Golden Icon
Released to widespread acclaim in 1998, Shekhar Kapur’s Elizabeth was a surprise hit, breaking out of the art house to earn numerous awards, and a worldwide box office tally of $82 million, not to mention turning its star Cate Blanchett into one of Hollywood’s most respected names. Scott Townsend talks to the director about the second installation in his historic epic.

Almost a decade after Elizabeth, both Kapur and Blanchett are revisiting the character for Elizabeth: The Golden Age. Whereas the first film was about the ascent to power and the creation of the myth of The Virgin Queen, the second explores the woman behind the myth. Once again, Kapur offers an engaging, revisionist version of history, with Elizabeth having to face religious war, conspiracy and a lust for Sir Walter Raleigh, played by Clive Owen. The film also boasts a varied international cast featuring the likes of Geoffrey Rush, Abbie Cornish and Samantha Morton.

Scott: The first film initially seems like an unlikely candidate for a sequel, what was it that made you want to revisit this character?

Shekhar: Really it was something that came from all of us chatting, it wasn’t like someone said ‘Hey, lets make a sequel!’. I was talking to Michael Hirst, one of the screenwriters, this morning – he’s here doing The Tudors – and I was saying we ended the first film with a young woman saying ‘I’m a virgin queen’ and in a strange way, trying to replace the Virgin Mary. So I was saying ‘Thank God’ there’s not another scene in the film, because I wouldn’t know what to do, or even what the next scene should be. The idea of the next film was, that if you have become a myth in your own lifetime, if you declare yourself divine in your own lifetime, then what do you do? Because you're human. And it makes you wonder about some very interesting things, for example, people that have become divine in their own lifetime, people like Diana, they drove her to her death. Gandhi became divine in his own lifetime, and they shot him. JFK, someone shot him, almost so that these people could stay divine. So why is it that every time someone becomes divine, we have to crucify them? These were all the kind of things that were going on in my mind, and here’s a person who has said she’s divine, she’s worshipped as divine, but she’s human. How could you be human and divine at the same time? So that’s what this film was born out of – that need to understand the relationship between human desires and needs and divinity.

The first film was very much like that as well, the idea seemed to be to break apart the myth of Elizabeth, to demystify the icon...

The idea is to look behind the iconography. Accept the iconography, accept history, and the mythology of history but then look beyond the myth of history, and see if there’s a human being lurking around there, and to catch and interpret the human being. Because really history is only about the icon, it doesn’t interpret the human being at all, it just says ‘This happened and this happened and she said this and she said this’ and you have no idea if it’s true or not, but you accept it, and so that’s become the myth, and you work around the myth, trying to find the human being behind the myth, and even that’s an interpretation.

How easy was it to get Cate Blanchett and Geoffrey Rush back?

Well, Geoffrey wanted to do it because he enjoyed the last film so much. Cate enjoyed it and wanted to come back, but she was a little worried because something she had done had propelled her towards world fame. You know, the film in itself became bigger than it was; it became an iconic film, partly because Cate Blanchett burst upon the international scene, and so her point was ‘How do you compete with an icon?’ And so what I would tell her is ‘You’re not competing. You’ve just got to forget that, because we’re making a different film, you’re not competing with the first one.’ Of course, everyone’s going to compare it, and people that liked the first one are going to say, ‘Well this is different and it’s not the same film.’ But that doesn’t bother me so much.

How did you go about casting the new cast members, the likes of Abbie Cornish for example?

Well, I’d seen her giving probably one of the best performances I’ve ever seen by a young girl in a film called Somersault when I was in the jury of the Tokyo Film Festival, and I was so sure that I called my agent up and said ‘I just saw this girl and you’ve got to sign her.’ And he said ‘You’re too late, we already have and she’s the hottest thing in Hollywood right now.’ So she was always at the back of my mind, and so two years later, when I was thinking of people for the part, I remembered Abbie Cornish. Actually, it wasn’t even my first suggestion, it was Cate’s suggestion, she said ‘There’s this wonderful new Australian actress’, and that she’d be perfect.

There’s almost a tradition with these films of unusual casting. You had the likes of Eric Cantona in the first film, and here you have Rhys Ifans playing an unusually serious role.

Yes, and Samantha Morton as Mary. I think one of the things we ought to do with film all the time is to break from what the audience expects, break film grammar, and I think the first film succeeded in that. There’s a relationship, I think, between the audience and the filmmaker that I call the armchair relationship. You can comfortably sit there and watch a film, knowing that we always understand each other’s language, and I kind of almost want to break that relationship so that they’re not sitting comfortably in their armchair, they’re sitting forward wondering what the hell’s going on. And it challenges you; it’s a challenge to live on the edge of the art that you follow, so that each time you come up with something, it challenges perceptions of the comfort level between the viewer and the filmmaker. And so I keep trying to do something different each time, so that the audience has a different experience than perhaps they were expecting.


The first film garnered a lot of awards, most notably seven Oscar nominations, and so there are instantly expectations around this film to follow that up. How do you feel about that kind of attention?

I was surprised and I was happy with the first film. Obviously, the moment I started making the second, everyone started shouting ‘Oscar!’ You don’t make films to make Oscars, you make films to make a film, and if you start thinking about that sort of thing then you’ll destroy your film. Of course, if you have Cate Blanchett in any film now, there is an Oscar buzz around it. But I’m not sure what an Oscar means. You know how the Oscars started? At some point, they found out years ago that in March and April, the US box office was performing badly in those months, and so they dreamt up the Oscars. So it’s about box office, and it’s not necessarily about the best films. Tastes change, fashions change, and what was best film last year may not be best film this year. And then anyway 85% of the world cinema is not seen in the US so I’m sure there are some Irish films or African films or Indian films that people never see, so it can’t be said it’s the best in the world. It’s a celebration of cinema, and that’s it.

Have you thought about a third Elizabeth film?

I’ve thought about it and what I think the third one should be is... You know, [these films are] about being divine in your lifetime, and so how do you face death? In a way you are divine, people worship you as immortal and as an icon, and so how do you face death and still stay divine? Does your divinity die with you or is your divinity something separate from your mortal self, so which part of you dies? Which is what people think about all the time isn’t it? Everybody keeps asking that question. But the last one should be an interesting look at a woman who thinks she’s divine and immortal and now is going to die. They say something about Elizabeth and that’s when she knew she was going to die, she stood for 12 hours, because she was afraid if she lay down or sat down, she would die. So what went on in her mind in those 12 hours? How did she come to terms with her life? And so a third film would be about those 12 hours, and her perception of her life.

You recently co-founded Virgin comics, and persuaded the likes of Guy Ritchie and John Woo to produce work in that medium. You also are heavily involved online with your website. What role do you see traditional films playing in a multimedia landscape?

Technology defines the way we relate to people. I like telling stories, and I’m addicted to communicating with people, that’s why I make films. So the moment I get the chance to have a website, I start communicating with people. The moment I get the chance to write a comic, I start communicating with people. But I think what’s going to become really important now is an ability to be more involved, for the consumer to become involved with the process of filmmaking. I think that viewers, particularly younger viewers, are now demanding to be involved in the process. It’s like when you watch a tennis game or a rugby game, you’re addicted to it because you know the sport that well, you watch every move, you see people going against each other, you don’t just see the result, you’re involved in the process. That’s what an online experience is, that’s what an interactive experience is. Not necessarily to change the result, but to be involved in the process, and I’m thinking that one of the things I’d like to do with my next film is... You know when you watch a film and it says ‘Please switch your cell phones off’? I’d like to have a message saying ‘Please switch your cell phones on’ and then there’s an internal online chat going on between people with cell phones who can react to each other as the film’s going on, and they're looking at subtext and seeing different messages and sharing them with each other. I think in my next film I’m going to involve people in the design aspect of the film, so that when they see the final product they feel that they have also been involved in the making of the final film. Can we go to a point where it’s unpredictable, and the people actually decide on the result? I’m not sure. It’s like a game, you play the game because you enjoy the game, because you enjoy winning, but you don’t play the game because you need to know the result. But I think the other thing that’s going to happen is, especially in Asia, is that there’s going to be a lot of entertainment absorbed through mobile devices. Now the attention span is not that huge. You sit through 1 hour and 45 minutes of my film, but you can’t do that through a mobile device, you want to sit through ten minute stories. So [the challenge is] to adapt to telling a story in ten minutes. That’s why YouTube is such a great learning process – the question is how do you tell a story in ten minutes? The audience has ten minutes to get an emotional reaction, so it’s about dealing and experimenting with that.

So what is your next film likely to be?

My next film is a film called Paani. Paani means water in Indian, and it’s an epic story about a city of 20 million people that runs out of water, and the water wars have begun, and it’s a story of people who are involved in fighting against each other for water.

Is that going to be a Western production?

Well, we'll shoot in India, but its going to be in English. And it doesn’t matter anymore what production it is, you know there’s going to be Chinese and American and English people in it, because my vision of the future is that it won’t matter. Its like, remember Blade Runner? How there was so many different races and people all pushed together? It’s like the modern Blade Runner, but the context is different.

Elizabeth: The Golden Age is released on 2nd November 2007
See review here