Macbeth (Drama / Completed)

The Melbourne underworld, present time.

Macbeth, a loyal henchman to his crime boss Duncan, is told by teenage witches that he will one day assume great power. Driven by their prophecy, he plots with his wife to kill Duncan, and takes the leadership of the gang for himself.

Maintaining his power will require more murders and violence, finally driving his surviving enemies to unite and destroy him.

Director: Geoffrey Wright

Writers: Adapted by Geoffrey Wright, Victoria Hill

Producers: Martin Fabinyi, Victoria Hill, Geoffrey Wright

Executive Producers: Michael Gudinski, Gary Hamilton, Greg Sitch, Antonio Zeccola

Production Companies: M Productions Pty Ltd / Mushroom Pictures / Film Victoria

- Official Selection, Vanguard

Australian Film Institute (2006):

- Won, AFI Award: Best Costume Design (Jane Johnston)
- Won, AFI Award: Best Production Design (David McKay)
- Nominated, AFI Award: Best Cinematography (Will Gibson)
- Nominated, AFI Award: Best Sound (Frank Lipson, John Wilkinson)
- Nominated, AFI Award: Best Original Music Score (John Clifford White)

Film Critics Circle of Australia Awards (2006):

- Nominated, FCCA Award: Best Editing (Jane Usher)
- Nominated, FCCA Award: Best Music Score (John Clifford White)

IF Awards (2006):

- Nominated, IF Award: Best Music (John Clifford White)

"Shakespeare's bloodthirsty Scottish warlords are transported to contemporary Melbourne, recent home to Mafia-style vendettas, tit-for-tat slayings and alleged police corruption, for Geoffrey Wright's Macbeth. The result makes for a good genre fit, casting the centuries old plot in a new light with suavely dressed killers, beautiful women and a steady flow of beatings, knifings, machine-gunnings and close-up garrotings."

"There's much to admire in this rich Shakespearean update... Sam Worthington (Somersault) is impressive in the title role... As his ultra-pushy trophy wife Lady Macbeth, Hill has a model's looks and catwalk strut... Gary Sweet (Duncan) and Lachy Hulme (Macduff) deliver classic quotes... while Steve Bastoni takes an impressive stab at the unwary kingpin Banquo."

"Wright has clearly given his technical team a measure of freedom and they repay him handsomely, with outstanding lighting and photography, gorgeously rich interior designs and rock-star costuming all coalescing to a glowing frenzy of blood, decadence and mayhem."

Matt Zoller Seitz, The New York Times:

"For four centuries William Shakespeare's plays have been reinvented to fit contemporary sensibilities. But few recent efforts can match the Australian writer and director Geoffrey Wright's brutal and thrilling new version, which envisions the thane of Cawdor as a longhaired, drug-addled gangster and his poisoned realm as a decadent MTV dreamscape of nymphet witches, smoky nightclubs and point-blank, slow-motion gun battles.

Laudably, though, this Macbeth isn't content to riff on Shakespeare's short and bracingly violent tragedy. While Mr. Wright's movie goes to great, often inventive lengths to tell the tale visually, it dutifully preserves great swaths of the playwright's verse and often ramps down its machine-gun-style editing and jittery handheld camera work to allow sensuous language and the cast's consistently imaginative, lively performances to take center stage."

"Mr. Wright - a former film critic whose debut feature, the powerful 1992 skinhead drama Romper Stomper, made a rising star of Russell Crowe - isn't just another would-be Quentin Tarantino, piling on gore and self-referential cuteness. He respects the visual power of killing. When Macbeth and other characters shed blood, the movie insists on showing how physically hard it is to murder a person, how the act corrupts and numbs the perpetrator and how it implicates those who watch (the viewer included). This Macbeth is one of the year's most violent movies, and every crimson drop is justified."

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