Fassbender, Cotillard breathe new life into Macbeth

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One of Shakespeare's most cinematic tragedies, Macbeth, famously filmed by Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa and Roman Polanski, would seem ideal for the modern era of computer-generated effects: bearded witches that disappear in the air, a ghost at a banquet seen by only one man and even an apparent walking forest of ten-thousand soldiers camouflaged by the tree branches.

The surprise about Australian director Justin Kurzel's adaptation of the play, the last film screened in this year's Cannes competition, takes exactly the opposite approach. This intimate drama, starring Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard, scuttles the metaphysical horror of Shakespeare's tragedy and cheap-seat thrills in favour of an almost modern psychological approach. Kurzel and the writing team of Todd Louiso, Michael Lesslie and Jacob Koskoff, put their cards on the table with the movie's opening scene, featuring not the witches on the heath, but the funeral of Macbeth's toddler, complete with a funeral pyre, in the craggy Scottish winter landscape. Grief, not ambition, is the goad that drives the Macbeths.

While there's something reductive about interpreting Macbeth as a story of regicide as a marriage therapy, Macbeth mostly works, thanks to the emotional intensity of Fassbender and Cotillard's performances and Kurzel's stylistic economy. Soliloquies fold deftly into voice-over over montages, the dynamic shifts between brutal battles to intimate scenes of sickly tension. The sum is less a history play than a blood-hazed expressionist nightmare with a pounding soundtrack full of sound and fury.

In the press conference following the screening, Irish star Michael Fassbender (Shame, Twelve Years a Slave) said he had encountered Macbeth only twice before, once as a student and later at drama school. But it was not until preparing for the role that "it occurred to me that he was suffering from post-traumatic distress disorder, which Justin suggested to me in one of our first conversations. And that changed everything for me."

"We know from soldiers today coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan that they have these hallucinations. They can be walking down the street here, the Croisette, and the next thing, it's Basra.""

Director Kurzel said that, while he understood that Macbeth is typically thought of as a drama about ambition, Shakespeare's language is "very elastic" and, without having a pre-defined "concept" of the play he brought his personal experience to bear.

"I was really interested in grief, and what you do to replace something you've lost," said the director. "I've experienced that in my own life. I was very interested in how desperate you can be to fill a hole left by grief."

In acting the role, Fassbender said he wanted to tried to strike a balance between following a "what ain't broke don't fix it" approach toward Shakespeare's language, while "fileting what you can to stand within the vision that Justin Kurzel had."

"For me it's a story about loss," said Fassbender. "The loss of a relationship, the loss of a child, and the loss of their sanity."

Cotillard, speaking in French, said of her sympathetic portrayal of Lady Macbeth, which she described as the biggest challenge as an actress, playing a character who was "all gloom."

"She grapples with her fears and that turns her into a bit of a monster. There's a lot of love between these two characters but they're just too damaged to allow in anything luminous."

Of course, loss is highly personal, and Shakespeare purists may grieve for some of the Macbeth scenes the film excises, including the famous witches' incantation ("Double double, toil and trouble") and memorably disgusting cocktail, involving eye of newt, various other animal and human body parts, all chilled with a topper of baboon's blood.

In compensation, Cotillard bewitched and Fassbender charmed. Fassbender also offered some insight into another ancient Scottish potion.

Asked a question about the best and worst parts of shooting a film in the wilds of Scotland, Fassbender answered promptly:

"Whisky and whisky."