{"id":9242,"date":"2020-12-10T22:57:48","date_gmt":"2020-12-10T22:57:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/?p=9242"},"modified":"2021-09-03T03:50:38","modified_gmt":"2021-09-03T03:50:38","slug":"kenneth-branagh","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/?p=9242","title":{"rendered":"Kenneth Branagh"},"content":{"rendered":"

December 14, 1989 |<\/strong>\u00a0 Not the face of a matinee idol, not at all, and certainly not the grave majesty of a king. Relaxing in his Houston hotel suite, Kenneth Branagh is a stocky, fleshy-faced Irishman with a quiet, contemplative voice and a ready smile that stops just a few meters short of a boyish grin. He could be seated on the barstool next to yours and you might not notice him, unless he wanted to start a conversation. But when he takes the stage, or screen, you can’t take your eyes off him.<\/p>\n

Among actors of his generation in England, Branagh is easily the most acclaimed, probably the most accomplished, and definitely the most ambitious.<\/p>\n

At 24, he was the youngest actor ever to star in Henry V<\/em> for the Royal\u00a0Shakespeare Company. At 26, he launched his own stage company, Renaissance Theatre, by serving as writer, producer and star of a world premiere drama, Public Enemy<\/em>. (The title, incidentally, does not refer to Branagh\u2019s slight, much-remarked-about resemblance to James Cagney.)<\/p>\n

At 28, he has already written an autobiography, Beginnings<\/em>, and made his debut as a feature filmmaker with a grand new version of Henry V<\/em>, which opens Friday at the Spectrum 9 Theatre.<\/p>\n

Filming this particular play, previously produced in 1944 as a rousing wartime screen spectacle by Laurence Olivier, was perhaps inevitable for an actor-director widely hailed as \u201cthe new Olivier.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, like much of what Branagh has accomplished in so short a time, it has ruffled a few stately feathers in certain quarters of England’s artistic community.<\/p>\n

When the film opened a few months ago in London, Branagh notes, most of the reviews were enthusiastic. But one strongly dissenting voice could be heard among the hosannas: \u201cThe greatest act of hubris since Prometheus absconded with the rights to divine fire.\u201d<\/p>\n

That, Branagh says, was \u201ca bit excessive.\u201d<\/p>\n

Of course, he quickly adds, it\u2019s not the first time he\u2019s been forced to consider that, as his worst critics suggest, he is an insufferably cheeky upstart.<\/p>\n

\u201cYes, that has certainly occurred to me,\u201d Branagh said a few days ago.\u00a0\u201cAnd, of course, many people have said it about me, without me having to think it.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s a kind of reckless-stroke-fearless streak that’s pretty Irish, I think. Something slightly mad and romantic about wanting to do things like this. I can\u2019t do much about that \u2014 that\u2019s in there. It means that you sometimes make massive mistakes. But you learn a great deal very quickly. It concentrates experiences, it concentrates the mind wonderfully, to be quite forward. Or whatever people would describe it as.\u201d<\/p>\n

Branagh, a Belfast native, believes an acute awareness of mortality, of the death sentence we\u2019re all given at birth, is an intrinsic part of the Irish psyche.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve certainly felt that thing of, you really aren’t on this planet for very long. And without walking over people, you\u2019ve got a certain kind of responsibility to take opportunities if they\u2019re there. I was talking to a guy in a wheelchair the other week, a guy who\u2019d been a college athlete, who now can hardly move. And we were talking about this very thing. And he said, \u2018Of course, you must . . . do these things.\u2019 With no bitterness, no rancor on his part. But, basically, he\u2019s a very graphic example of, \u2018You don’t know what\u2019s going to happen to you tomorrow.\u2019 This guy had been fit and healthy, with a wonderful future, and just had an accident.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was always brought up that way, to think, you know, \u2018Eat that meal \u2014 somebody else would be glad of it.\u2019 Try and live for today, and don\u2019t plan too much, don\u2019t dwell on the past, just get on with it.<\/p>\n

\u201cEspecially if you have any talent, if you have any luck \u2014 go for it. Not aggressively, snarlingly. And along the way \u2014 because otherwise, it\u2019s not worth doing \u2014 enjoy it.\u201d<\/p>\n

This unaffected enthusiasm \u2014 this insistence on making an audience enjoy rather than endure classical theater \u2014 is a hallmark of Branagh’s Renaissance Company. Derek Jacobi and Judi Dench, two kindred spirits who also appear in Henry V<\/em>, have directed their own Shakespearean stagings for Renaissance. Like Branagh, they have tried to make the poetry \u201csound like real speech, sound naturalistic . . . dropping barriers of intimidation about this revered, dull playwright.\u201d It\u2019s the same bold, bracingly direct approach Branagh has taken to the Renaissance Company\u2019s first film production.<\/p>\n

Actually, Branagh says, there is nothing dull about either film version of\u00a0Henry V<\/em>. But each version, Olivier\u2019s and his own, is very much a production of its own time.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn 1944,\u201d Branagh says, \u201cyou wanted a glamorous, heroic, romantic, clean, slow, steady progress toward a certain victory against a weak enemy. That\u2019s what you wanted to know while the D-Day landings were happening. People didn’t want to know about the rest of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

So Olivier scrupulously trimmed Shakespeare\u2019s text, removing all mention of Henry\u2019s ruthlessness as a warrior-king, and the threat of betrayal by trusted confederates.<\/p>\n

For his version, Branagh has restored those elements, for a darker, more troublingly ambiguous view of Henry as a man \u201cwith one foot in the dirty world of politics, and one foot in Camelot.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIn this way,\u201d Branagh says, \u201cI think it focuses on the fallibility of those people we try to create as heroes. For the Elizabethans, Henry V was a great hero, a great national figure, a great political figure. Shakespeare clearly admires him more than any other king he writes about. But he presents him warts and all, I think.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut I think our own time is both obsessed with heroes, and obsessed with trying to pick them apart. And I guess Shakespeare\u2019s posing a lot of questions about the nature of heroism. His basic point, I think, is that, as Henry says, \u2018The king is but a man, as I am . . .\u2019 That\u2019s the keynote for our film: He’s just a man. And yet, as William says, \u2018Forget it, don\u2019t expect us to feel sympathy for you. Tough. This is your job.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cThe discussion point, I think, is: What kind of heroes do we want?\u00a0Shakespeare says they\u2019re always going to be flawed. They\u2019re always going to be imperfect. Henry is a killer, he is ruthless, he is chilly. Do you still like him? Would you like to be led by him? Would you have been on that campaign?<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd if you accept any kind of political system, dare you also accept that people are inevitably going to be compromised?\u201d<\/p>\n

Branagh had never directed a film, had only acted in a handful of TV and movie productions, when he decided to work both sides of the camera for Henry V<\/em>. He consulted a few textbooks before filming began, \u201cto learn all about lenses and stuff, at least so I couldn\u2019t be blinded by science.\u201d For the most part, though, he learned by doing. The education was not an easy one.<\/p>\n

The most difficult aspect, he admits, was maintaining the level of his performance, charting Henry\u2019s slow evolution from untested youth into fiercely charismatic leader, while at the same time worrying about the thousand and one things every director worries about during every day of shooting.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe shot the film in chronological order,\u201d he says, \u201cwhich was very important. Because I felt much changed, I must say, on an almost daily basis, by dealing with the kind of responsibility I had as director. And we tried, technically, with makeup as well, to look harder, and tougher, and more worldly, by the end. So everything was designed to see a boy become a man.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe key link was having played it before, and having an idea of how it should develop. So I kept having a performance that had a kind of arc to it. Fortunately, I’ve already done it about 140 times.\u201d<\/p>\n

Branagh, the son of working-class Protestant parents, says he started acting at age 9, after his family moved from the mean streets of Belfast to Reading in Berkshire. After that, Branagh says, \u201cIt was a question of being English at school, and being Irish at home. It was a bad time to be Irish in Reading, where we were, because there were lots of people with brothers and uncles and fathers in the army, in Northern Ireland.\u201d<\/p>\n

But it was a worse time to be Irish in Belfast. That\u2019s why Branagh\u2019s family left Ireland in the first place.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy father had been working away for a while, in England. And my mother was pregnant. And I remember a crowd invading our street one night, and smashing all the windows of the Catholic houses on the street \u2014 it was a mixed street. And I remember that being very terrifying.<\/p>\n

\u201cI remember being shoved under a table in the back room, hysterical, it was so frightening. There were hundreds of people, screaming as they passed by. And suddenly everybody was in the street, and paving stones were ripped up.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat was not good for a pregnant woman whose husband was away. It was clearly going to get worse. So when my father got a permanent job in England \u2014 that came with a house that we could rent \u2014 we left.\u201d<\/p>\n

At 16, Branagh began to seriously consider a life on stage.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was a conscious decision \u2014 and a surprising one \u2014 where it really was like a kind of seeing the light. I\u2019d been interested in journalism up to that point, and I reviewed children\u2019s books for the local paper.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd then I was in a play, and a teacher made the foolish mistake of saying, \u2018You know, you could do this professionally.\u2019 And that was the first time the light went off, and I thought, \u2018Well, Christ, I suppose I could.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cSo then I just read and read and read, and just devoted myself to trying to educate myself about this strange world that my parents thought was peopled with unemployed homosexuals.\u201d<\/p>\n

Branagh studied at the prestigious Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, and made his first big splash in a West End production of Julian Mitchell\u2019s Another Country<\/em>. Before Henry V<\/em>, he was best known to audiences outside England for his work in the BBC miniseries Fortunes of War<\/em> in which he was first teamed with his future wife and Henry V<\/em> co-star, Emma Thompson.<\/p>\n

With the tumultuous experience of filming Henry V<\/em> under his belt, Branagh is looking for new worlds, and new audiences, to conquer.<\/p>\n

Next month, he will be in Los Angeles with his Renaissance Company, staging two productions \u2014 King Lear<\/em> and A Midsummer Night\u2019s Dream<\/em> \u2014 at the Mark Taper Forum. After that, there will be a worldwide tour that will bring the Renaissance man to Japan, Chicago and Europe.<\/p>\n

And then? Well, Shakespeare did write several other plays, and many of them would be very suitable for filming.<\/p>\n

Indeed, as Branagh sees it, Shakespeare himself would be writing screenplays if he were writing at all in this part of the 20th century.<\/p>\n

\u201cI feel that he\u2019d be writing for the Lethal Weapon<\/em> audience, as broad an audience as that. I certainly feel that\u2019s what he wrote for, originally, and was very much aware of. He really did write across the board. I feel that if we could have been on the phone to his agent, while we were filming Henry V<\/em>, he would have told us, ‘Look, I can give you some topical gags for the script.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cHenry V<\/em> does seem very filmic to me. It has real rip-roaring quality to it. And it seems to me that the injunction that the Chorus makes is as true of the film medium as it is of the stage. Like, \u2018Please forget that you\u2019re in a movie theater in Houston, and imagine you’re at Agincourt\u2026\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

December 14, 1989 |\u00a0 Not the face of a matinee idol, not at all, and certainly not the grave majesty of a king. Relaxing in his Houston hotel suite, Kenneth…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,15],"tags":[6,14,85],"class_list":["post-9242","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-archives","category-interviews","tag-archives","tag-interviews","tag-kenneth-branagh"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9242","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9242"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9242\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9410,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9242\/revisions\/9410"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9242"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9242"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.movingpictureshow.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9242"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}