In a key scene when the film’s villains trick Claudio (Fran Kranz) into believing something that is untrue, Claudio appears in a manner wholly unexpected for a Shakespeare play but that makes sense for a modern guy who has just spent the night partying. So why did Whedon decide to put Claudio in a swimming pool, martini in hand, donning a snorkel for the scene? The answer is quite simple: The director, who shot the film at his own Santa Monica, Calif. home, told EW, “For the love of God, if you have a pool overlooking beautiful mountains and trees and you are doing a party scene in a modern-day Shakespeare, and you don’t have someone in a snorkel and martini, then you should be fired.”
Actually, there was a little more to it than that. Even before Whedon knew that the photo of Claudio in a swimming pool would become a promotional image for the film, he knew that it would set the right tone for his adaptation and for that scene in particular. “It encapsulates so much of the spirit of the thing,” he said. “Ridiculousness with just a hit of darkness.” That carefully measured dose of darkness comes into this scene as a night of partying ends and the morning dawns with the first of multiple times poor Claudio is cruelly tricked by the movie’s antagonists. Whedon sees Claudio in this moment as “a guy who has been partying too much, and there’s that feeling of decadence that’s about to go from charming to damaging in that image.”
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