“It has some very bold and specific choices”: director Timothy Scott Bogart reinvents Shakespeare with ‘Juliet & Romeo’
William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is one of the most heavily adapted works of all time, and somebody would have to travel pretty far to find anyone who isn’t aware of the story, even in its broadest strokes.
However, has it ever served as the basis for a musical that features original pop songs written for the screen by the Grammy-winning songwriter behind Beyoncé’s ‘Halo’? No, it has not. That’s where writer, director, and producer Timothy Scott Bogart’s Juliet & Romeo comes in, with the filmmaker putting a fresh twist on one of culture’s most well-known tales.
It hasn’t been the easiest road to the screen, though. Production wrapped in early 2023, but the movie won’t release in cinemas until May 9th, 2025. It’s been a long wait, and Bogart is thrilled that audiences will finally be able to see what he’s got in store.
“To finally be able to release after all this time is just absolutely exhilarating,” he said. “Our business tragically, and the world, just continues to be thrown these left hooks and these strange events. We were ready to go, and then we had the big strike with the unions, and we couldn’t support the movie. And we literally had to pause with the completed film for over a year while that strike played out. Then we have to find a new date again. You can never predict the unpredictable.”
The same month Bogart began principal photography on Juliet & Romeo, his previous feature, Spinning Gold, was released. A biographical drama about his father, Casablanca Records founder Neil Bogart, it was a curious experience to be working on a splashy period-set musical at the same time he was promoting a passion project that couldn’t be more different in every way, besides the musical element.
“The difference between my last film and this one certainly looks as if it seems extraordinarily different,” he agreed. “Although I would suggest that the approach to how important music is, and how music drives an audience, and how we all react to music, even though one is a very different kind of piece, I do think there are some similarities.”
“We were actually in the middle of mountaintops and craziness in the middle of Italy shooting this movie, and then we had to go to the premiere, and had to go back from Italy to the United States,” he recalled. “It was lucky to get anything made in this crazy independent world, it is unbelievable to be able to be in the remarkably blessed circumstance of making one movie while releasing another. I mean, that’s just too much to dream of. So I was touched beyond belief.”
With that in mind, it was fair for Bogart to experience some creative whiplash when he’d spent years developing a biopic about his old man, and then when it’s finally released and he’s going to premieres and promoting the film, there’s the small matter of a major musical based on an iconic story waiting for him on the other side of the world.
“I definitely felt whiplash between the two creative compasses that were going on,” he admitted. “One in 1301, but the other in the 1960s and 1970s. So they were certainly very different pieces, although much like us completing Juliet & Romeo and then having to wait for distribution, the same was true of Spinning Gold. So by the time we moved on to Juliet & Romeo, Spinning Gold was done and just waiting for it, but yes, going back and doing those interviews and those discussions while also figuring out what we’re going to do with our horses and swords and fire. It was bizarre. It was bizarre, but fabulous.”
If anything, the delay may have been a blessing in disguise. Bar the odd exception, movies with a heavy musical element have been riding the crest of a recent critical, commercial, and awards season wave, something Bogart hopes will play directly into his hands when Juliet & Romeo hits cinemas.
“I think that comment about the timing is so spot on,” he concurred. “It’s funny. I’ve been such a lover of musicals in general, and certainly musical films, my whole career. I’ve directed on stage. I just always loved this space. It’s always amused and frustrated me to hear the general reaction in the business of ‘Musicals are dangerous. Genre musicals don’t work.’ Well, like every genre, bad ones don’t work, ones that don’t necessarily reach the audience. It doesn’t mean they weren’t trying to work.”
Adding, “But you can literally look at every year and go, ‘Gosh, some of the biggest hits were, of course, musicals’, because it’s eventizing the experience. And today, more than ever, audiences want to have fun. I mean, look what’s happening with Minecraft. People just want to have fun again, and oftentimes, too often, we don’t make these things as fun, perhaps, as an experience for the audience as they should be.”
Spinning Gold originated in 1999 but didn’t land on the screen until 2023, and while it hasn’t been quite as long for Juliet & Romeo, Bogart has nonetheless been toying with the idea for a long time: “I remember when I was an actor. I was a stage actor. And I love musical theatre. And I remember very specifically, I was in Jesus Christ Superstar, playing Judas, and I had my big death scene where I’m up on the scaffold, and the director decides there should be 15 dancers in front of me.”
Elaborating, “I remember going, ‘That’s weird. Why would you do that?’ And they couldn’t explain why they wanted dancers in front of my death scene. And I remember thinking, ‘I need to do that job’. And literally, that was the last show I ever acted in. I immediately moved to be a director, and one of the first things I did as a director on stage was Romeo and Juliet, and I ended up directing the play probably four or five times.”
“As much as I adore the themes, and believe the themes are so relevant and resonant today, which is why I wanted to do it on stage, I did always feel that the borders around the text and the story that Shakespeare had crafted were a little thin for some of those characters,” he explained of the niggling feeling he couldn’t shake.
Bogart “always thought there was something else” that could be mined from Romeo and Juliet, and a conversation with his brother, the Grammy-winning Evan Bogart, about iambic pentameter of all things was the breakthrough he needed. “I said, ‘Why do you think Shakespeare used iambic pentameter?’ And it was very quick. He just said, ‘Because that was the poetry of that time.'”
What would be the modern equivalent? In Bogart’s mind, pop music was the only answer. As much as people think they know Romeo and Juliet, and a lot of them know it very well, it’s safe to say a pop musical is a fresh twist, and an approach the filmmaker was confident in taking.
Explaining, “It was really the approach of how music existed in these characters’ souls and how it became an inner voice, which I believe is a very different approach than what’s been done. But frankly, if you go back to West Side Story, right? They may not be pop music, but they took Romeo and Juliet and did that version as well. We’re in semi-familiar territory as a basis, and then we really took an enormous leap in terms of how we create the alchemy of all those pieces together. But it’s definitely different.”
Still, it’s Romeo and Juliet. On one hand, it’s a completely different take. On the other hand, Bogart acknowledged that there were certain moments when he felt daunted by not only adapting one of Shakespeare’s most famous and iconic works but also making it a musical with modern and original songs.
“I had those kinds of moments every day,” he conceded. “From writing to shooting it to posting it, I would continue to go, ‘What on earth are we doing? Does it make sense? Does it ultimately work?’ Because it has some very bold and specific choices.” One memory in particular stands out, which embodied the juxtapositions at the heart of Bogart’s film.
“I was always striving for authenticity, yet I said, ‘Now break into song’. Or, ‘Now you’re on a horse, and now break into song,'” the director reflected. “So those moments of such authenticity jarred with a guy on a horse singing. It absolutely made me pause multiple times. I always felt we were onto something, because I would look around, and I always play music on my sets, but on this movie, every day. To look around at a bunch of, you know, 56 Italian men singing the songs, I just kept thinking, ‘We’re onto something.'”
Speaking of the songs, Bogart is the first to admit it helps having a Grammy-winning songwriter for a brother. “I’d always joke that I’ll spend years on a screenplay, and he’ll walk into a studio and two hours later walk out and go, ‘That’s called ‘Halo’. How do you do that so quickly?”
As for the process, the creative team wanted the tracks to stand independently as individual pieces of music but still fit seamlessly into the world of Juliet & Romeo, which Bogart likened to working in TV. “It was not terribly dissimilar to a writers’ room in television,” he explained.
“We had songwriting rooms. I would move from one room to another, going, ‘In this scene or in the church, I want this kind of thing. This is what they’re feeling in another room. We want this kind of thing’. So we would go back and forth, literally for years, crafting the architecture of the songs themselves. Then we had to cast them and do that pre-record all so that we could do live capture on the set.”
Bogart’s mantra was that every song “has to play like a radio hit.” Thanks to a “startlingly brilliant” job by his sibling and his writing partner, Justin Gray, the filmmaker got what he wanted. Of course, casting is one of the hardest parts of any musical, but Juliet & Romeo wasn’t beholden to hiring performers with a proven set of pipes.
The ensemble includes Clara Rugaard and Jamie Ward in the title roles, with support from Jason Isaacs, Rebel Wilson, Rupert Everett, Tayla Parx, Rupert Graves, and Shakespearean legend Derek Jacobi, among others. The roster includes veterans, newcomers, singers, actors who can sing, actors who can’t or won’t sing, Broadway staples, and esteemed stage icons, and casting was always key.
“If you don’t get casting right, there’s just no way back,” Bogart said. “Like, if you mess it up, no matter what you do, you can’t come back. So casting was always crucial, absolutely.” That led the director down two paths: one to recruit the younger members of his ensemble, and another to bring in established names, which required a lengthy audition process and a couple of Hail Marys.
Bogart wanted “fresher faces” for his two leads, but when Rugaard and Ward tested opposite each other, he knew. “I said, ‘Oh my god, that’s them,'” he remembered. “The casting for the younger folks was a worldwide search, and just endless auditions and incredible workshops.” For his Lady Capulet, he went straight to the source.
“It was like, ‘I have a crazy idea,'” he told Wilson. “I want to do a Lady Capulet that no one’s ever done before. I want to understand her as a mother and what she went through. I have this incredible song. And Rebel just listened to the song, and was like, ‘I get that’. So many opportunities were like that.”
Isaacs, who’d worked with Bogart on Spinning Gold, was an easy get: “I literally said, ‘Jason, I need you in Italy on this stage’. He’s like, ‘Whatever you want.'” Recruiting Jacobi, a knight of the realm and one of the finest Shakespearean actors of his or any other generation, was slightly more surreal.
“I kept talking about, you know, ‘We need someone like Derek Jacobi,'” Bogart said. “And then one of his agents said, ‘What about Derek Jacobi?’ And he sent it to him, and the first thing I said was, ‘Make sure he knows I want him to rap’. Which is a very strange thing to ask Derek Jacobi, so it was unique to each character, but each one was so consequential to the overall tapestry.”
As mentioned, Juliet & Romeo is Bogart’s second consecutive feature with Isaacs, and the actor went on record saying the filmmaker has “balls the size of planets” for even daring to make an original musical inspired by Romeo and Juliet, an endorsement that Bogart was thrilled to hear.
“I love that quote,” he laughed. “Jason played my grandfather [Al Bogatz] in my last film. We became such good friends, and I just loved his craft. I loved the way he worked. Every morning I’d arrive on set and he’d hand me, like, five pages of rewrites that he did, but they were always brilliant, and I was always like, ‘The scene can’t be ten minutes, Jason’. So we would end up shooting these long things because he had such great contributions, and then ultimately have to edit it later!”
Even though he’d worked with Bogart before, Isaacs still wasn’t entirely prepared for what he discovered on the set. “When he arrived in Italy, I don’t think he knew what to expect. And on the first day, he suddenly arrives at the castle, and there’s this 400-person crew, swords and thousands of costumes. I don’t think he had an idea of how big it was gonna be.”
Having previously mentioned how authenticity was paramount despite the movie’s status as a pop musical, it was non-negotiable for Bogart to shoot as much of Juliet & Romeo as possible on location. “We don’t have a green screen in the film,” he proudly stated. “It doesn’t mean there aren’t a couple of visual effects shots, but nothing was designed to enhance the world.”
“Going into a soundstage would have been the antithesis of every reason I wanted to make the film,” Bogart declared. “And I knew I was going to make this enormous leap when people started singing their feelings. So everything else has to be so grounded. And the only way, in my opinion, to do that was to do it for real, and the only place to do that was Italy.”
If a pop musical inspired by Romeo and Juliet doesn’t sound unique enough, what about an entire trilogy of pop musicals inspired by Romeo and Juliet that draw influence from one of Hollywood’s most beloved and iconic franchises? It sounds crazy, but that’s exactly what Bogart has in mind for his planned second and third instalments.
“If our first film is Star Wars, then yes, we’re following to The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi,” he confirmed. “There’s a lot of story to tell between 1301 and 1303. I can’t reveal how it all ends and whether you’ll be happy or sad at the end, but there are a lot of journeys still to come.” As a marketing hook, The Empire Strikes Back meets Romeo and Juliet basically sells itself, with Bogart citing George Lucas as one of the film’s major influences.
“I’ve always loved that idea, but I always thought what George did so brilliantly is understand how to plant the world and then how to start turning the screws on those characters,” he concluded. “And I may sound silly, but I really use that as an arc for me, in terms of what I thought was so brilliant. Look, he was doing a lot of Hero’s Journey from Joseph Campbell, but I think there was a lot of brilliant architecture there that, yes, if you’re gonna steal, steal from brilliance.”
