'Belfast' Director Kenneth Branagh and Jamie Dornan Join the Variety Studio at TIFF

do you ever say that mood board though our makeup and i said what are you what are you going to show jamie and katrina she said oh i'm going to show jamie about 20 pictures of marlon brando i'm going to show katrina 20 pictures of bridges i remember seeing that it was like remember seeing it it was there every day [Music] we're looking to cleanse the community away but you wouldn't want to be the old man out in the street talk to my family and i'll kill you as we all know uh 18 months or so ago we all went into this very unsettling lockdown that was so difficult for everyone it seemed to bring to the surface something that i'd been thinking about ever since the events of this story happened about 50 years ago where effectively i began to realize we went into our own lockdown a lockdown that meant from a very stable happy settled life where in with one working class family in one street in one part of town your neighborhood you knew where you were you know how you belonged you knew your relationship to the world and in a single day everything literally from the ground underneath your feet was ripped up turned upside down and all the uncertainty that followed that ignited i think when our own experience of the lockdown kicked in and so the story of this nine-year-old boy who tries to navigate his way with his family through this catastrophic period of change is really what came out and uh some of it is heartbreaking and some of it i think is quite heartwarming i left belfast when i was uh 20 years ago when i was 19 and uh i think about it all the time i think of home all time i think of family still there so as a result of that initial lockdown i was thinking about home so much um i was also writing a script about home which again wouldn't have happened if it wasn't locked down so my head was very much in that part of the world and then a script comes through called belfast and uh you know with a note that ken wanted to talk to me about it so it was kind of like this beautiful package that was so timely in terms of where my head was at anyway and would be timely no matter what was happening with me because you know it's a it's a story of the time that i was born bred and buttered a moment where you realized how precious everything was because freedoms had been necessarily taken away from us so the freedom that's expressed by the family at the beginning of the film i think was something that all of us felt it would be beautiful to return to and we all had memories evoked of you know what now seem like ideals when the doors are closed and it's just not possible to travel in the same way or see people touch people hug people you know all those apparently silly things that become quite profound this thing jamie and i have talked about particularly for the irish the pull of home even if half the nation travels away from it as a matter of course the pull of home and the certainty of home is clear and then we obviously need it at the center of it a little boy who you know was from there and who could could be as open and as present and as uh alive to it all so that you saw the story un unfolding through his eyes i mean within about five minutes on any given day that's where i've absolutely felt i was you know back in 1969 and back in a certain part of belfast where i'm reminded of new york a bit where you know when i've worked there that a single street constitutes a neighborhood because if everybody knows each other and there's a few shops either end and all the rest of it essentially that's your little world and if you're nine years old that really is your little world you know i said i said this to ken i think possibly the first time we spoke about it is that i felt that i knew him i felt a new pie i know men like that my father was a man like that his father before him was a man like that i i i think even before the conflict began there's something about people in belfast sort of been up against it a wee bit you know it's it's it's never been a particularly easy place to live um there's since you know 1920 basically there's been a a certain divide there that's caused friction that really resonated with me that idea of like i don't even you know it's like it's hard to even think of if my family was now put in that situation where overnight everything changed and there was danger outside the door where there used to be peace um and and sanctuary outside the door suddenly overnight becomes something totally different and i feel as a father and i can recognize the moves that i would make to ensure the safety of my family you know so i think that in itself just at the very core of it like this guy trying to make right for his family just resonated with me you know and then there's a you know i will i will my whole career try to um given the opportunity to tell stories from that part of the world because it's important to me and it's important that people know when people understand what the reality of of people from that part of the world is we looked at some of the great photographers cartier bresson who would find this thing they called the court moment you know really just trying to find some essential piece of life that black and white leads you to it somehow bizarrely we don't see the world that way but somehow it has an increased authenticity somehow it's a real paradox if literally the paving stones beneath your feet have been ripped up so the world is is is completely out of kilter it seemed to me that that movies and the way great artists saw the world was a great thing to try and bring back into your own backyard and if in in the safe space of the street that we had um you had only the space that you had that could still be your forts and your palaces and your castles and your wild west streets and everything and so that delight that sort of explosive firework of imagination that can be a young person at that age that's that went right into the cinematography [Music] you

Channel: Variety

Views: 141,608

Keywords: Variety, Variety Studio, tiff, belfast, Kenneth Branagh, jamie dornan

Id: fE_uOMVlC-w

Length: 6min 36sec (396 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021