Roland Emmerich Gets Ready to Tackle the Man Behind Shakespeare
Posted 02.25.10 by reelz
Roland Emmerich is not going to destroy the world … this time. No alien invasion, no ice, no cataclysms at all. No, for his next project the director of Independence Day and 2012 is going to get Shakespearean. The movie, titled Anonymous, aims to dramatize the theory that Shakespeare didn't really write all those classic plays. They were instead, in this version of history, written by the Earl of Oxford, Edward de Vere.
Shooting is set to begin in March, and he already has, as he puts it, "a true English cast" on board, with Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth, David Thewlis as the queen's secretary of state (and master of intrigue) William Cecil, and Rhys Ifans as the Earl Of Oxford.
And the plot, as in many a good Elizabethan drama, is all about the plotting. Emmerich sums up some of the twists and turns in an interview with Empire:
It's a mix of a lot of things: it's an historical thriller because it's about who will succeed Queen Elizabeth and the struggle of the people who want to have a hand in it. It's the Tudors on one side and the Cecils on the other, and in between [the two] is the Queen. Through that story we tell how the plays written by the Earl of Oxford ended up labelled 'William Shakespeare.
Don't worry, though. After he finishes this project, Emmerich is scheduled to return to his roots with an epic sci-fi flick about the collapse of galactic civilization. And he is planning to shoot that movie, Foundation, in motion-capture 3-D, giving him plenty of scope for his old world-destroying tricks.