When the first images broke of Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut, an adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Coriolanus,” a little while ago, it was in no way what we’d been expecting. The project was thought to have a contemporary setting, but the images revealed it to be a full-on war movie.
Unlike the sometimes-gratuitous modernizations of Shakespeare’s work (Michael Almereyda’s “Hamlet,” please stand up), the action-packed end-of-an-empire drama of “Coriolanus” seems tailor-made for an update, and Fiennes has enlisted regular Ken Loach DoP Barry Ackroyd, who’s recently shot both “The Hurt Locker” and “Green Zone,” to give the film some of the feeling of those works.
The Daily Mail has a handful of fresh images from the film, which give us a first look at the supporting cast, including Gerard Butler as Tullus Aufidius, the rival of Roman general Coriolanus (Fiennes himself), Vanessa Redgrave as Volumnia, his mother, Brian Cox as Menenius and Jessica Chastain (“Tree of Life”) as Virgilia. James Nesbitt, John Kani, Ashraf Barhom and, bizarrely, British pop star Will Young also appear. The look seems to be inspired more by the Balkan war than by Afghanistan or Iraq, and indeed shooting took place in Belgrade, with former Serbian special forces soldiers appearing as extras.
It’s been a long time since there was a Shakespeare movie worth a damn, (although we’re hopeful about Julie Taymor’s “The Tempest,” when it eventually sees the light of day) but this looks like it could be terrific — it’s a real passion project for Fiennes, and he’s assembled a hell of a cast. The only question comes over the casting of Gerard Butler, who, “How To Train Your Dragon” aside, has never appeared in anything even close to being worth a damn.
