Ralph Fiennes - Coriolanus chimes with current politics

Blood dripping down his face from his shaven head, vengeance boring from his eyes, Ralph Fiennes’ Coriolanus is a brutal version of Shakespeare’s proud general. The story of a Roman war hero who is feted by the masses while he’s winning wars but falls out of favour in peace time because he refuses to suck up to the mob, it’s renowned as one of Bard’s most difficult works.

But for his directorial debut, Fiennes has given this most unloved tragedy the propulsive feel of a modern action thriller. Filmed in the concrete suburbs of Belgrade, the ancient story is transformed into a contemporary drama on democracy, class war and the role of political spin.

“Coriolanus has something to say about how we are now, very much,” argues Fiennes, looking rather less alarming as he speaks to The Big Issue in his civvies. “The reversion to tribal type is always around the corner, everywhere. The history of Ireland and the North is so much part of the references I was using in the film – Ireland, Chechnya, the former Yugoslavia.”

Coriolanus is not the only war film in cinemas at present – with a more sentimental tone, Spielberg’s War Horse continues to romp home at the box office, while even The Iron Lady is set against the backdrop of the Falklands War. They join a list of war movies that is almost as long as the history of film itself.

The popularity of war films has never been in doubt, but their meaning has continued to shift, servicing the causes of First World War government propagandists, peaceniks exposing ‘the horror’ of the war in Vietnam, and every one in between. The films we make reflect where we are in society. In many cases the images from blockbusters are the most immediate we have of a war – for generations of civilians the Vietnam War is summed up by Marlon Brando, the Normandy landings by Tom Hanks.

Nor is this the first time Shakespeare has been called into service to reflect on modern conflict. Where Laurence Olivier famously gave the troops and the public a morale boost near the end of the Second World War with his performance as Henry V, Fiennes has intentionally made something much more critical.

“The idea for this became more concrete during the very height of the Iraq conflict,” he explains of his Coriolanus. “I think that being in a country that is being taken to war against the will of the majority of people has marked our generation.

“Maybe down the line a historian can say, well actually, now look at all these marvellously functioning democracies in the Arab world. Or will they? Our democracies – the democracies of western Europe – seem to be in a mess. All their economies are going places they’ve never been, so nobody is sure of anything.”

The nationalism at the heart of Coriolanus also chimes with current politics, Fiennes thinks. “There’s this huge uncertainty and you feel people reverting to nationalistic positions. The Germans want to protect their economy; the French are getting at the Brits. And the media exacerbates and simplifies because nobody really knows what the fuck is going on.”

It is in film, and drama in general, Fiennes argues, that we can process these big questions. Though it was made before the protests erupted in Benghazi, Coriolanus asks questions that resonate with the uprising on the streets and with Muammar Gaddafi’s death. Fiennes was alarmed when the images of Gaddafi’s corpse came out – since the crowds filming him on their mobiles echoed the ending he had first envisioned for his Roman general, in which his body would be thrown in the back of a truck and filmed by gawpers on camera phones. It was later cut because it seemed “too self-conscious”.

“We all think, great, Gaddafi should go... the people of Libya rise up. Then we see all those faces of smiling men over a stinking corpse on their mobile phones.

“Effectively, we signed up for a lynching, that’s what we’ve done,” he says. “The question is, what are we that we all think, ‘Yes, kill Coriolanus’?

“Sometimes we’re filled with a kind of righteous anger – yes, go in, make a difference – but we see all kinds of terrible things as a result.”