When actor and stage director Oliver Parks first played the manipulative Iago in repertory theater six years ago, he was struck by the play as a twisting and turning thriller that sweeps its principal characters, and with them the audience, on an ever-tighter emotional journey that ends in tragedy and death. But Parker felt the key to the play's core had eluded directors both on stage and in its three cinematic versions. But for me, at the centre of the play is the all-consuming love between Othello and Desdemona, which flies in the face of the conventions of the time. I wanted to reinvest the tragedy with passion and romance, because without romance there is no real tragedy. I saw the play as an erotic thriller, and that is what I wanted to translate onto the big screen.
Passion is the driving force of the story.
Every character is motored by desire. There's an extraordinary fusion of people boiling with different passions. His vision of the play concentrated on the youthfulness of the characters' emotions. The relationship between Othello and Desdemona came over as being very hot and hurried, very erotic and exciting, but also very vulnerable because of that sexual urgency. For Fishburne, the opportunity to make his Shakespearean debut opposite Kenneth Branagh was too hard to resist.