Edward Bond's play Bingo, which focuses on the last months of Shakespeare's life, captures many of the beauties and horrors of the poet's age. At one point, Shakespeare's character describes "women with shopping bags stepping over puddles of blood" on the streets of London. At another, he stands under the body of a beggar woman who has been hung from a gibbet, and remembers watching bear-baiting. "The baited bear … tied to the stake," he says, as if reliving the scene. "Its dirty coat needs brushing. Dried mud and spume. Pale dust."

Paris Gardens, where bears were baited, is in Southwark – just around the corner from the Young Vic, where I've recently been directing Bond's play. Now one of the few visible remnants of the Elizabethan gardens is the name of a street that runs along one side of a public park surrounding Christ Church. These days the park is full of city workers eating lunch, a few stray folk, and tables at the back of a pub. But its history is much bloodier. In the 16th and 17th centuries, it hosted all manner of cruelty. Bears were chained up, blinded, their claws were removed and dogs were set on them. Bear-baiting still goes on in various countries in the world, and the web is full of images and videos. I wouldn't advise Googling them.

I've been thinking a lot about Paris Gardens recently because we decided to make a short film there, inspired by the play, with some of the actors from the show. The Young Vic encouraged us to be bold and gave us no constraints. The brief was the same for the film: it simply had to be inspired by the play and bold in its approach. I asked Mark O'Rowe, who is a successful screenwriter, to write a short, contemporary piece; something complex and blackly comic. One thing more – it had to feature an act of violence or cruelty in the present-day gardens. A few days later, we had a script.

The cast was already on hand: Patrick Stewart, who's been playing Shakespeare in our production, Matthew Marsh (who played the rich landlord William Combe) and Richard McCabe (who played the playwright Ben Jonson). They're joined by Aimee Ffion Edwards, who is currently appearing in The Recruiting Officer at the Donmar Warehouse. We shot over two part-days, finishing early as all the actors had to be on stage in the evening.

At roughly the same time I also happened to be invited to a rough cut of Shan Khan's film about honour killing, Honour, starring Paddy Considine, among others. It's a dark, mesmerising film, and the director of photography is David Higgs. I asked him work with us and he agreed. We planned lots of handheld shots using the Alexa, a new digital camera. The Guardian kindly offered to provide all the editing and post-production facilities.

I don't want to spoil the film by describing it in too much detail, but in it Patrick Stewart plays a famous (albeit fictional) contemporary poet. It's got a nasty event in the middle and some very bad language. It's set in the present day. And we've called it Epithet.