First Look: Director Justin Kurzel introduces a new Macbeth

Director Justin Kurzel has said the word “landscape” – or variations thereon – something like a dozen times (best guesstimate) by the time he winds up a recent Q&A at Edinburgh’s Cameo cinema. He’s just watched an advance screening of his Macbeth adaptation along with members of the press, The Skinny included, minor cast members and sundry others. It’s a very advance screening – the film isn’t released in the UK until 2 October. Plenty time to dust off your school copy of Shakespeare’s creepy, manky, bloody trip to Scotland.

First thing to say is that Kurzel and Jina Jay have casted an absolute blinder. Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard play the upwardly mobile central pair. Paddy Considine as Banquo and Sean Harris as MacDuff lend grizzly support. There’s strong local representation, too, particularly from witches Seylan Baxter and newcomer Lynn Kennedy. Then there’s the real star turn: Skye. It’s the landscape young Aussie Kurzel is so keen to talk up. Filming much of his bellicose adaptation in one of Scotland’s most demanding and gorgeous environments was, he says, a given. Though there is also something of his native land behind the sheer, sparse rises of the Inner Hebrides, that part of the Australian landscape that is “extremely important” to its people, he says, and yet “‘intimidating and kind of frightening at times.”

Of course, all good Macbeths are intimidating and frightening, and Kurzel’s is no exception, with Fassbender and Cotillard so strong. The former disintegrates beautifully; the latter is eerie and bold. Cotillard is also touching in a way that few Lady Macbeths are. For all the expansiveness of this version of the Scottish Play, a great deal of its dialogue is hissed, whispered and muttered. Aside from the combat scenes, it’s only really in Act II Scene 1, the discovery of Duncan’s body, that anyone gets to hit full throttle. MacDuff’s “Awake! Awake!” tears through the preceding calm. It’s a bit of a pity there aren’t more moments like this one, where a kind of perverse excitement spills forth. Kurzel’s got a cast more than capable of sound and fury. Occasionally he under-eggs them.

Or perhaps it’s that landscape again, making all else seem puny. Talking after the film, Kurzel says he began to see his adaptation as Western inspired. This will hardly be the first impression most viewers get from what is, on the surface, a straight medieval adaptation. The influence is rather in the way his players are “isolated and brutalised by their environment.” The landscape is more than a breathtaking prop, then. It has a will and a darkness all of its own. Kurzel is canny in drawing it out, too. He’s not some gawky eyed tourist shoving his camcorder up against the coach window. Skye plays its part, as do Applecross, Ely Cathedral and Bamburgh Castle. The sum of this film’s parts – location, cast and source material – are formidable in and of themselves. Kurzel, with a nimble and sure hand, has pulled them together into something yet greater.