>> rose: welcome tour programto. we bring you another episode in our series called "why shakespee" talking to liev schreiber, scholar jim shapiro and filmmaker kenneth branagh. >> otherwise it becomes a musty, dusty, book on the shelf, a cultural artifact, something to be referred, department constant from, something we're told is good for us, and, instead, to discuss, talk, to debate, to dismiss, to trash, to, you know, passionately evoke words, charters and lines whatever. >> rose: "why shake peer" forth. >> funding for charlie rose was provided by the following...

captioning sponsored by ro communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: samuel tailor coldridgt wrote of all of shakespeare's plays mcbeth is the most rapid, hamlet is the slowest in movement. tonight as part of our charlie rose series "why shakespeare" we examine two masterpieces, mcbeth and king leer. first we talked to liev schreiber who played mcbeth in shakespeare in the park in 2006. then rim jim who has an upcoming back called king leer,

shakespeare. we conclude our conversation about shakespeare with kenneth branagh, and kenneth branagh has directed and started in numerous shakespeare films including hamlet and henry v. >> under my battlement. come. tendon mortal thoughts. unset me here and fill me with the crown full of direst

cruelty! take of my blood, stop the accessing passage to remorse that no shape of nature takes nor keep peace between the effect d it. come to my woman's breast and take my milk. you murdering menace are forever in your site. come. take and pull thee in the dunnest smoke of hell. thy king seen not the wound nor heaven peek through the blanket of the dark and cry! >> tell me about you and

shakespeare. >> i got lucky. >> when you were a you aspiring actor? >> yeah. in school i studied classical theater because i thought no one else would ever possibly be interested in this and i had heard how competitive acting was and i felt it was a niche thing. i would be a small fish in a big pond. >> now you're a fish in every pond. >> i don't know what it is. it started with my mother ading to me. very earlyon, my moer reading shakespeare to me and i just took to i >> do you leap at every opportunity, assuming that it fits your schedule, assuming that it fits -- >> assuming it fits my schedule, absolutely. >> have you had a performance

where, you know, the famous story about lawrence olivier where he was so brilliant and he a seed larry was so good an and he said, i can't he, i know, but i don't know why. have you had one of those nights or days in a shakespearean character where i felt i just nailed this like i will never nail anythg again? >> you know, i'm trying to think of howo answer that. because, yeah, i mean, i have had those experiences on stage but oddly enough, for me, i think that the times i feel the most excited about what i'm doing is where it's taken on an energy i haven't experienced before or it's taken on something that i don't understand completely. in other words, when the amalgam occurs of text, audience, and

focus, there's a chemical reaction that occurs for me when you have done all of your homework and you're in a relationship with the audience and the other actors on stage and suddenly this thing takes on a life of its own and it begins to function without your intellectual thought, then it's very exciting and i think then you start gettin into surfing metaphors. >> i was goingo say then you're in the groove. >> yes. and that feel single real thriing. because it's exhausting. there's nothing more exhausting than half hour before curtain on a ow you have been doing eight shows a week r two months. i can't believe i have to do this part again and say these words again. but there's something strange that happens. there's an alchemy that when you begin to work, an energy that forms between you, the audience

and the other actors and not ohm the play right but the history and continuum of the play that is incredibly energizing and powerful to be part of. >> this is such an easy question but i want to know the answer so i will ask it. so how do you get ready for a shakespearean play? mcbeth for one? let's just take mcbeth? >> well, i like to -- i have -- obviously there's physical and vocal warm-ups i do to get my voice ready because it's a wrong night of talking and with shake spear it's generally a longer night of talking. and also to be limber because, you know, you're going to be moving out there and you want be -- you want your body to be limber and receptive. but for me, i also am really into this thing, i think i told you out before, which i call a kind of ritualization which is, i drink a toast to my andfather, and i make sure i'm looking intohe mirrornd i say -- this is going to sound

incredibly sentimental and i don't know what i told you last time that i say but i say i love you alex, which is just something i say to my grandfather. and i will tell you why. beuse when my grandfather died when i was 27 years old, it was one of the most powerfully emotional things that i ever experienced and it was kind of kind of motion that made me think about it for weeks. so when i'm toasting him i'm not only thinking about someone i care about but i'm evoking an emotional power that is beyond me. in other words, my emotional reaction to my grandfather was consuming and i couldn't control it. and i'm hoping that that happens to me again on stage. >> so you are acally revisiting that moment and hoping there's a transference from that moment to the moment

you're about to begin? >> i'm going to go even further and say i'm invoking, i'm invoking the power of that emotion to serve me for this play and this character. and in particular with mcbeth. that was a very powerful one. because the most powerful emotion that played for me and it's different for different actors but the most powerful emotion for me was the lost that comes to the end of act v of tomorrow, tomorrow, tomrow. because the ambitionof that belongs more t her. he kind of follows along sometimes -- >> the ambition or lady mcbeth. >> yes. he certainly has ambition but i think she plays that card more beautifully than he does. but one thing he does that really struck me wheni read the play and every time i see it, that really struck me as quite moving, was that, all of this

for what moment, that happens after she dies. and he said, why, why i am i here and why did i want to be here and what have i done to my life and my wife. >> i get emotional thousand thinking about that moment in the play. that to me was the most powerful moment of the play, so that little revisiting of the memory with my grandfather, not that i'm a method actor at all a much as i admire it, i never really felt like it served me well, particularly in shakespeare. >> has this -- has mcbeth been something lots of actors,if you canvas many of them, have tried, and found out, i just can't get there in the end? >> no. >> it's not? >> no. i think it's a part aors love to play. it's one of the quickest

shortest most lucid of all of the parts. actors love mcbeth because it is so lucid and it's relatively quick. but he is so evil, does that make it easy? >> you think he's evil? i don't think he is evil. >> how many people does he have to kill for you to characterize him as evil. >> well, he he is murderous. >> that's not evil? >> i don't know. >> what is his redeeming value? mcbeth? guilty? >> to me, tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. it's incredibly beautiful. what is redeeming to me about mcbeth is a couple of things. and i think it's very important in these plays that you find what a redeemtive about your character because part of what makes this whole thing work is that you get the auddwroans jump on board with you for the right. if they think you're too evil or awful they're not going to come on for the right and not going to experience the play at the level they need to experience

the play in my opinion. so i think with mcbeth, it's that he is passionately and physically in love with this woman o is driving him and they're driving him tother and they're on a trip somewhere. and it is a murderous trip. we have to have a little context historically bust i think the depth of his emotion for her at the end after he loses her and his perspective and awareness and realization of how far off he has gone. >> i don't want to talk about mcbeth in the following way. the romance between mcbeth and lady mcbeth is it one of the great shakespearean love affairs? >> i think so. i would even like to take another shot at the play because i think there's more to be mined from that. >> see, that's great. is that because you have just been thinking about it or --

>> no, because these plays are so rich, you know, there's so much in these texts, you know, you can't possibly get anytime one pass. and i have done hamlet twice and mcbeth twice now and every time you approach the play, you approach it with a completely new perspective. >> the text in shakespeare, it's -- you knowhow much can you go off text in this? >> you don't go off text. that's what i love about it. >> you can't play around with the words. >> i find nothing more liberating in acting than structure. and -- >> inow exactly what you mean. >> do you? >> yes. structure is everything for me. i mean, this is not quite on target but it's close, in the ballpark great jazz musicians say they can be what they are

because they have a deep understanding of music. it allows them to be free. >> that's right. and that for me is the thrill of playing shakespeare, that you have a form. and once you learn that form and you repeat that form and you repeat it and repeat and it repeat and repeat it like you're playing classical music, suddenly something unlocks and it becomes something else and i haven't had that experience really with any other text. i have had glimpses of it, glimpses of it, true. >> but mamet would love the fact we're putting in a category of shakespee. >>ell ere's a format ma to his language and a rhythmic structure to his language that frees you. but i will tell you the other thing about it is, because you as actors are sharing that structure, it's the same thing you're saying about ja musicians. the reason we pla well

together, we ke all fall back in the same back view. we're all in possession of the same rhythm and that aows to us do wonrful things and retu to each other. >> take a look at th clips here and i want you just to talk about it. first is when lady mcbeth, who we have talked about this idea that lady mcbeth's ambition exceeded her us and he is the driving parts of the place. this is where she urges her husband to kill king duncan so they can be all they can be. here it is. >> i dare all to he who becomes a man. >> what beast made you bring this enterprise to me? to be more than what you were, you would be so much more the man than time and place here and yet you would make both? they've made themselves, as if

their fitness now does unmake you? i have given and know how tender it is to love the babe that milks me. while it was smiling at my face i would havebashed the brains out if you had -- >> if we should snail. >> we fail. but screw your courage to the sticking place and we will not fail. >> screw your courage to the sticking place -- >> i have given suc. that's good stuff. >> that's good stuff, isn't it? >> yeah. it's -- that scene, i think, is one of the most remarkably written scenes because what that comes off of is his soliloquy where he is trying to decide

whether or not he should do i it it -- that speech, it's all about structure and it starts, for well that it was done quickly if the consequence can catch what he sees success but this blow might be the be all and end all here -- this is a guy tryin decide wther or not to do do it. by the end he breaks down and you go into these elaborate lines. but this born had and like a newborbabe with the blast or on the siteless every tear shall dry the eye and i have no desire to prick the intent but leap

itself on the other -- >> and she comes in and goes how now, what news? but only voting ambition which folds on the other. >> how now, what news? as he is going down, she comes in and goes pow. >> how now, what news? >> right. and she goes, happy sup. and you're into this thing right away where i don't know if what i'm trying to express is how the structure of the text is not only articulating the ideas and the thoughts of the characters but also the nature of the relationship that she is propping him up and it's in the words that she's proppin hi up and she is pushing him towards this thing which he has lost all this air. all of the air has gone out of this balloon and that's how i think about that speech. the reason i was playing it for you that way is that that you can see, in order to do those lines you need incredible breath

because they're femininendings and go on too long so you run out of breath. when when you run out of breath it puts you in that place and makes you want to cry. it's the same diaphragmatic expression in your vocal cords that makes u want to cry. and she does that to him. shakespeare makes you run out of air and then she comes in, what now, what is news? that scene ensues and by the end of his speech nice not going to do it becau he is too scared. bust after the scene with her, you know he is going to kill can you know can. >> why did she commit suicide? why would she go insane, first? she was getting her way? >> that's a great question. but i think that the answer lies

in, a, the historical reasons why the play was written, which is about being commissioned by the grandchildren and saying this thing about mcbet and lady mcbeth and duncan, but i also think there's something about regicide being in that historical context the worst thgnyone could do. this. >> this is another monologue. this is mcbeth, is this a dagger? >>s this a dagger which i see before me? the handle towardy hand. come. . . let me clutch thee. i have thee not and yet i see thee still.

are not they sensible to feeling as to site? >> this is the other thing about lady mcbeth being mad is that -- >> being around crazy people. >> you know what we tend to do, contemporary feeder histories we look at these things and go could we justify this with contrary psychology. i think that's interesting to do that for the actor and also we have to remember part of what he is talking about in this play is, there's an incantation scene she does early on in the play and says, no you spirits unsex me now, which is basicallytake poe tevtion me. she is gone. and this and even sort of articulates tha in an interesting way because patrick

plays it as in he is really having that vision and that you could also play it in -- from contemporary psychological perspective of the vision of that dagger is him creating an image for himself of his own ambition, his murderous ambition, and that he personified that or created a physical image of a dagger and he can react with it as he decides what he is going to do. but i think the more exciting thing to do which patrick has chosen here is say that he is seeing things. >> and how did you play it? >> i tried to keep both things true. i think it's interesting, you know? i think mcbeth is more interesting because i think it also then makes it clear what the -- and we can relate to that because not all of us hallucinate profoundly but many

of us are driven by things. are driven by things we don't perhaps take the time to image oreference. here is tomorrow, tomorrow, from scene v. >> the queen, my lord, is dead. she should have died here after. there would have been a tim for such a word. tomorrow. be and tomorrow and tomorrow keeps in this place from day to day to day to the last syllable of recorded time. and all of our yesterdays have

acted fools, the way to dust death. out, out, brief candle. life is but a walking shadow, a poor player. and then iseard no more. it is atale told by an idiot full of sound and fur, signifying nothing. >> he is so wonderful. >> he is. that was really good. >> thatas amazing yeah.

i think i might have stolen somethinfrom him and i just realized that. this is why i watch every single actor. i always watch everybody else do it first but it's a beautiful thing he does in there, which is generally a lot of actors there's a assumption that tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow but what mcallen does there which is so beautiful that i think i borrowed is the idea that those things are a discovery after the first tomorrow, which really is a beautiful illustration of the kind of existential nausea the character is going through. in other words he finds out his wife is dead and he said she should have died hereafter, later, that would have been a bettertime, perhaps torrow? do you knowhat i mean? so it would have been a better time tomorrow. then he realizes the irony of that and how ridiculous this.

and tomorrow, and tomorrow. it's awful the same. and what have i done? what is my life about? it's just wonderful. because there's an immediacy when he discovers it and she should have died here after, tomorrow. and then oh, my god, no, that's going to be just like the next one and next one and next one as opposed to she shod have died here after. tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow creeps in this petty pace and then you're talking about tomorrow and the pace of life. but this way you're talking about her. and a man having a sudden epiphany about his life, and that's beautiful. >> rose: how did this changehim? >> it's like see into a vacuole. once she dies and he realizes

that he has got this curse of immortality on him, he realizes that this pursuit of everything that he has been after. it's so aimless in such a vicious circle and ere's no value in it. and he is no anymore and his life becomes a vacuum into what he sees himself fall. >>s that why, he perceives a moment of royce that that is the value of mcbeth? the goodness of mcbeth? >> absolutely. >> that he sees the error of his ways? >> he has that moment, to see. he sees the error of his ways yes but he also sees the futility of his existence which

is to say it is kind of futural and redundant. you might as well live a good life and love people while you have them because it is brief. and your candle will be blown out like that. there comes a day and you have not done those, if you have let other things inhabit that space, that life and when you lose someone that you love suddenly that becomes apparent: it could be a big question to the players why was he doing it, he was doing it for her and how could i justify that? because this sce he releases he is not doing it fornything because he has been taken away. >> thank y for coming. pleasure to have y. really. >> thank you. >> those wicked creatures yet d look well favored when others

are more wicked stands in some rank or praise. i'll go with them and those are twice her love. >> hear me, my lord. what need you 5 and 20, 10 or 5, to follow had a heart where twice so many have a command to tend you? what need one? the poorest things are superfluous. >> it's a great story. and the story shakespeare inherited is different from the story he wrote. in other words it was actually

another play. we know about it. it was staged in 1594. we know the gate receipts, the rival company called king leir. and it's about a king who does a love test for his daughters, divis his kingdom. >> and says you have to prove me while you're the most deserving. >> tell me how much you love. and he is think along he is going to play a fast and loose game to decide who his daughter is going to mary. that play ends happily. there's a lot of rough and tumble scrufl but in the end keeping lier is there and his beloved is by his side. the year before shakespeare writes his play, heoes to muggle street london, gets down to the local shop and sees the chronicle of king leer for

sale. he remembers it. it's a decade old. maybe it spurs him to retell the story. he does a complete gut renovation. imagine as a theatergoer remembering the other king leer. you go to the theater andt starts the same test, the love test, of the language is beautiful, the division of the quick tom and so much that goes wrong and this time there's a sub plat, a man name the gloster and we get king lee with his three daughters, t evil sisters -- >> and he has two brothers. >> little bit of that fairytale element of it, once upon a time there was a kg with three daughters. . . and it turns int the most seang apocalypc play anyone in that audience had ever seen or would say and in my opinion probably the brightest playever written. >> it's about being old, it's

about making choices, it's about -- >> it's about self knowledge and the price we pay for self knowledge. the two great protagonists, king le and gloucester in the sub plot, pay too terrible of a price for sub knowledge. >> his daughter, cadelia tells him the truth, i'm saving part of my for miss husband to be. i'm not going to tell i love you as much as the others will. and he, rather than understanding that finest tribute -- >> love is a hard tng to get right and shakespeare really understands that in this play and father daughter, father son love is hard to get right and this play rips those relationships apart. it's a play about misunderstanding and self understanding and to the great climax is king leer and

gloucester on the heath, gloucester blind leer mad and they have this blind because. >> becau his son has betrayed him, evil or bad son edmund and he has saved leer and sent him to dover to be rescu by his daughter car dolia and gloucester is caught, bound, and blinded on stage in one of the most brutal scenes, until 1962 when peter brook did it, no one thought to have an audience watch the blinding of gloucester, watch his eyes gouged out one after the other. so he has these bleeding puts and leer is mad and returned to sanity and they talk about the world. they talk about social justice and children and talk about understanding themselves it's a play that goes to a dark place. when his daughter saves him and

brings him back from this madness, he speaks about now wanting to come back to the world. it's too painful. i'm bound upon a wheel of fire, to scald like molten led. the play should end happily but shakespeare turns on the yudience. >> why did he do that? why did he not let her. >> when leer enters with a dead cordelia on his arms, i hope as a theatergoer this time it will be different. and leer says look, she lives, she lives -- he has to or wants to believe that he can make amends. and he says look there, look at her lips at the eastbound of the play and there are two theatrical conditions.

one says leer thinks she is alive and the other, the harsher i like is here is a man that has suffered as much as any human being can and he has been brought from as high, ruler, to the lest level and he points to that little nothing, as leon and cordelia comes back and he is trying to tell her something, that this is all there is, the love between a father and daughter and she is dead and it's a hopeless and bleak and cruel ending which must have shocked people who expecte his kingdom to be restored. >> why did he do it. >> heas already written a superb tragedy, hamlet, before leer and written romeo and juliet.

he knows how to create great tragedy but how do you create a tragedy that is even more powerful and profound? i think you actually have to take atory and turn it inside out and shock your audyepses in ways tha they cannot imagine and it's brutal and actually quite cruel. and the great directors like peter brook for david pharr have caught that bleak and brutal ending. >> hue would you define the contribution of shakespeare? >> this is a man, a cultural icon, who not only shaped a explained his own culture to himself but for the last 400 years explains cultures around the school. half the people in the world now study shake spear which is extraordinary and productions of this was play are a kind of litmus test for where we are today. they really hold a mirror up to our society.

shake peer is relevant today because. >> he is relevant because his plays are of their thyme. ben johnson was right about that but somehow have slipped their time and he was a good enough listener and a good enough story teller to speak about the kinds of political and cultural contradictions that still we get up. >> we're going to look now at some scenes here and have you talk about it and why it'so appealing. the first one is from act i scene i as we talked about. roll tape. >> now, our joy, although are lost and least, two whose young love the vines of france milk of burgundy strife to be interest, what can you say to george iii

more up than -- speak? >> nothing, my lord. >> nothing? >> nothing. >> you know, it's grainy, it's a little black and whitish and i think it captures the way in which leer and cor delia are speaking past each other as only parents and children can. nothing. nothing. nothing comes of nothing. it's that word set in emotion that is going to reverberate through the play. there's a musical quality to shake peer's plays and there are ways in which, in the opening mean ands there are words that are released and it's going to haunt that relationship from

beginning to that last moment when leer points to the other daughter. >> here is act 2 scene iv as leer confronts them. here it is! what need one. >> oh, it's superfluous. allow nature no more than nature needs! man's life is as cheap as beasts thou art a lady, if only to go on are gorgeous when nature needs not what keeps thee warm but for true need all heaven's give me patience. patience i need you see me hear

you gods, a poor old man asull of grief as age, wretched i both, yet it be you that stirs these daughters' hearts against their father, fool me not so much to bare it tamely. touch me with noble end, and then water drops stain a man's cheeks, no you unnatural hags! i will have such revenge on you both that all the world shall -- i will do such things what they

are yet i do not know but they shall be the terrors of the earth. >> wow. >> what i love about that scene is it works two ways. these daughters are a chip off the old block and leer doesn't realize thatheir cruelty tee, that coldness, their inability to love is a function of their father and at the same time, he is cracking up under the pressure of realizing -- >> the third scene, i n't want to mike sure we get them all together. next is the duke of cornwall and you seehe gouging of the eyes. here it is. >> hi. >> what will you do? >> come, sir. what made you late from france.

>> from whose hand would the lunatic king speak. >> we know the truth. >> sent the king to dover wherefore to over. >> wherefore to dover. >> because i would not see his poor old nails pluck out his eyes. see it, thou shall never [screaming in pain] >> one side will mark another. >> out.

>> they blacked out there, when that was done on stage by peter brook in the version that inspar that film, everyone in the theater got to witness that scene and to this day, everyone shows that now. you don't have leer with his back turned or gloucester with his back turned to you. that is just man's inhuman tee to man right there in that scene >> it is unbearable to watch ane unbearable. it's in the middle of the battle scene where edgar leads the blind gloucester and she says i have to sit you down for a moment and i have to go off. and he sits there and there are battle noises going on around him, and it is the end of the world. a blind man sitting on a battlefield not knowing his fate and just hearing the concussive noises around him, and that,

too, is part of shakespeare's brilliant of strategy, having characters just quietly responding and not speaking and gloucester's silence speaks well. >> next is where leer is la manhattanning his daughter, ka teala degrees death. here it is. >> no, no, no. no lies. why should a dog, horse or rat have life who thou breath at all? th will come no more never, never, never will you see this.

look on her. look, her lips. look there. >> i'm usually weeping at this point in the play. so one of the questions that i love to ask really great actors is, how do they do those five nevers. and every great actor a beer or two later will tell you how they try to make the arc of those never, never, never, never, never to convey really the entire spiritua journey that leer has gone throh, at least up to that look there, look there, and the greatest ones mr. carryou with them. >> reporter: you just hang onth.

never, never, never. and it's also shakespeare, just take that word and let it echo again and again in the hands of thgreat act were a slightly different inflect shen every time. >> thank you. >> thank you, charlie. lovely talking to you about this. >> i hate the moore. and this abroad which 'twixt my sheets and i know it not to be true but i with suspicion in mind will do as if for surety. >> he holds me well, i better show my purpose work on him. >> when i sayto you "why shake

spear" what do you think? >> i think it's an important question. i think to say i is to keep shakespeare alive basically because i think it needs to keep being answered by which i mean you haveto, either through example of it whi is thrilling and wk, explain and persuade children why they should be interested to read his plays or hear about him, and unless you do that, i thk that shakespeare doesn't live in the way that his best realization does when he has performed, when he has spoken aloud, when those characters are 3d, otherwise it becomes a musty dusty book on the shelf, a cultural artifact, something to be referred, kept constant from, something we're told is good for us and, instead, to discuss, to talk, to debate, to dismiss, to trash,

to, you know, passionately evok words, characters lines, whatever, and to be reminded of how pertinent and how contemporary -- shakespeare is is -- a book upon which a tran scentent rendition of midsummer night's dream ush arerred in a new era of doing shakespeare and the way shake spear was performe so why shake spear has to be asked to we can continuously view his play right's work. >> will you come back. >> i will. and i find i read the plays more than i ever did. i in find myself as bedtime reading the other night king john. i play i do not know well. and it is extremely pertinent. if you read king john right now

and you're going to public up the debt crises. >> tell he how someone named william shakespeare to could that and no one has been able to do at well as that. what you're asking about are the simple but profound questions and they are pro fund. it seems such a delicious disprik irony so that shakespeare offers illumination on every part of the human condition resists analysis of himself as a character. we might have, i think, 23 single pieces of evidence about him in the public record office. they do not constitute a biography. as a result, the flash between scholars, the outrage that someone who we don't even know had a grammar school education, don't even know where the eridition and scholarship

records in the plays could have come from. where did he get the books? the mystery about around shakespeare is one of the most important things around him. it means you keep asking -- >> youever zeped the idea he was someone else. >> no, i have not. i'm a working class irish boy so the fact that somebody who, through power of the imagination and through awe -- around 1800, with the growth of the row unanimoustic movement, the idea that great writers had to be tormented geniuses with classical educations is a modern idea. so if you also assume, which is a dangerous assumption that all write single auto bog fell, the plays invite you to put the information together and say therore he must be the head of oxford because he was in sisilly at the time he wrote that. that's a wonderful detective hunt but ain't the truth and you can feel around w shakespeare,

who, what for, there's a tantalizing passion for understanding really in asking those questions, what youe asking is tell me about the nature o genius? could it be explained by fact offer circumstance? it bngs up nature and nurture? did he arrive with a lot line to god? was he that once in a generation or once in a millennium artist who was existed from the word go and go he acquire it or i there a mystery we will find out he was someone quite other. >> you did full text of hamlet. >> yes. >> why did you do that? >> i did it because i wanted to celebrate every single word that we think that he had written in regards to that play partly to set up other arguments, why

didn't you do the bad quarter, whe polonius is called carambus and hamlet said there is the lubb. well, because when the full version comes together it seems to me that it wraps up the process of living as an individual human being and talks abounature of reality and looks at politics and the map of europe in ay that makes it seem to me the most -- piece of entertainment that is essential to achieve and it's a page-turning ghost story, so something that contains the greatest and profound observations in the english language begins with the simple words, who is there? >> the central thing that i he am trying to achieve here in

asking why shakespeare and lookg at all of these plays is looking at different actors that play the dirk roles, hamlet or leer and not say this is better an that but this is the greenious and great joy of theater. you think see different people with different life experiences bringing something different to bare to something that was of the same. >> yes i agree with that wholeheaedly and i never feel proprietary annual, how can i about the films i have made. you never listen to your favorite song once. you will listen to it again. it will strike you differently at different times in your life. you never listen to beeoven similar phone owe i understand. something will respond uniquely to each performance and the audience it plays to and that, when you say why shakespeare, is partly why we do it. because i will live anew, again,

refreshed that that moment of time and it needs to be done then and only then and those republican record and film have wonderful value and great import, but shakespeare, the why of it is because he here and because he isow. thank you, sir. good to see you again. >> thank you. captioning sponsored by rose communications captioned by media access group at wgbh access.wgbh.org