Some movie buffs compare Quentin Tarantino movies (Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction) to Shakespeare. Although Tarantino did tell GQ that “I might have been Shakespeare in another life,” he also claims that he’s not really into the Bard’s work. Clearly, Tarantino’s not as much into Shakespeare as actor/director/novelist Ethan Hawke, ex-husband of Tarantino’s muse Uma Thurman (Kill Bill).
Hawke, who played Hamlet in Michael Almereyda’s 2000 film adaptation, has just transformed Shakespeare’s Cymbeline into a modern tale of cops and biker gangs. It’s showing now in Venice. The magisterial Ed Harris plays the “king” of the leather clad biker gang with Milla Jovovich as his tiara-wearing queen. Also cast is actor Anton Yelchin (Star Trek Into Darnkess) who said “What’s kind of wonderful about Shakespeare is to kind of think of him as pulp and genre. It’s very prevalent in his plays. They’re filled with gangs and rivalries, and these material forces that lend themselves very easily to pulp, biker gangs and cops versus bad guys.”
