Franco Zeffirelli

Cinema then magnified that expectation.

George Cukor's 1936 Romeo and Juliet gives us an enormous and spectacularly ornate version of The Lover's Meeting Place, while Franco Zeffirelli's 1968 film gave another generation an intensely physical, romantic vision of Italian Verona.

And this creates a wonderfully circular process.

Shakespeare imagines Verona without necessarily having seen it.

One of the things I realized was we were involved in a war about sexuality and sexual identity.

and it wasn't long before i began to understand that the catholic position on mary was that she was the second eve she was the ark of the covenant she was the tabernacle and i had taken her for a kind of that there was a man called Zeffirelli who made a film called Jesus of Nazareth, I think in the 1980s.

And he, like so many people, presented Mary as a kind of Jewish teenage ingenue, a girl who'd had some, if she had indeed had it, some strange experience that caught her up.

And she was almost a sort of an unwilling, not unwilling, she was willing clearly, but an unwitting participant in all this.

is your version of Romeo and Juliet? Is it

Claire Danes and Leonardo DiCaprio? Is it the Zeffirelli film? Like what is Romeo and Juliet? And one of the dancers really, really smartly said, it's about boundaries.

And I was like, Oh my God, I totally missed the mark.

All of the set designs that we had been talking about were all empty frames, door frames, window frames.

Uh-huh, yeah.

But did Jesus see something in Peter that was indispensable? I don't know if I'm dating myself here, but in Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, which I always love, James Farentino was the actor that played Peter.

And people my age and older remember him.

He was in TV and movies in the 70s and 80s.

So Pretty Baby is by Louis Malle.

Endless Love is by Franco Zeffirelli.

I think I'm saying that right.

I'm just going to let you go.

I don't have a complaint about that.

So for me personally, I've said it before, the Jesus of Nazareth miniseries from 1977, Franco Zeffirelli, to me that's the gold standard of Jesus movies.

And I'm partial to it, but I realize that that's just my own opinion.

Other people have different opinions, and I'm okay with that.

And as Ryan said earlier, filmed in the style of, or at least shown to us in the style of Italian cinema and, in terms of its colour palette, split diopters, soft lensing.

And you would probably recognise the visual language of Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet in there.

I think

just a point on those split diopters and that soft lensing.

So my mum, big fan, she used to love the original film version of Romeo and Juliet.

I want to, I can't remember who it's by, Zeffirelli maybe? Okay.

Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet.

It's a black and white film.

And it's a, I guess, a more accurate depiction of Romeo and Juliet in this time that it is set.