By Gill Pringle at IFFAMacao, Twitter #gillianpringle
If Indian director Shekhar Kapur has made a career out of celebrating British monarchy, most notably in his two films about Elizabeth I starring Cate Blanchett, then he has no time for Stephen Frears’ Victoria & Abdul.
“I haven’t seen it, but would I have made it? No. There’s not enough for me,” argues Kapur, 72, who won multiple Oscars and nominations for Elizabeth and its sequel, Elizabeth: The Golden Age.
“I like to live on the edge a little bit in my own films but from what I’ve read about it, I felt it was perhaps too nice,” he says of Victoria & Abdul which today won a Golden Globe nomination for its lead actress, Judi Dench.
The feel-good movie tells how Queen Victoria strikes up an unlikely friendship with a young Indian clerk named Abdul Karim, played by Ali Fazal.
“My feeling is that maybe it [Victoria & Abdul) is not provocative enough, not like with Elizabeth where I started the first film with this idea that virginity wasn’t a fact; that virginity was a political move – so why did a woman have to say she was a virgin in order to rule? That’s what I wanted to know,” says Kapur whose favourite leading lady is undoubtedly Blanchett.
“I wanted to explore why men are asked to exaggerate their masculinity when they come into positions of power while women are required to get rid of their own sexuality. So, I took this idea that Elizabeth was not a virgin, but she had to say she was in order to be powerful. She knew that everybody looked up to the Virgin Mary, so she had to do the same,” explains Kapur chatting at the International Film Festival & Awards Macao where he is serving as Talent Ambassador.
With multiple projects in development including a biopic about Bruce Lee and a live musical show in Vienna about Empress Elisabeth of Austria – to be performed entirely in German – Kapur is no stranger to a challenge.
He longs to make a third Elizabeth film [Elizabeth: The Dark Age] with Blanchett. “The first two are actually leading toward the idea of divinity; you are a queen because you rule by divine right. So, Elizabeth I moved toward being divine which was the main reason she would not kill Mary of Scots because how could she kill another queen if she believed she ruled by divine right?
“I’ve always been fascinated by the thought that if you feel you rule by divine right, what happens when you’re dying? And it’s not just queens, it’s anybody, take for example Michael Jackson, who suddenly rises above people into a moment where they get a sense of their own divinity because nothing could convince them that they could be here of their own efforts; so, they feel there is a divine force working that makes them special.
“So now that you’re special – at that moment of death – you’re going to be very ordinary, so how do you work out the path between the extraordinary and the ordinary?” asks the director who is still working on a script to complete his Elizabeth I trilogy.
“Elizabeth, apparently, when she thought she was going to die, she stood up for three hours and wouldn’t sit down. I want to make a story about those three hours. What was going through her mind? How did she come to terms with death after being divine?” says Kapur who is currently directing episodes of TV’s Will, taking a fresh spin on Elizabeth I’s favourite bard.
“Shakespeare was a genius street poet,” he says.
But his greatest fascination remains with the British monarch. “I guess it was in my destiny. I’ve always preferred to tell stories of strong women. When you’re telling the story of a strong woman you’re actually exploring much more of the human spirit unlike the story of the strong man which mainly becomes fists, fights and violence which is very simplistic.”
