Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand & the Cast of The Tragedy of Macbeth on Their Acting Process

Joel Coen’s The Tragedy of Macbeth was an Opening Night selection of the 59th New York Film Festival. Watch Joel Coen, Denzel Washington, Frances McDormand, Bertie Carvel, Harry Melling, and Moses Ingram in conversation with NYFF Director Eugene Hernandez following the World Premiere. A work of stark chiaroscuro and incantatory rage, Joel Coen’s boldly inventive visualization of The Scottish Play is an anguished film that stares, mouth agape, at a sorrowful world undone by blind greed and thoughtless ambition. In meticulously world-weary performances, a strikingly inward Denzel Washington is the man who would be king and an effortlessly Machiavellian Frances McDormand is his Lady, a couple driven to political assassination—and deranged by guilt—after the cunning prognostications of a trio of “weird sisters” (a virtuoso physical inhabitation by Kathryn Hunter). Though it echoes the forbidding visual designs—and aspect ratios—of Laurence Olivier’s classic 1940s Shakespeare adaptations, as well as the