But I don't think there has ever been anything written on the nature of violent man as deep and as thorough as Shakespeare's Titus. I think it puts all modern movies and modern exploitations of violence to shame.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Violence commands both literature and life, and violence is always crude and distorted.
I think there's as much violence, in a way, as a scene with two women having a cup of coffee in a Ruth Rendell novel - in terms of emotional violence and the violence you can inflict with language - as there is in the most graphic kind of serial killer/slasher novel you can think of.
If you read Shakespeare's stage directions, all the gore and violence is right in there.
Violence is used to portray what happens in a film. It only helps portray the actors and what they do. I think it is more about the story, when you have something to play off of.
Shakespeare and his work will always be relevant. He wrote those pieces hundreds of years ago and we haven't really changed as humans, have we? We have to deal with love, honour and adultery now - people were the same then, too - that's what's so wonderful and powerful.
Man has an innate capacity for violence, but can only justify it in the name of justice.
My work is less violent because we tend to write what we want to read... and I'm not that interested in gruesome books. Any violence, to fit in well with a crime novel, has to have compassion.
From the director's point of view, it's infinitely easier to do violence than to do a good dramatic scene.
So much of contemporary crime fiction is painful to read and obsessed with violence, particularly against women, and I can't read that.
As for sex, well, I mean sex is a perfectly respectable subject as far as Shakespeare is concerned. I mean, all history is love and violence.