In a reunion longer in the making than Monty Python's, the original lovers from Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo And Juliet are reuniting on film for the first time in 46 years. Leonard Whiting and Olivia Hussey played the titular doomed paramours in the 1968 adaptation and have come together again to play Juliet's (here renamed Julia's) parents for a new project, Social Suicide.
The film kicked off filming in London this week. It is a loose retelling of Shakespeare's tragedy, taking the well-known tale into the digital age. After some suspicious murder/suicides of teenagers, the police trawl through endless information and videos from social media and security cameras, as well as interrogating survivor Balthazar (Maleficent's Jackson Bews) to discover the cause of the chaos.
It's directed by Bruce Webb (previously of The Be All And End All) and stars India Eisley as Julia. In a nice bit of serendipity and/or nepotism, Eisley happens to be Olivia Hussey’s daughter. She's the centre of the first still to be released - with smartphone ominously in her hand. Also in the cast is Doctor Who's Neve McIntosh as the detective in charge of the investigation.
The prospect of seeing Whiting and Hussey reunited will no doubt please movie buffs; the late Roger Ebert named their and Zeffirelli's version to be "the most exciting film of Shakespeare ever made". Mind you, that was in 1968, so it was before he got to see Mel Gibson's Hamlet or A Midsummer Night's Rave.
We have, of course, seen updated Romeos And Juliets before – most famously with Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet – but this promises to be a much looser version of the original text. Social Suicide will be released in early 2015.