Simon McBurney

If you take a play like The Encounter, which is based on an autobiographical account of a man being lost in the rainforest...

The form that Simon McBurney therefore deploys for a complicit tape show is so revolutionary and felt so novel that the fact that it was based on a novel becomes almost by the by because the story transcended that regardless of the form that it was taking.

Yeah, and I suppose against that, at least it is unfamiliar novels that are being put on stage.

I mean, Middlemarch has never been done before.

Oh, Jesus.

Anyways, next we'll go to Simon McBurney.

Who I this is the one that we always talk about, Elizabeth, where I always think he always ends up playing that horrible director, Roman Polanski, because he played I think he played Roman Polanski in a movie once.

And then I see him in Chinatown.

And it's no, it's the good one.

Because he is a very good actor.

Simon McBurney is probably a

very nice guy.

It's on the tip of my tongue.

McBurney? Think McBurney?

Simon McBurney.

Yeah, so Simon McBurney, I believe, was also in the running to play Renfield in the Francis Ford Coppola one.

Oh, really?

And lost the role to Tom Waits.

And so we developed the sort of interdisciplinary version of the show.

I've always sort of wished that this was written by Tom Stoppard and directed by Simon McBurney.

And so James Bonas, this amazing director from the UK who's a friend, we would sort of pretend we were them, I guess, and tried to do our work accordingly.

And so there's the music.

It was directed by Oscar winner Robert Zemeckis, screenplay by Stephen Knight.

It stars Oscar-winning actors Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard, along with Jared Harris, Lizzie Kaplan, Simon McBurney, and Matthew Goode.

It had a budget of $85 million, which I suppose, relatively speaking, among Hollywood films at the time is not that high, but anyway.

And it took a global box office of just shy of $120 million.

One of them is relatively new.

Do you know I saw a play with my son when he was 10 from the Théâtre de Com- de Complicité, I don't even know if I'm saying that right, Simon McBurney's company.

And they did a piece about the frozen Viking that was found, and I thought it was one of the greatest things I'd ever seen.

And at the end of the play, I was standing up and I was clapping my hands above my head, and when we left, my son said, "That was so weird, Mom." And I said, "Oh, was it uncomfortable for you to see somebody naked on stage?" Which was the frozen Viking.

Mm.

We're welcoming an actor-

Exciting

... who is here to talk about his, his latest character of Plowman.

That was really fun.

There's...

Remember, you know the actor Simon McBurney? He, he, he runs, um, Theatre de Complicite.

Really great theater maker.