Baritone William Shimell stars alongside Juliette Binoche in an Abbas Kiarostami film titled Certified Copy which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2010. It will be shown on January 11 at the Palm Springs International Film Festival and have a limited release in the U.S. theaters for March 2010. The singer discussed his role and how it compares to the opera stage. An excerpt from the interview, the film plot and trailer are after the jump.
(Photo: Francois Durand/Getty)
"'I’ve always found opera performing somewhat limiting,' he says. 'The reason I like to sing the da Ponte operas so much is they allow you to be so real. Night after night it can be completely different. There’s such depth in the characters, unlike in a lot of other operas. Transferring that to the film experience was one of the interesting things about it. It was a different form of expression. You can’t 'act' at all. The camera picks it up straightaway.'"
Synopsis: In Tuscany to promote his latest book, a middle-aged English writer meets a French woman who leads him to the village of Lucignano.
