Macbeth (1971 Film) - Production

Production

When Roman Polanski's pregnant wife, Sharon Tate, and several of his friends were all senselessly murdered by members of the Manson Family at the director's house in Beverly Hills on the night of August 9, 1969, he quit his current film project, The Day of the Dolphin, and sank into deep psychological depression, blaming himself for the tragedy.

After months of grieving Sharon's death, he set to adapting Shakespeare's The Tragedy of Macbeth, but major Hollywood studios refused to finance it. His financial savior was friend Victor Lownes, a senior VP of Playboy Enterprises in the U.K. who persuaded Hugh Hefner to finance the film. Some construed Playboy's involvement as the reason for Lady Macbeth's nude sleepwalking scene; however, Polanski and co-scenarist Kenneth Tynan said they had written the scene before their association with Hefner. British producer Andrew Braunsberg also provided financial support and executive guidance.

Macbeth was filmed on location in Snowdonia National Park, Gwynedd, in northwest Wales, U.K. This North Wales location is cited on the DVD release of the film but it is clear that a considerable amount of location shooting also took place in Northumberland on the northeast coast of England. (The BBC Tyne website devotes a section to films that have been made using Northumberland locations, and it includes two by Polanski—Cul-de-Sac and Macbeth.) Location sites listed for Macbeth include: Lindisfarne Castle, Bamburgh Castle and beach, St. Aidan's Church and North Charlton Moors near Alnwick. An extensive list of both the Welsh and Northumberland locations can be found at the IMDb .

The production suffered delays caused by chronic bad weather and malfunctioning special effects as well as by Polanski's own perfectionism and his stubborn insistence on shooting multiple takes of difficult and expensively mounted scenes on colour film stock. The shoot went over schedule, ultimately taking six months to complete and exceeded its $2.5 million budget by some $600,000.