Interviewed by Deborah Day

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Shekhar Kapur likes to play god. From his Oscar-nominated Elizabeth to his comic-book endeavors, the director enjoys immersing himself in new worlds that he creates. Kapur invited Premiere to sit down with him and discuss his latest, a second look at Elizabeth — this time in her Golden Age.

When you're preparing for such a sweeping epic like either of the Elizabeth films, what is your process?
I work very instinctively. I allow my camera to follow … I mean, while I prepare all the time, I'm very scared of knowing — I walk into a film and my biggest fear is not that I won't know what to do; my biggest fear is that I will know what to do. And so I wake up in the morning, and I then try and deconstruct myself. And I think that's the hope: to then find the answer somewhere in the ether, and then I allow myself to be very instinctive after preparation. So to prepare for the epic quality — especially in this film, because this film to me works on many levels, on a political level, on a mythic level — and the sweeping scale that you talk about is not political, it's mythic. It's to get the audiences to understand the mythology of our own lives. So mortality and jealousy and sex and love and all of those are mythic events in our lives; and therefore, when you use an icon like Elizabeth, or when [someone like Princess] Diana falls in love, it's a mythic event, but what happens when you fall in love? It's not mythic to you. So the idea is to set these things against a mythic, epic scale so you understand the mythology of it. So how do I prepare for it? I kind of keep following my instincts. So I actually see a film, so the moment I think of a scene, I start to see it, then I write it down and then I give it to my people and say, "That's how I see it." And then you adapt because the actors are not going to do the same thing. They're not puppets; they're thinking everyday of mythic human beings, it changes many times, and sometimes what they do is so fantastic that you have to change and adapt to that.

Shekhar Kapur on the set of Elizabeth: The Golden Age Laurie Sparham/Courtesy of Universal Studios

Do you draw the scenes?
Yeah, all the time. We do drawings, we do storyboards, and then we change it all.

Could you speak a little bit about the sensuality of the film? Sir Walter Raleigh, especially, punctuates his language in his speeches so that seemingly innocuous words like "hope" suddenly become scandalous.
Did you like that? It's fun, isn't it? When you can take something sort of innocuous and make it sexual. Yeah, it was very deliberately thought of because there was no sex between them. But there was intimacy, and intimacy is not always physical; intimacy can be — two minds getting together can be very intimate. So the whole idea of the sensuality to come to the fact that there was no sexuality, and yet it could be very sensual and intimate is the reason for the way to work like that. Yeah, it was all thought about: to work it like that. To me, that one scene, when she and he are actually at a distance talking to each other, but then I only treat it in close ups as if they're together in bed, so that he's talking to her like he's seducing her, but he's talking about immensities and they could be in a very intimate position when they're talking like that.

And then there's the dance scene. Historically, was the Volta scandalous at the time that it was introduced?
It was, but Elizabeth actually loved the Volta. That is what history tells us. And it was — the whole idea of lifting a woman from her crotch was scandalous, but it was part of the life. Yeah, it was very scandalous, but people did it all the time, but it became an accepted part of the culture. And she uses it to such effect.

Aren't the women actually lifted by part of their dress — the busk? To modern audiences, it will look like he's lifting her by her crotch….
Yeah, but the dress would've ripped apart.