Julie Taymor's dark fantastic play-to-film adaptation of William Shakespeare's most fantastic play, 'The Tempest', has completed filming. One of the major twists? Helen Mirren stars as 'Prospera', a feminized version of the dark sorceror in the original play. Taymor directed the extremely gory and dark Titus, starring Anthony Hopkins, from Shakespeare's 'Titus Andronicus' in 1999 to critical acclaim and amazement.
In Shakespeare's fantastical thriller 'The Tempest', the magician Prospero orchestrates spirits, monsters, a grief-stricken king, a wise old councillor, two treacherous brothers and a storm at sea into a fantastical conspiracy bringing banishment, sorcery and shipwreck into the lives of two hapless lovers to stir and seal their fate...
Here Prospero takes female form as Prospera, giving her journey of vengeance and self-discovery a wholly new resonance. As Prospera breaks her magical staff against an entrancing volcanic landscape at the end of her heroic quest, this poignant story of love and forgiveness translates into a riveting and filmic mystical tale, for our own times.
The film will be out in 2010 from Icon Entertainment.
