"In England you have had centuries when words are totally divorced from truth."
Vanessa Redgrave discusses the importance of Shakespeare in an interview with the filmmakers. A veteran of the English stage, Redgrave is here stressing the importance of finding the inherent truth behind the words, and echoing the intentions of Pacino and his collaborators. She shares his vision of making words come to life by unlocking the true meaning behind them.
"They’re not fancy words. That’s where we get confused. But they’re poetry. It’s hard to grab hold of some rap slang too. It’s hard to get hold of it until your ear gets tuned. You have to tune up."
Pacino is talking about how many people say that Shakespeare is hard to recite because the language is so different from how people talk in the contemporary world. Here he suggests that in fact the language is not rarefied or obscure, but poetic, and that one has to get used to the rhythm and meter of the language in order to get swept up in its meaning. In comparing Shakespearean verse to rap, Pacino finds a contemporary comparison as a way of making Shakespeare seem that much more accessible.
"It’s always been a dream of mine to communicate how I feel about Shakespeare to other people."
This statement is Pacino stating clearly his intentions and explaining why he has created this film. It is his belief that there is a gap between today's society and Shakespearean drama, that contemporary people misunderstand Shakespeare as dense and not for them. Pacino himself has a strong passion for Shakespeare, and a conviction that it can be understood and is relevant to contemporary audiences.
"A person has an opinion. It's only an opinion. It's never a question of right or wrong."
At one point, Pacino's collaborator, Frederic Kimball, gets frustrated with the fact that Pacino wants to interview academics about Shakespeare's work. He feels that theatre practitioners have all the tools they need to understand Shakespeare and is offended that scholars are being propped up as keepers of "the truth" in the documentary. In response, Pacino assures him that no one has access to the complete truth, that all the people he talks with, whether scholar or theater person, are just disseminating their opinions, their interpretations of something that does not have any one objective explanation.
"I'll have her, but I will not keep her long."
This line is one of Richard III's lines as he plans to woo the widow, Lady Anne. This line shows what a ruthless manipulator the character is, as he intends to seduce the young woman without any real intention to take care of her or "keep" her.
"What's this thing that gets between us and Shakespeare?"
This is another instance in which Pacino is trying to get to the bottom of why modern audiences don't connect with Shakespeare's texts. He wonders about the specific impediment that prevents contemporary audiences from connecting to the language.
"Intelligence is hooked with language. When we speak with no feeling, we get nothing out of our society."
Very early in the film, Pacino interviews a man on the street about Shakespeare. The man is not a scholar or an authority on Shakespeare, but he earnestly expresses his belief that words must be uttered with feeling, and suggests that Shakespeare connects people to their feelings and emotions.
"It's a movie about a play!"
Michael Hadge, one of the producers of the film, gets frustrated with the project at one point and complains to Pacino that they are simply making a movie about a play, and that that will not earn the attention of the average audience member. He worries that a movie about a play is not compelling.
"O sirs, consider: they that set you on/To do this deed will hate you for the deed."
This is a line from Shakespeare's Richard III that we see staged and filmed. In it, Clarence, who is about to be murdered by Richard's hired men, appeals to the assassins' sense of ethics and reason, imploring them not to kill him, given what it will do to their reputations and their sense of what is right.
"I want to be king already."
Towards the end of the film, we witness a meta-theatrical moment, in which Pacino, in a moment of frustration with how making the film is going, merges his desires with those of his character Richard. He complains to Frederic Kimball that he wants to stop making the film, but then he adds this line, suggesting that he simply wants to finish the play. Frustrated with the process of documentary filmmaking, he expresses his desire to disappear into the circumstances of the play. This is Pacino at his most actor-ly.
