Back in 1996, in what was a pre-Titanic world, nothing was hotter than the pairing of Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes as the titular star-crossed lovers in William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet.
The 21-year-old DiCaprio was just coming into his own as the sensitive, sun-kissed heartthrob of the 1990s and 17-year-old Danes, fresh from a Golden Globe win for the sole season of the taken-before-its-time cult classic My So-Called Life, was the hero of high school girls everywhere—and, upon this film's arrival, the envy of so many.
Which is why Baz Luhrmann's frenetic, colorful take on the 16th-century tragedy, in which Hawaiian-shirt-wearing Montagues battle slickly embellished Capulets with guns instead of swords on the shores of Verona Beach, had teens packing theaters for an olde English lesson, set to the sounds of a best-selling soundtrack that included Garbage's "#1 Crush," The Cardigans earworm "Lovefool" and Des'ree's love-at-first-sight-through-the-fish-tank theme song "Kissing You."
With a $147.6 million haul at the box office, Romeo + Juliet remains the highest-grossing cinematic take on a Shakespeare play—minus the loosely Hamlet-inspired The Lion King, which made almost a billion dollars, and Best Picture Oscar winner Shakespeare in Love, which, among its various liberties with the playwright's origin story, spices up the premiere of Romeo and Juliet. (And surely Steven Spielberg would love to surpass that when his version of West Side Story finally comes out Dec. 10.)
But though it's one of the most staged plays of all time, and had already been made into two classic movies, in 1936 and 1968 (the latter becoming the highest-grossing Shakespeare film ever at that time), Romeo + Juliet "was an incredibly difficult film to get made," Luhrmann said in a 1996 interview.
He had a first-look deal after making his feature directing debut with the smash-hit Strictly Ballroom in his native Australia, but nothing particularly inspired him for a few years until the prospect of making Romeo and Juliet the way Shakespeare himself might do it came along.
"He was a relentless entertainer and a user of incredible devices and theatrical tricks to ultimately create something of meaning and convey a story," Luhrmann explained of the Bard. "That was what we wanted to do. We were interested in that experience."
People may have been thinking after the movie came out, "How clever. What genius at the studio rang you up and said, 'Do a funky MTV-style Shakespeare and wipe the floor with all the other pictures, go to number one and get the kids in?'" he reflected. "That was not the case."
And it's quite possible that none of it would have happened if DiCaprio hadn't been onboard from the beginning, flying to Sydney on his own dime to workshop the idea with Luhrmann and some local actors before they took it to 20th Century Fox and secured a relatively small budget of $14.5 million.
Which, considering the cast they ended up with, was quite the bargain.
On the occasion of the unique film's 25th anniversary, take a look at the star-studded lineup then and now. They've done a few things since:
When Romeo + Juliet came out, DiCaprio admitted that he didn't know how the concept—Elizabethan language in a hyper-modern setting—would be received, no matter how timeless the material.
But "I have to say," he told i-D in 1997, "the first time I knew it was working was the first day of work. It actually seemed more natural, more 'meant to be' than a traditional version."
"Even though it's a fantasy world," he explained, "it has a lot of modern references in it, especially with the violence and gang warfare, so it made me feel a lot closer to home. I think Shakespeare probably would have wanted his work to live on through the years, become a timeless piece that could adapt to the future."
And of playing Romeo, DiCaprio said, "It was interesting once I really started to research him, because you have this pre-planned idea of what Romeo's supposed to be, just some fluffy romantic type of guy, but then you sort of realize that he was a hopeless romantic, and then he meets Juliet. And Juliet says, 'Alright look, if you've got any real balls you should marry me now and risk everything.'
"So he risks everything—his whole life, his whole family, everything—and he marries this girl, which is such an honorable thing to do if you really believe in somebody, if you believe in love like that, especially at that age, especially to risk your life. It's the ultimate tragedy and the ultimate love story."