directing Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth

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From proposing marriage to actress Fanny Ardant to likening the character of Walsingham to a Krishna figure, Shekhar Kapur possesses a penchant for melodrama and poetry. "I love to throw actors into the deep end because the more nervous and uncertain they are, the more honest the performances."

Born in Delhi in 1945, Kapur has assumed a wide variety of roles, including becoming one of India's leading directors. Having directed mostly potboilers and curry westerns, he first broke into international consciousness with the searing and controversial Bandit Queen, a graphic account of India's famed outlaw Phoolan Devi. With the release of Elizabeth, Kapur is poised for international stardom and perhaps Hollywood, too. An engrossing and resplendent interpretation of the young woman's rise to the throne and the conspiracies she must battle once she possesses it, Elizabeth boasts a roster of talent: Geoffrey Rush as Walsingham, Christopher Eccleston as the power-hungry Duke of Norfolk, Joseph Fiennes as Elizabeth's true love, Fanny Ardant as her French enemy, Richard Attenborough as Sir William Cecil. And, in the title role, a superlative Cate Blanchett.

THE BANDIT QUEEN CONTROVERSY
Bandit Queen ran into a lot of trouble. It got banned, it got a lot of court cases against it. I spent almost a year and a half of my life trying to get that film released. There was a lot of angst in India over this film because sometimes, if you take a mirror and you hold it up to people, they don't like the reflection. It has nothing to do with the individuals but the society. Now I cannot blame them because I made the film to make people angry and some of the anger will be reflected back at me. That was what was happening. People were angry and when you don't find another channel to use it, it just gets reflected back on the filmmaker.

We live comfortably in our own cities while, only a hundred miles away from us, there are things being done to women that we know because we read little things in the papers but we push it aside. Suddenly you're forced to see a film that says, "Now watch it. Watch exactly how it happens." It was just a great writing of guilt that people saw. India is 65%, 70% low caste. The upper caste traditionally have always ruled, not just the country but the villages. A lot of people that were upset by [the film] were of the higher class. And they were not particularly the people who indulge in these atrocities but the film put it up to say, "Are we also not responsible?" That's what got them.

[Phoolan Devi] brought a suit against me that stunned me. It was funny because her suit was not about privacy. She said the film lied because she was not raped. Here was a woman whose importance in India actually was the fact that she got up and fought instead of accepting that it was her shame that she got raped. She came out and killed people for it and said, "They raped me. I'm going to kill them." Then suddenly she comes out and gets accepted by the very society I'm taking about and they impose upon her their own sensibilities.

ELIZABETH
I really didn't know very much about Elizabeth when I started to make this film, except my schoolboy history. Just basic knowledge that you get when you're reading history in school and getting bored.

I took the film because of the fact that I knew the challenge of connecting myself to Elizabeth I would be a bridge I'd have to build for myself. I'd have to understand so many things about myself before I got to her, and then all that becomes the movie. Any work of art is not necessarily about the subject, it's your interpretation of the subject and, in interpreting that, you're putting so much of yourself. So I knew that in trying to reach to somebody that I knew nothing about, I'd have to really push myself and ask myself questions. So, in one way, a lot of those questions were answered when we were writing the script because the scriptwriter was Catholic, English, conservative. The director was Hindu, operatic, melodramatic, restless, informal. [We were] two people trying to understand each other [and] discovering ourselves. And, in that discovery of themselves, trying to invest that discovery into interpreting what Elizabeth's life must have been like. Once you've got the script, then an Australian actress [Cate Blanchett] comes, who has her own ideas about Elizabeth, and that causes conflict. Then an Australian actor [Geoffrey Rush] playing Walsingham causes conflicts. The only instruction I usually give on a film is don't lie. If there's conflict, let's shoot the conflict. The actor does not have to have the same subtext as a director. It just has to be honest. If I can feel the honesty of the situation and I can feel my subtext coming through and [the actor's] subtext coming through, it's great to have two subtexts. The process of creation is organic and that process of creation consistently is throwing up little problems and conflicts, but that is creativity itself. The acceptance of that chaos is creativity and to be able to channelize that and push it forward into a work of art is what creativity is.

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