Here’s a quick clip of director Julie Taymor explaining how, after cutting the final speech from The Tempest, she decided to put it back via the song in the end-credits, which she felt had to be performed by Beth Gibbons, best known as the willowy, wounded — and occasionally wrathful — voice of Portishead.
When I see a movie, I sit through every last end-credit. While screening The Tempest, as usual, I’d drank waaay too much coffee, and I really had to go to the bathroom. So I was on my way out of the theater as the credits for The Tempest rolled, when I realized that the words being sung and the voice singing it, were familiar…by the next verse, I’d recognized the source: the mighty Beth Gibbons.
I used the screen grab (above) because the way Taymor’s hand is positioned under the image of Helen Mirren’s head on the movie poster reminds one of Hamlet holding Yorick’s skull…
Click on the 360 for higher rez
“Beth came to mind because she has this incredible – she feels like Helen [Mirren] to me; she has the vulnerability and the power, simultaneously. So the song was written with Beth in mind; there was never any question of anyone else, and we were very proud that we could show her the film and she said ‘Yes’ when she saw it. And we’ve actually had some people think that it’s Helen singing, but Helen will tell you that she doesn’t.”
I’d be honored if you would read my coverage of the 48th annual New York Film Festival for The Huffington Post, found HERE . It includes, amongst many, many other notes, recently declassified conversations between war criminals Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, about the U.S. support of an illegal overthrow of sovereign, fairly-elected president Salvador Allende, in the Chile of the early 70s.
Additional extra-credit reading: My piece on Portishead from the pages of URB.
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