The latest adaptation of Shakespeare's "Othello" is set in the arena of competitive high school basketball in 'O' ..   

The idea of a contemporary retelling of Othello was that of screenwriter Brad Kaaya who was the only black male in an all white high school. Kaaya identified with the heroic figure of Othello for many reasons. Like many teenagers, Brad Kaaya loved to play basketball- and chose to set the conflict of 0 on a basketball court rather than a battlefield. The male characters in 0 are warriors on the court, and Odin is the fiercest and most heroic of them all. In a school and a town where basketball is paramount, Odin James is king. This modem adaptation widens its focus to examine the complex lives of a group of teenage basketball stars and their entourage, as well as issues of interracial dating, substance abuse (in particular steroids and cocaine) and school violence.

After developing the screenplay at the Sundance Institute Writers Lab, Kaaya. sent the script to director Tim Blake Nelson, who received it while acting on location in Australia in Terrence Malick's "The Thin Red Line" and most recently co-starred in the Coen Brother's acclaimed hit "0 Brother, Where Art Thou?"  An Obie Award-winning playwright and director of the film EYE OF GOD, Nelson was initially not interested in yet another teenage adaptation of Shakespeare's work. "I thought there were probably too many teenage Shakespeare adaptations floating on the movie screens, so I resisted even reading the script," says Nelson. "But once I read it, it really stuck with me."

Nelson felt Kaaya had modernized Shakespeare's play beautifully, "while infusing it with every bit of passion and human frailty that exists in the original," and agreed to direct the film.

Nelson and Kaaya worked for a solid year revising the 'Original screenplay. They sent off the script to producers Eric Gitter and Dan Fried, who immediately fell in love with the script.

'We're both fans of teen genre films, but we felt that the audience had matured a bit," says Fried. "So many teen films are horror films and comedies, a little bit exploitative but fun. We thought it was time to stop pandering to that audience and give them a film that had some meat on the bone, some real substance."

"We knew instantly that this was a project for us after reading the script and meeting with Tim. It was like magic."

Nelson took great care to explain the significance of setting Othello in a modem-day high school by examining the contemporary themes which draw the audience into the story- guns in high school, interracial relationships, teen sex, racism, the parent-child relationship. He felt these themes must be seen exclusively in the context of O's main theme: the relentless efforts of one boy (Hugo) to tear down the life of someone he envies.

"The sort of violence and level of passion that the characters in Othello experience leads  finally to murder and self-destruction," says Nelson. "But these problems are faced today by teenagers. There are high-school shootings. They don't just happen in urban areas. We wanted to make a film, that's true and coherent with what's going on in our society."

He showed the actors some news footage from shootings that had taken place in high schools. Nelson's aim was "to make the violence of the movie very jarring and realistic, and not at all glorified like the way you see violence in horror movies and things like that," says Julia Stiles.

Nelson felt it was extremely important for his ensemble to go back to Shakespeare and explore the original roles. "I trained as an actor, and for the lack of a better way of putting it, if you can do the classics, particularly Shakespeare, you can do anything," he says. "To come together around any Shakespeare text as a company, and to work on it together and apply some of the rules which one learns as an actor, is enormously valuable. This author was an actor who wrote for actors." Each afternoon the cast rehearsed Othello, with each actor playing the respective part from which their own character was derived. They all feel these rehearsals were invaluable to their individual and collective performances in 0.

The current popularity of films based on Shakespeare's play speaks to the fundamental brilliance and timeless quality of these stories. "A lot of people are intimidated by the language of the work, but underneath it there are some really powerful stories and great characters which teenagers can relate to themselves," says Stiles. "Shakespeare also writes really great parts for women, which is ironic because they didn't even have female actors then." Josh Hartnett adds: "Shakespeare wrote such great human stories, about love, about jealousy, about the basest emotions possible, and that's interesting and always will be."

"This is an Elizabethan play, and here we have a playwright who is proposing that there is a level of evil which is human, an which defies explanation," says Nelson. "There is a kernel of evil in all of us which you cannot explain, and which will not be explained."

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