ROMEO AND JULIET - THE GREATEST LOVE STORYOF ALL TIMES
Since the invention of the motion picture in 1894, Romeo and Juliet has been one of the most popular stories in films. Numerous movies have been based on Shakespeare’s famous love
story, the earliest dating back to 1900. Many directors have taken this famous play and made it into
a film, trying to keep to the themes of the original story.
One of them is BazLuhrmann. His version of Romeo and Juliet, produced in 1996, has been
described as an original, post-modern version of Shakespeare’s tragic love story.
With this extremely successful film, Luhrmann has managed to update the story - by combining modern-day settings and characters with almost the original language. The story is set in
Miami. The changes in the language, together with dramatic gun fights and passionate love scenes, make the story more accessible to modern audiences.
In Luhrmann’s version of the film, the main characters, Romeo (Leonardo di Caprio) and
Juliet (Clare Danes), are Miami teenagers of the nineties. Even though the setting of the film is very unconventional, it contains all the themes of the original version, because it does not change the
story at all.