Romeo and Juliet with Smartphones: Editing a New Visual Language for Shakespeare

Romeo and Juliet with Smartphones: Editing a New Visual Language for Shakespeare

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Brie Clayton April 9, 2021

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Inspired by a 2015 Skype accident involving a woman who forgot to stop sharing her screen, Russian producer Timur Bakmambetov had a breakthrough moment. That day, his Skype presenter obliviously texted friends in one area of her screen while making an online purchase in a side window, unaware that her audience could still see what she was doing. Timur found himself thinking I'm inside her brain , and that's when he connected the reality that people live entire lives on screens to filmmaking itself. Thus, a new cinematic experience was born: Screenlife.

Fast forward six years from the initial idea, and the latest project from Timur's Bazelevs Productions puts a further twist on digital social lives in the film R#J, or Romeo and Juliet'.

Marrying Screenlife with Shakespeare is the brainchild of director Carey Williams. He needed a brave, open-minded editor with a familiarity for the concept to flesh out his vision, and found that in Lam Nguyen, who received the SXSW 2021 Adobe Editing Award for his work on the film. (Williams was also nominated for the NEXT Innovator Award at Sundance for his direction of R#J.)

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Winner of the Adobe Editing Award at SXSW this year, Lam Nguyen, editor of the Screenlife romance R#J'

In Romeo and Juliet's Screenlife, scenes happen as live-streams and video chats, overlaid by scrolling comments, incoming texts and push notices. The suspense of pending replies from lovers, family, and friends appear in dotted thought bubbles. Both basic decisions and passionate emotions are funneled to the digital display in the hands of either Juliet or Romeo. The relentless instantaneous communications that would have overwhelmed the Elizabethans is now the recognizable language spoken by all teens.

Creative COW was able to catch up with Lam Nguyen, the wizard of R#J, once he settled in from his festival circuit. We were honored to speak with the SXSW winning editor to learn what made R#J work, and his thoughts on this new cinematic style.

Has the pandemic made the film festivals experience tough?

I thought they did a great job putting the festivals together. I wish I had the in-person experience with Sundance and SXSW as my first experience with festivals, but I thought the virtual experience turned out well, because they allowed a lot of my family, friends, and other people that weren't able to travel, to get a chance to buy a ticket and see the film anywhere.

And at least with this virtual experience, everyone could see all these films. I feel like that might be the future, where they just merge the two (experiences) together to give people the opportunity who can't travel to still get to see these films.

How did R#J, the Romeo and Juliet project come to you?

Based on the success of Searching' and Unfriended', Bazelevs Productions had all these different types of genres and ideas for the format. So, I was doing a bunch of proof of concept trailers for it, and then they presented this Romeo and Juliet' idea to me.

They said Hey Lam, we think you'll be a perfect fit for this project, it's a remake of Romeo and Juliet for modern day, but it's told entirely through their phones. I was really questioning it at first, like wow that's a huge challenge, not just because of the classic to remake, but also the format.

So they introduced me to director Carey Williams, and we just kind of brainstormed the idea of his vision. We decided that we could really make this cinematic, and make it work. We spent a good four or five weeks on the proof of concept and made it visually work, and presented it to the producers, and then it was green-lit.

Did you have to re-create all of the social media screens from scratch?

Initially we did a pre-viz with all the story boards and all the templates. I would screen record a snapshot from my phone, and I would put in the edit, and then I worked with the graphics team. They had to redraw everything from scratch to high-res. Everything was pretty much re-created.

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