Juliet & Romeo Director Talks Musical Shakespeare Movie, Ending, & Sequel Plans | Interview
ComingSoon’s Brandon Schreur spoke to Juliet & Romeo director and writer Timothy Scott Bogart and the new Shakespeare musical movie. Bogart discussed his modern-day approach to adapting Shakespeare’s play, giving audiences a different ending, sequel plans, and more.
“Based on the real story that inspired Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, Juliet & Romeo follows the greatest love story of all time, set as an original pop musical,” the official synopsis reads.
Juliet & Romeo is now playing in U.S. theaters from Briarcliff Entertainment.
Brandon Schreur: I just kind of want to first ask, in general, if you can tell me a little bit about how this project came to fruition? You wrote the screenplay and you directed the movie; how long have you been working on this, and what did the process of bringing it to life look like?
Timothy Scott Bogart: The origin of it really goes back to kind of the origin of me, as a director. In my very much younger days, I was an actor, and I loved musical theater. I was always acting, doing musical theater. I remember very vividly the moment I changed course — I was in Jesus Christ Superstar, and I was playing Judas. I’m in the middle of my big, giant death number at the end, and the director decides they want to put 15 dancers in front of me while I’m doing my big death scene. I remember having a conversation of ‘Why? Why are we doing that?’ They didn’t really answer it. I remember, in that moment, going, ‘I need to do that job. I can’t do this job anymore.’ I literally changed my career trajectory after that show and decided I wanted to direct.
My first directing job was Romeo and Juliet on the stage — I ended up directing [Romeo and Juliet] four different times throughout my career, on the stage. It was always interesting when I was directing on stage — I adore the play, I adore the text, and I adore everything Shakespeare’s ever done — but, to be honest, you would find moments where you’d be like, ‘I just don’t think the grown-up characters or the parental characters are as explored as they should be, or this relationship between these characters.’ So I always felt that there was a lot of stuff left outside of the confines of what Shakespeare could fit in. As a director on stage, I always felt, ‘Gosh, there’s so much more here, and it’s so clearly relevant, I’ve got to figure out how to do this one day.’ That kind of just kept lingering.
Cut to ages later, I’m now making movies and television, and I was still struggling with it because I always thought there was something cool there. I remember watching Shakespeare in Love going, ‘Aw, I should have thought of that! Stoppard was brilliant, why didn’t I think of that!’ I kept trying to find an angle in.
Anyways, I remember seeing it with my brother Evan, who is a songwriter who wrote all the songs with his partner Justin Gray. I was wrestling with iambic pentameter, in general, thinking, ‘If I’m going to make a movie, it just can’t be iambic pentameter.’ I know that that’s crazy, it’s Shakespeare, but it’s tough to get through. Let’s be honest, it just is. I know we all go, ‘It’s lovely,’ and it is, but it’s vegetables. I remember asking my brother, ‘Why do you think Shakespeare did it in iambic pentameter?’ And so effortlessly, he just said, ‘Because that was the poetry of their time.’ That’s interesting. I said, ‘What’s the poetry of our time?’ and he said pop music.
Granted, he’s a big pop music writer, so, of course, he was speaking about himself, but he drilled down deeper and said, ‘Think about the young folks in this world. Think about kids who are 15, 16, or 17. They’re all listening to music, all the time. Not just to block out the world, but because it’s speaking to them. It is their poetry.’ That was really the leaping off point, and that was about 10 years ago.
I always laugh with my brother — when writing a script, directing something, or editing something, it takes [me] forever, and then he’ll walk into a recording studio and, like, three hours later, he’ll come out and go, ‘I just wrote Beyoncé’s Halo.’ How do you do that in three hours? It’s a different business. But crafting songs, boy, is that tough, and it took years and years and years. Any great stage musicals take years and years and years, not just for the screenplay or the play for the stage, but you work the songs forever and ever and ever.
I finally had my greatest revelation during all this period: Shakespeare didn’t come up with one single idea in the play. It’s all based on other source material. Seven different authors, who tackled this story over hundreds of years, going all the way back to historical records that show there were families of these two names, with these characters, at this time, in this place. Shakespeare based his play on source material. So, I started looking at all the source material, and there was so much more story to tell. It was the thing I had been searching for for practically my whole career. That really found it and launched it.
Sure. That’s so interesting. It sounds like it took a while to get there, too; I mean, working on it for ten years, I’m sure it was a long process to put it all together. How much of these ten years was spent doing research on that source material you mentioned?
I read every piece of literature you could ever find. I had to get translations in different languages. But I was still trying to find — you’re doing Shakespeare, so there are people, and we talk about this all the time, who are purists to that text. It’s a little funny, I think, sometimes, that people get frustrated about the purity of the text when, really, what Shakespeare has done is create material that’s meant to be adapted. If you look at Romeo and Juliet, it’s literally performed in every city, every state, every country, on every day, all around the world, but they are virtually all adaptations.
You look at something like Baz [Luhrmann], that’s Venice, California, not Venice, Italy. It’s cars, not horses, and it’s guns, not swords. Of course, that’s an adaptation, with iambic pentameter. Others are set in World War II, others are set on Mars. There’s something about those themes that I think Shakespeare meant to be reexplored and looked at. When you look at the canon of Romeo and Juliet, it’s all about exploration.
I always found the exploration was key, but I needed it to be a place that, if you are a purist, you get to the end of it and go, ‘Well, they didn’t do that and they didn’t do that, but I understand how they got there and why.’ I hope they can respect why we got there and understand that we’re paying homage and doing a love story to these themes, not disregarding any of it, because it’s crucial stuff.
That makes total sense, and I think you pulled it off so well, too. That jumps into what I was going to ask you next, one of the things you obviously changed about the movie is just the title. Instead of Romeo and Juliet, it’s Juliet and Romeo. Was the inspiration to help make it different and stand out from other adaptations?
So, it absolutely was, and yet, boy, titles are always tricky, but this is arguably the most famous title in literature. With the exception of the Bible, you’d be hard-pressed to find something more well-known than Romeo and Juliet. When I began, I always called the movie Verona, because I thought it was not just about this group of people, but a larger group and a larger context. The problem, when we were talking to other people about that, is that most people just don’t know what Verona is, don’t remember what it is, or they don’t make that connection. Then we started going down the road of, ‘It should be Romeo and Juliet.’ And I just felt like that doesn’t say anything about how our approach really is different.
We kept trying to find what says it’s Romeo and Juliet without saying it’s Romeo and Juliet. It’s the thing you think you know, it’s not the thing you actually know. And it was while working in editing and when I playing with the title of Romeo and Juliet — I happen to have the digital files on my computer — and I don’t even know why I did it, it wasn’t even intentional, but I somehow flipped the letters and suddenly thought, ‘If I brought it on-screen as Romeo and Juliet and then [flip it]…’ Without getting into any more detail as to why, it simply says that it’s more than you think. That, really, was what we were going for.
Of course, people will say — and there’s truth to it — that putting Juliet first is talking about it being a different approach to the Juliet character. And it absolutely is a different approach to the Juliet character for a thousand reasons. I think one of the biggest reasons, and it’s probably the thing purists of Shakespeare will argue with the most — I understand the argument, but I don’t necessarily agree with the argument — is the age. Many people will say, ‘Juliet was 13, he was 14.’ That may very well have been true, but it’s at a time in 1301 when lifespans were 30. It’s not the same 13 or 14 as you are today. Even in Shakespeare’s time, let’s say he’s writing in 1595 — as much as I adore Shakespeare, he didn’t have the same view of women in the world as we do in 2025.
Just trying to take the themes, without changing the period, but making them understandable, I think it’s totally appropriate to say, ‘What is young today?’ And I think our characters still are, for today. It’s entirely different than 1301 because we don’t live in that world. Talking to young people, they’re like, ‘We wouldn’t do that.’ So, we thought the themes are so important, they have to be embraced, but the distancing of some of those things, like age, [without it] would have made this impossible. I thought, in terms of adaptation land, and doing a different approach, I thought it was totally reasonable to understand lifespans were different, views of women’s rights in general were different, and this story should be different. If Shakespeare were writing this today, I bet you it would have been.
Oh, yeah, totally. And I’m sure that ties back into the pop music of it all because, like you said, that brings it to modern-day, it makes it for a 2025 audience, and I think that approach is really cool. As far as the music and choreography go, it’s just really well done. Like, even if this wasn’t Romeo and Juliet and just a normal musical, I was still into it. Going off that, how did that process work for you? Making the music and choreography — you were working on this for ten years, and I know a lot of people were involved, but did that part come first? Were you first making the music and building the story around it, or is it the other way around?
I was actually just talking to my brother yesterday about this. It’s so interesting because I really can’t find a direct comparison that approached it in the same way. I know every musical says, ‘We’re doing this kind of live capture’ or ‘we’re doing this kind of live thing,’ and those are all fabulous and true. But there was something different about our approach, though. What I mean by that, yes, we had to create pop music that can live by itself, on the radio, so you can be driving in the car and enjoy that. But that’s not what’s actually in the film.
I always say there are two kinds of musicals, and I really believe this. There’s the kind of musical where the milkman is singing. The milkman knows he’s in a musical, and his cow knows he’s in a musical. It’s so self-aware. That’s fine. It’s not my particular cup of tea or the kind of musicals I particularly love because I think it’s a little distancing. The other kind of musical, which I do think this is, is one where we’re really expressing the inner struggles, the inner feelings, the inner dreams and hopes as if it’s truly an inner monologue.
I always say that, when we meet Romeo and Juliet in the church, and they’re suddenly singing a big song in the movie called ‘Beat the Same,’ I don’t think that if we actually entered the real church, they’d be singing ‘Beat the Same.’ I think it’d be two young kids in the church, probably doing other things. The intention wasn’t that they’re really singing on a horse; it’s about how they feel.
Once I knew that was crucial, it couldn’t just be passive, ‘let’s create songs, put them in the bank, and when we’re ready to shoot, let’s do it.’ We have songs that play out over a 12-minute scene. I need the first verse to come in, that then becomes score, and it keeps adding, then it returns to song, then it goes back to score, it has to keep evolving. It’s not just, ‘Here’s a song playing in the background or even a song they’re going to dance to,’ it was so integral to the architecture of the whole piece. Because we were doing live capture as well, and because I knew how I wanted the music to integrate across the board, we’d be sitting there, on set, with my brother Evan and his producing partner Justin, on location with their mobile recording studio. We’d be like, ‘Oh no, it’s taking the horse six seconds longer to get from there to there, I need the song to be opened up by six minutes; guys, you’ve got 20 minutes.’ They’d be running back and doing that.
All of which only got to the place where we finally had a piece, then we had to figure out the orchestration of that piece around it. To the last moment, to the last delivery, it’s not just that music was there — there is no movie without the music, there is no music without the movie. And, at the same time, you could lift the music up and play it by itself. It was a fascinating experience. I’ve never done anything like that, my brother has never done anything like that. I don’t know anyone who’s done something as collaborative, where one had to absolutely inform the other at every step. I can’t imagine it any other way, now.
I’m sure. I think, I have to say, I loved all the music numbers, but I think my favorite was ‘I Should Write This Down’ from Dan Fogler.
I love that! I’ll tell you a funny story about that. Some of these songs were literally written 10 years ago, some were five or six years ago. ‘I Should Write This Down’ was not written when we shot. I knew we had the great Dan Fogler, whom I had worked with before. I had a wonderful character arc with him, and I knew what we were doing with the great Derek Jacobi. But I felt, because of the way we structured the movie — where, other than Rebel Wilson, who sings ‘Mask I Wear’ and it really feels like one of the other folks at the time — I really keep the songs away from the grown-ups and really let it be more of the language of the younger cast. And, suddenly, Dan Fogler and Derek Jacobi are going to sing a song.
Whenever I’m shooting, I have kind of a live edit going on, so I can see what’s landing. I felt there was a part of the storyline that wasn’t quite landing. I was trying to find where it could happen. But I also knew I had this great Dan Fogler and this great Derek Jacobi. What could I do? I remember walking to my brother and saying, ‘Evan, what we really need is our ‘Master of the House’ from Les Mís.’ If I’m going to do something with them, it needs to be the song we all wait for, and then we get to it — like, in Hamilton, when the king comes out, ‘You’ll be back,’ right? I felt, let’s go pure departure, and, therefore, it has to just be a balls-out showstopper. There’s the great Derek Jacobi, who I want to rap, and the great Dan Fogler. And there’s some choreography that we brought in. It really was kind of a piece of its own.
But, yeah, I literally went to my brother mid-shooting and said, ‘I have an idea for the song, this is what we want, we’re going to shoot next week, go.’ It was great that you loved it, I adore it so much.
That’s crazy, that makes it even cooler, really. That one was a lot of fun. We won’t publish this until after the movie comes out, which means we’re free to talk spoilers, so I do kind of want to talk about the ending because I do think that’s where you take the boldest, biggest swing. You write it so that they live. Can you tell me what went into that decision?
Absolutely. I will say, even for people who are seeing this after the movie has come out, there are two other films in the franchise, and in my story. It’s a three-film arc, ultimately. So where it ends at the end, I can’t promise you’ll be happy and I can’t promise you’ll be sad. So there’s more story to tell that may take us in different directions.
That being said, there wasn’t a single performance I directed on stage where I looked at the audience and couldn’t feel palpably that there were people saying, ‘I wonder if they live this time, wouldn’t that be fun?’ Like, they can see what the story is, the character says it in the opening lines — they’re going to die. So you’re watching it, but I do believe, when you do that show right, there’s a suspension of disbelief for a moment where people go, ‘Maybe this time. Maybe this time.’ I always thought, ‘Well. Maybe this time.’
Now, I think it is, like you said, an enormous departure, but when I went back to the historical reference points, what I discovered was that, again, Shakespeare based it on other material, which based it on other material, which based it on historical records. The only place historical records came from, at that time, was the church. The only character, at that time, who would have kept historical records, was the friar. Our particular story had a very specific desire for what was going to happen. The idea that the friar said, ‘Ok, if history needs to know that this is how the story ended, then that is what history will know.’ It will be placed in the church archives forever, which appears in our film. And that’s all Shakespeare ever would have had access to. He wouldn’t have known what happened next.
So, I felt, from a historical standpoint, nobody can say I’m wrong. Nobody can say I’m right, but nobody can say I’m wrong. More importantly, it allows for two things to happen: One, it allows for an audience who, the whole time, has been leaving that history at the door and going, ‘Gosh, I hope,’ it fulfils that for them because they’re caught up in this adventure. The characters, themselves, I think, which is probably a bigger departure than just to live or die, was the choice to kill oneself. Which Shakespeare did, it’s a very important, tough topic, a challenging topic, especially for young people today. And, yet, when you look at the ‘why,’ those two characters felt, in Shakespeare’s play, they had no way out. Our mission always was, in this story, there is a way out. It’s your way out. It’s your world. It’s your life. If that’s the story I was going to tell, I couldn’t revert back to that, because that would be completely inconsistent. So, once I made the choice of who I thought these characters were for this audience, today, their future was written differently, perhaps, than Shakespeare did, but perhaps not differently than the church did.
That’s actually so interesting. This could be the most accurate version of the story that’s out there.
It absolutely could. Nobody can say that didn’t happen. And, when you look at history, which is what our second and third film do — to track this incredible battle with the terrible Pope Boniface and his battle against the church and state — there are these fabulous characters like Dante Alighieri. All these fabulous, historical characters who would have been in this time, in this place, caught up in these events. That’s where our story ultimately goes, to the birth of all Italy and Europe.
Thanks to Timothy Scott Bogart for discussing Juliet & Romeo.
Source: Comingsoon.net