The earliest known film
Macbeth was 1905's American short
Death Scene From Macbeth, and short versions were produced in Italy in 1909 and France in 1910. Two notable early versions are lost: Ludwig Landmann produced a 47-minute version in Germany in 1913, and
D. W. Griffith produced a 1916 version in America featuring the noted stage actor
Herbert Beerbohm Tree. Tree is said to have had great difficulties adapting to the new medium, and especially in confining himself to the small number of lines in the (silent) screenplay, until an ingenious cameraman allowed him to play his entire part to an empty camera, after which a real camera shot the film.
Twentieth century In 1947,
David Bradley produced an independent film of
Macbeth, intended for distribution to schools, most notable for the designer of its eighty-three costumes: the soon-to-be-famous
Charlton Heston. and
Jeanette Nolan as Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in Welles' 1948 film adaptation of the play.
Orson Welles' 1948
Macbeth, in the director's words a "violently sketched charcoal drawing of a great play", was filmed in only 23 days and on a budget of just $700,000. These filming conditions allowed only a single abstract set, and eclectic costumes. Dialogue was pre-recorded, enabling the actors to perform very long individual takes, including one of over ten minutes surrounding the death of Duncan. Welles himself played the central character, who dominates the film, measured both by his time on screen, and by physical presence: high-angle and low-angle shots and deep-focus close-ups are used to distort his size in comparison to other characters. Welles retained from his own 1936 stage production the image of a
Voodoo doll controlling the fate of the central character: and at the end it is the doll we see beheaded. The film's allegorical aspect is heightened by Welles' introduction of a non-Shakespearean character, the Holy Father (played by
Alan Napier), in opposition to the witches, speaking lines taken from Shakespeare's Ross, Angus and the Old Man. Contemporary reviews were largely negative, particularly criticising Welles' unsympathetic portrayal of the central character.
Newsweek commented: "His Macbeth is a static, two-dimensional creature as capable of evil in the first scene as in the final hours of his bloody reign."
George Schaefer directed
Maurice Evans and
Judith Anderson in a
1960 made-for-TV film which later had a limited European theatrical release. (The three had also worked together on the earlier
Hallmark Hall of Fame 1954 TV version of the play.) Neither of the central couple was able to adapt their stage acting style to the screen successfully, leading to their roles being described by critics as "recited" rather than "acted".
Roman Polanski's 1971
Macbeth was the director's first film after the brutal murder of his wife,
Sharon Tate, and reflected his determination to "show [
Macbeths] violence the way it is ... [because] if you don't show it realistically then that's immoral and harmful." His film showed deaths only reported in the play, including the execution of Cawdor, and Macbeth stabbing Duncan, and its violence was "intense and incessant". Made in the aftermath of
Zeffirelli's youthful
Romeo and Juliet, and financed by
Playboy mogul
Hugh Hefner, Polanski's film featured a young sexy lead couple, played by
Jon Finch (28) and by
Francesca Annis (25), who controversially performed the sleepwalking scene nude. The unsettling film score, provided by the
Third Ear Band, invoked "discord and dissonance". While using Shakespeare's words, Polanski alters aspects of Shakespeare's story, turning the minor character Ross into a ruthless Machiavellian, and adding an epilogue to the play in which Donalbain (younger son of Duncan) arrives at the witches' lair, indicating that the cycle of violence will begin again. In 1973, the Virginia Museum Theater (VMT, now the
Leslie Cheek Theater), presented
Macbeth, starring
E.G. Marshall. Dubbed by the
New York Times as the "'Fowler' Macbeth" after director
Keith Fowler, it was described by Clive Barnes as "splendidly vigorous, forcefully immediate... probably the goriest Shakespearean production I have seen since Peter Brook's 'Titus Andronicus'."
Trevor Nunn's
RSC Other Place stage performance starring
Ian McKellen and
Judi Dench as the leading couple was adapted for TV and broadcast by
Thames Television (see
Macbeth (1978 film)). In 1992
S4C produced a cel-animated
Macbeth for the series
Shakespeare: The Animated Tales, and in 1997 Jeremy Freeston directed
Jason Connery and
Helen Baxendale in a low budget, fairly full-text, version. In Shakespeare's script, the actor playing Banquo must enter the stage as a ghost. The major film versions have usually taken the opportunity to provide a double perspective: Banquo visible to the audience from Macbeth's perspective, but invisible from the perspective of other characters. Television versions, however, have often taken the third approach of leaving Banquo invisible to viewers, thereby portraying Banquo's ghost as merely Macbeth's delusion. This approach is taken in the 1978
Thames TV production,
Jack Gold's 1983 version for
BBC Television Shakespeare, and in
Penny Woolcock's 1997
Macbeth on the Estate.
Macbeth on the Estate largely dispensed with the supernatural in favour of the drug-crime driven realism of characters living on a
Birmingham housing estate: except for the three "weird" (in the modern sense of the word) children who prophesy Macbeth's fate.
Twenty-first century Twenty-first-century cinema has re-interpreted
Macbeth, relocating "Scotland" elsewhere:
Maqbool to Mumbai,
Scotland, PA to Pennsylvania,
Geoffrey Wright's
Macbeth to Melbourne, and Allison L. LiCalsi's 2001
Macbeth: The Comedy to a location only differentiated from the reality of New Jersey, where it was filmed, through signifiers such as tartan, Scottish flags and bagpipes.
Alexander Abela's 2001
Makibefo was set among, and starred, residents of
Faux Cap, a remote fishing community in Madagascar.
Leonardo Henriquez' 2000
Sangrador (in English:
Bleeder) set the story among Venezuelan bandits and presented a shockingly visualised horror version. In 2004 an "eccentric" Swedish/Norwegian film, based on
Alex Scherpf's Ice Globe Theatre production of
Macbeth, was said by critic Daniel Rosenthal to owe "more to co-director
Bo Landin's background in natural history documentaries than to Shakespeare." More conventional adaptations of 21st-century stage productions to television include
Greg Doran's
RSC production filmed in 2001 with
Antony Sher and
Harriet Walter in the central roles, and
Rupert Goold's
Chichester Festival Theatre Macbeth televised in 2010 with
Patrick Stewart and
Kate Fleetwood as the tragic couple. The cast of the latter felt that the history of their stage performance (moving from a
small space at Chichester to a
large proscenium arch stage in London to a
huge auditorium in Brooklyn) made it easier for them to "re-scale", yet again, their performances for the cameras. In 2006,
Geoffrey Wright directed a Shakespearean-language, extremely violent
Macbeth set in the Melbourne underworld.
Sam Worthington played Macbeth.
Victoria Hill played Lady Macbeth and shared the screenplay credits with Wright. The director considered her portrayal of Lady Macbeth to be the most sympathetic he had ever seen. In spite of the high level of violence and nudity (Macbeth has sex with the three naked schoolgirl witches as they prophesy his fate), intended to appeal to the young audiences that had flocked to
Romeo + Juliet, the film flopped at the box office.
Justin Kurzel's feature-length adaptation
Macbeth, starring
Michael Fassbender and
Marion Cotillard, was released in October 2015. Also in 2015, Brazilian film
A Floresta que se Move (
The Moving Forest) premiered at the
Montreal World Film Festival. Directed by Vinícius Coimbra and starred by
Gabriel Braga Nunes and
Ana Paula Arósio, the film uses a modern-day setting, replacing the throne of Scotland with the presidency of a high-ranked bank.
Denzel Washington was nominated to an Academy Award for his performance in the title role of
Joel Coen's
The Tragedy of Macbeth (2021). == Adaptations ==