Century Fox think.” He claims to have done just that with “The Day ALSO IN POLITICS » A frozen library in Roland Emmerich's After Tomorrow”: “The Americans go over the fence to “Day After Tomorrow.” Photos from the campaign trail Mexico illegally. We’re surviving by burning books!” Continuous coverage of the election

With “Anonymous” he isn’t up to his usual explosions. Rather, what he blows up this time is received wisdom about Shakespeare. The film posits that Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of ADVERTISEMENTS Oxford, played by Rhys Ifans, was the true author of the works of Shakespeare (an argument called the Oxfordian Theory) and was the incestuous lover of Elizabeth I (a twist known in academic circles as the Prince Tudor Theory Part II). It's Just the Ticket for Everything Theater

Mr. Emmerich is also seeking to blow up Hollywood’s image of himself. “God forbid they have to take you out of one drawer and put you in another,” he said of the industry and the press that covers it. “You get pigeonholed, and then it’s hard to break out.”

Mr. Emmerich indeed used his long-running success with Sony Pictures to make “Anonymous” happen. “He is a great partner to be in business with,” said Amy Pascal, co- chairwoman of Sony Pictures Entertainment, which produced Mr. Emmerich’s “Patriot,” “Godzilla” and “2012.” “He’s a showman. He wants to win.” Ads by Google what's this?

But here winning meant Mr. Emmerich had to forgo his usual $100 million to $200 5 Signs of Depression million budgets. Instead, because Ms. Pascal said “Anonymous” wouldn’t have the draw of These 5 Signs of Depression Will his previous films, he had to get it made for around $30 million. Shock You. See The Causes Now! Depression.DailyLife.com/5-Signs And that took some creativity. Rather than building Elizabethan exteriors on soundstages, which would require what Ms. Pascal called “astronomical” sums, Mr. Emmerich opted to make the costume drama as if it were a disaster movie. He shot actors in front of green screens, then his longtime visual effects team conjured up 16th-century London, complete with crane shots of entire neighborhoods. In a nod to the director’s disaster past, the Globe Theater burns to the ground, a feat accomplished through computer-generated imagery.

“We created Whitehall Palace,” said John Orloff, the movie’s screenwriter. He wrote “Anonymous” almost 15 years ago and then rewrote it again and again under Mr. Emmerich’s direction. In a move atypical for Hollywood, Mr. Emmerich, not the studio, buys the screenplays for the movies he’s directing. “That allows him total control of the project,” Mr. Orloff said.

Once the script brought the issue of Shakespeare authorship to Mr. Emmerich’s attention, he did his own research, transforming the story into one about power and politics by adding the Prince Tudor Theory. There are questions of succession, incest and, as in “Hamlet,” a young man who has had his kingship snatched from him.

Mr. Emmerich remains fascinated by the authorship debate. At 55, lean and tan, he can seem reserved because he is self-conscious about the heavy German accent he retains from his youth. But once he relaxed, he showed himself passionate about the question of Shakespeare’s identity.

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“Nobody will ever know what really went on then,” he said. “But certain things are very hard to explain, like how this commoner wrote these 36 — or some say 38 — plays. And why does this most learned man have two illiterate daughters?” (Some Shakespeare scholars dispute this description of the daughters.)

He continued: “It’s crazy, right? But they say it’s crazy to doubt it.”

“They” are the Stratfordians, scholars who specialize in Shakespeare. Singling out James S. Shapiro, a professor of English at Columbia, Mr. Emmerich said, “It’s pretty much challenging their life’s work.”

“That’s so funny,” Professor Shapiro said in response. “If I actually found a document that suggested that the Earl of Oxford wrote ‘Midsummer Night’s Dream’ at the age of 9, as the movie would have it, my career would be made.”

Professor Shapiro, author of “Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?,” called Mr. Emmerich “a charming man and a great filmmaker” but said that his approach was reductively anti-intellectual, and dangerously so. Mr. Emmerich and Sony have produced a documentary and classroom study guide that Professor Shapiro described as full of “half- truths repeated through a 20th-century perspective.”

“I have no problem if Roland Emmerich wants to drink the Kool-Aid, but I do have a problem when it’s doled out in small cups to school kids,” he said.

Mr. Emmerich lives far removed from any ivory tower. His home is a lushly landscaped, five-acre property down a long, gated road beside Runyon Canyon. The three-bedroom house and its pool were built in 1919 by Jesse L. Lasky, a founder of Paramount Pictures.

“I made it cooler,” Mr. Emmerich said of the eclectic art collection and Art-Deco-meets- Gothic furnishings that fill the house, which he shares with Omar de Soto, a musician who is his boyfriend of three years. In the living room Mr. Emmerich sat near a stuffed zebra and a foam copy of the Statue of Liberty, a prop from “Independence Day.” His London home, by contrast, features an extensive collection of folk-art penis sculptures. “I have 200 or 300,” he said proudly.

“He’s very mischievous,” said Joely Richardson, who plays Queen Elizabeth as a young woman, while her mother, Vanessa Redgrave, plays the aging monarch. Ms. Richardson said his working style was reminiscent of that of her father, the stage actor Tony Richardson. “I mean, I never saw my father at work, but from what my mum says, he was so full of enthusiasm with a little bit of mischief involved,” she said. “And Roland has that side to him.”

Mr. Emmerich directed Ms. Richardson in “The Patriot.” And, she recalled, “I don’t think he would mind me saying this, but when we first worked together 10 years ago, he smoked a lot of cigarettes and he wasn’t very good at talking to the actors.” But with “Anonymous,” she said, she sensed a transformation, a change she attributes in part to his deep passion for this project.

Many directors are “scared to give Vanessa notes” on her performance, Ms. Richardson said, “but Roland was not.”

Mr. Emmerich also cast British stage stars like Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi to perform some of Shakespeare’s best-known scenes. “They gave me a kind of lesson in what acting means,” Mr. Emmerich said, though he brought in a theater director, Tamara Harvey, to handle the stage sequences.

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Nevertheless, after this foray, he plans to return to the realm of the mega-budget. “Singularity,” which he will start shooting in March for release by Sony in 2013, is about attaining superintelligence — that which exceeds the capacity of human perception — and will raise ethical questions about technology, medicine and immortality.

But the project that interests him the most is “Happy Birthday, Mr. President,” an experiment in digital re-creation, an emerging technology that he would apply to John F. Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe as minor characters. “It’s the project nobody wants to do,” he said of the script, which seeks to do for the Kennedy image what “Anonymous” tries to do for Shakespeare — that is to say upend reputations.

A version of this article appeared in print on October 23, 2011, on page AR14 of the New York edition with the headline: Brush Up Your Shakespeare, Or Whoever.

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