Romeo and Juliet: A Love Song

This is not a conventional musical with a cast breaking into hummable choruses when the text fails. It's an opera using hip hop, rock, pop, ballad and gospel styles to seamlessly tell one of the greatest stories.

– Composers Peter van der Fluit and Michael McNeill

[The film] displays an emotionally-assured grasp of what makes this famous story so enduring. The big moments all feel huge, and the mostly unknown actors hold their end up impressively. The camper-van park setting somehow feels appropriate and contributes greatly to the film's confidently-mounted singular aesthetic.

– Dominic Corry in The NZ Herald, 30 July 2013

Every generation reinvents Romeo and Juliet in a way that strikes a chord with its sensibilities, experiences and outlook. This is Romeo and Juliet for the YouTube generation, a film that plays off the wide-ranging tastes of people accustomed to taking the glamorous with the grimy, the comic with the tragic, the beautiful with the freakish, and the venal with the elevated.

– Director Tim van Dammen

Shakespeare is your license to do something mental ... As a director I always like to think of what's the obvious thing to do and the opposite of that, before doing something different. Here, I was determined to ride the comedy into the tragedy and grind the two together."

– Director Tim van Dammen, in Stuff, 12 September 2013