Kenneth Branagh on Personal Film "Belfast"

there's something on the soundtrack there's some something something has this and said i'm fresher that is your that's your intake of breath when she got it right and so i'd literally gone through it that's she she she'd taken my breath away [Music] so i saw you at telluride which was the very first time you showed the movie in public yes yes yes what did that feel like when i was asked to go to telluride um they said of course you can't tell anybody because we don't announce the films until you know that that week that's part of the nature of that festival and i said well i'm thrilled to be asked i i to be honest i am going to tell people because i don't think i'm going to get there i think the the kovid will will defeat us will defy us all so i suppose i didn't so i did tell people first of all i was very impressed by the size of the venue and the size of the screen all these quite basic things that accompany the release of a film and then how many people were there i i hadn't been in a room with that many people for um two years and um so it was a bit overwhelming and then uh to hear people listen to the film shakespeare always talks about hearing a play and one of the things that i suppose as a filmmaker you become sensitive to is the quality of listening i have been in many silences that are uncomfortable bored silence is discomforted and there's just a sort of faint ambient hiss of disinterest but then you hear the pin drop stuff and i felt that i was hearing that and also hearing an intensity of feeling that was to do with the rest of the group there being aware of being together as a community of film goers watching it for the for the first time so it was a very charged experience you've done a lot of adaptations of shakespeare yes uh you've you've written a lot but it hasn't been your own personal uh writing you've suddenly gave yourself permission what changed i think lockdown um invited this sort of introspection um i was very aware of the the the new silence uh i'm particularly struck by the fact that airplanes weren't in the sky and uh so walking the dog it was just there was i'd have more room to think suddenly that one's mind expanded a little and what it what what came in to fill the vacuum as it were was the sounds of belfast and this um really this uh un mistakeable irresistible pull towards the what i understood to be the most significant event in my life because it had such a profound it made made for such a profound change in where i lived who i was how i sounded what my identity was and um and and was somehow hadn't been i had written about it before but not but somehow what i hadn't re-experienced or revisited was the feeling that it had produced and that had stayed with me uh that feeling of um the sort of rupture from uh from a period of settled secure imperfect but but significant happiness into the minute almost in a minute in your life that you start hiding was it fun was it cathartic was it difficult yeah i mean i'd written a lot of things that went into bottom drawers so i had to some extent be begun to understand that for me writing required discipline starting at a regular time in the morning from my point of view and with a determination that i must be writing something in my case by nine o'clock at nine o'clock if i couldn't i couldn't start at five past nine and so i had to get there early enough might be a lot if i knew it was rough i'd be in there quite early in my little shed in the garden um but i also did the primitive trick of sort of the day before knowing that i knew where i knew maybe a first sentence or a first something people asked me i've had fun making movies and fun's never quite the right word it can be profoundly satisfying it can be distressing it can be depressing it can be exhilarating it can be infuriating it can be obsessive and i suppose the writing was was was those things as well but there was a sort of um a sense that there was some volition that was being unleashed there was a something was happening he was starting to you know starting to do itself a bit was there inspiration um on your part if for example uh roma well i can be absolutely honest and say that i have not seen roma i haven't seen roma and i think even back then it wasn't so long ago i think that i knew that i was i was headed towards a childhood story and i didn't want to be influenced hammer chord or well some of the classics or even you know the the real classics 400 blows or um for me uh oro of wales is a masterpiece absolutely my masterpiece that that i cried from beginning to end um in that film yes interesting that the permission thing was that was was was a key thing actually but also as an age thing i think so i'm now 60 so i guess i would be sorry just just before 60 when i started doing a sense that at the beginning of the lockdown there was precious time there was this sense that you were in a world where already you'd begun to question whether you had been taking for granted um opportunities creative experiences that you'd had that maybe you had not fully enjoyed or experienced is all been present with and um and so um it seemed as though there was there was a there was more in a weird way there was there was more at play than making a film although it was clearly about making a film and i wasn't going to do it unless i felt it could look outwards it could not just be about me gazing into my navel um because i didn't think i wanted to do that i felt as though there was recognition in the story that i began to i'd begun to understand i'd begun to be a little easier i'd begun to be a little more sympathetic and compassionate towards that nine-year-old boy and i suppose i also wanted to understand better what my parents had been going through why that big in a way consider how that big change that happens in lots of people's lives as families make decisions about things that are important to them how how it affects the rest of their lives and so you need to look back at what was that big pivotal event and were there elements of it that that people could could could recognize and i began to think um that there were so that somewhere the um the fusion of that the necessity to write about something personal that might reach out seemed possible but i think it's an interesting way of putting it i think i effectively i did i did give myself permission because i thought we don't know what's going to happen you know we is this an intermission will we ever make films again and i think i felt it very much in stages i'll i'll write the screenplay and then we'll see we'll see what happens then i'll see if i move ahead and then the other thing that struck me is that you've been making these very big movies from artemis fowl to the thor movies for marvel to cinderella one of my favorites of yours by the way um all of these films are big and they're for other people they aren't really expressions of you well it's interesting the um cinderella is a good example of um there was a i thought a wonderful screenplay by chris white's and um and then you know i would say in a sort of a sort of invisible way quite a sort of revolutionary treatment of the um the role of what might otherwise have been seen as a victim where you were looking for in a new world where cinderella how does that story sit uh for a sort of what you might call a spiritual strength inside a situation where you might otherwise see her as having been merely abused and ultimately having some some good fortune and yet for her to be somehow passively in in just a sort of at the whim of fate it seemed still not necessarily a story that was was necessarily one wanted to tell and critical to sort of how you shaped that was was performance i'm talking a bit about so what do i put into something like that when cinderella sees this the stepmother at the end on the steps so she's the prince has come and they are together and all will be well as it were and the stepmother is there and she's in a position to punish or apply some sort of retribution she looks and and thinks for a long time and then says i forgive you and that was not in the script and that was something that i suggested that we should say because i thought that that was the most difficult thing anybody could say and that it was an example of a spiritual strength in cinderella not a sappy avoidance of conflict but something that linked back to some spine of personal self-possession that she had had throughout um and i thought that uh i was very glad that chris and disney were happy that that should go in and i would say it's that kind of inflection that i would say was present but yes you're right and i would say that happens in the family dynamics of something like a you know in a film like thor uh but but that sort of but the but that as it applies to something much much closer to one's own heart i guess what i'm trying to say is that you were making big hollywood movies with a lot at stake and this would make you um more vulnerable yes and i think i think vulnerable is is absolutely what it in in involved and incurred and um so it was a very very vulnerable moment to expose the screenplay first off to my brother and my sister without who there was a lot of without who's we can't make the film so as far as i was concerned without their approval there's no point in carrying on and then we couldn't make the film if you couldn't find the boy no point in carrying on and then in the middle as you make the film and you grapple with all the logistics uh you are you know entirely focused on that and except for a number of you know critical exceptions the doing of it removes you from the feeling of it for a for a while but then once you start putting it together and now as you start showing it to people actually that's where the sort of tidal wave of emotion has hit and i have found myself very unmanned uh at various times when when talking about the film um partly because of understanding what some people have found in it i mean uh you know there was a woman first night in telluride a woman just taps me on the shoulder in the dark as the credits are rolling and i look up and as i look up some of her tears hit my face and she just started to try and speak just like and then eventually she got out i'm a grandmother and then she just walked off so that was all that was all she had to say and she had just uh caught uh you know judy dench at the end making a sort of supreme sacrifice jamie dornan lost his father a little while ago and so this was the first time he'd seen the film about a man who loses his father a friend of mine said when they saw it the other day they said christ you've really outed yourself haven't you um and i hadn't quite realized to what extent i had what i was curious about also was how in in the change that occurred how you eventually leave belfast as a nine-year-old you were you know 100 percent in that community and then you moved to england i wondered this is about you this is about your character this is about who you are how did that change you in a way you know everything that the character of ma says on the bus to her husband about what she fears or what the difficulty will be you know we're here we know everybody which you either like or don't like i like it everybody knows the kids they can play whatever they want somebody will yell from three streets away if something goes wrong whatever it is child care it takes a village to raise a child we're in the village we go over there and she says and we'll be on our own and we won't talk funny and you know people there will say we're killing soldiers over here and um and what what i think what happened when we moved over is that the removal from that large extended family from that village if you like was very um very very difficult and it became we became a very insular unit in ourselves and inside the unit we all became much more isolated and also it was the beginning i guess of the you know i think um even then i knew intuitively although that they they had sacrificed this for us that it was it was a sacrifice for them and i think for my mother particularly it was absolutely sort of in a way a sort of catastrophic move really but um uh but it had to be done you know had to be done had to be done and that and that's not what they that's not what they felt eventually but it was very very difficult at the time and um uh and i think it was also for me it was more like it was like the process of uh it was the process of um the beginning of a process of disguise basically my sort of my raison d'etre then was do not stick out you know because also you had been aware of the uh rapidity the speed at which the world had turned entirely upside down and and so if it happened once it could happen again in some other way that you could not predict so just keep your head down don't stick out and um um but but but you know so we had the economic advantage he had the stability of the job we had a slightly larger house not very not very much bigger and the much promised garden in which to play football was it was a postage stamp of a garden so there wasn't much football played there it changed things uh utterly and i i guess that's one of the reasons why 50 years later you're still you're still thinking about it because a large part of you thinks well what would have what would have happened and at the same time you are recognizing a sort of the forging of your character then really with whatever you might call them values or characteristics that um um remain and are more fully you than than um that even 50 years of disguise can do anything about so you went in uh to recreate this place and then you built a set and you you had a limited budget and you decided to shoot in black and white describe for me why all of those things uh had to happen people say don't they you know it's all there in black and white you know the very phrase carries a sense that there is a greater degree of truth in black and white paradoxical though that is i mean it shouldn't be should it emotional truth was what we were after i was never going to remember everything accurately or want to remember everything absolutely as it was with 50 years distance and and with the determination that i looked through the eyes of the nine-year-old so i knew that it would be it would have it would have some kind of heightened quality um black and white for me whether it was that which was a huge influence watching films on television in black and white whether they were originally color or not that's how i that's how i saw what were often classic classic films with classic compositions classic portraiture uh very glamorous um you know um presentations of uh females particularly i think of hollywood black and white and i think of barbara stanwick you know i think of that incredible glamour um so and i think that as a nine-year-old maybe like many nine-year-olds if they're lucky enough to be in a family scenario they often idolize their parents you know and they see them or they can see them you know and before deciding they're full of flaws they can see them as you know very glamorous individuals so black and white for its um for the it's capacity to be both both lucid very clear forensically clear and um um so have some quality of the make-believe about it as well of the fairy tale um that that drew me intuitively to that and i knew i wanted to put the camera where the boy might be a lot of the time or where his view of the world might be expressed by lowering you know cranes or houses or you know and i wanted to as his innocence is taken from him have him look through things always be hiding starting to hide behind banister rails or you know looking through heat haze or you know through window frames um and uh a sort of a sort of visual aesthetic if that is the word sort of formed out of this uh intuitive sense the black and white was the uh the the way to go to give the heightened sense of his his reality this sort of i'd call it hollywood black and white sort of velvety black and white and when i'm thinking in irish terms i think of the the liquid quality of the photography as being like sort of swimming in a guinness or something but shot through with these flashes of color which were how it seemed my mind was hit by real movies in the cinema and i i think it was true that in the mid 60s late 60s if you were watching popular color films they were saturated in color they were they were they were technicolor certainly that's how i remember seeing the films you see in the in the in the film power film uh as well as others that didn't make the cut like the great escape or um uh the sound of music um these were epic and and the greens couldn't have been greener and the yellows popped out and um and so that's that was the sort of that was the sort of the melange of influences for him so judy dench and karen hines who are fabulous as you knew they would be and you've worked with her many times yes he how he was younger than he was playing and she was older how did you deal with that for me uh julie dench is a sort of is a timeless figure and if she's um which one can't take for granted because she is i think has is is rather rigorous i'd call her an artistic puritan so she doesn't think she's right for something she says no what however much she may say oh i say yes to everything ken says but um so if she fancies the part and she she likes to be frightened judy that's how she likes to act she likes to act scared go in and be in deep end and the deep end was the accent and uh we played obviously each other in all is true the shakespeare film that we did and uh and we were husband and wife and i didn't feel that there was an issue with that the the the it was the intuitive connection to the characters that i wanted from them kieran grew up about less than a mile away from me um he's a bit older but he really he really did live around the corner as it were so and he knew that kind of man he i mean he happens to be a catholic i mean i'd happen to be a protestant um but for us that's immaterial but he knew what how important the differences were then and i think judy had much more of an irish background than i understood her mum's from dublin she had an uncle from belfast and so who visited them a lot they went back to ireland quite a bit and so that all started to play into something that um she responded to strongly and one of the side effects of kovid was that you know people are suddenly they're in a bubble whether they like it or not and a family feeling or a rapport is fairly instantly engendered judy has these awful trouble with her eyesight now so i when i um went to see her to talk about it i she asked me to read the entire script to her something i had never done before apparently people used to do it george bernard shaw and noel coward would read their plays all the characters judy said i'd like to know what the story is i said well if you've got if you've got a couple of hours i'm ready to go for it that was when i began to understand that it would be an emotional experience because it was a difficult thing to get through but she was very respectful um and she was on board immediately and was she the one who who was the movie fan i mean she was the one you you who took you to the movies uh she took me everywhere actually she she would the things did jump so she took whereas she took us wherever i wanted to go but we did go a lot as a family and i went with my brother and i think that i don't know the rules are a bit looser then but we our favorite cinema was the capital on the antrim road which you could walk across alexander park which is the park in the in the uh in the film and you can uh we we seem to be able to get in quite easily ourselves to i remember seeing uh seeing and having my mind blown by yellow submarine the beatles film talk about color and also a pretty trippy movie i don't know that i understood it back then i believe people have had stimulants who made that film you told me something about um a shot with her where there was a glint in her eye that just astounded you one of the things that her theatrical background equips her for is to be very lively um you don't necessarily expect big theater types to be real naturals in cinema i think she is because of the theater experience every take is like a rehearsal which she would always expect to be different and to recreate not just re repeat to explore him so you could start her and and so for instance at the end of the uh at the end of the piece she essentially says goodbye to the family and and in a way lets them go and uh understands that um that is what needs to happen i hadn't quite worked out how i should say it i'd written half a dozen different things we started to shoot it and we just kept running and judy was able as she was is to improvise which she did a bit which you don't expect from legrand dom the british theater but she's ready to do that she has really understood the virtue of stillness in movies i mean just literally not not moving your head much and not blinking michael caine's great advice but not not blinking but just sometimes particularly with important moments just giving that sort of rock-like quality so she could do that and listen to a thousand remarks and then come up in this case with her own version of these four lines that are this kind of um breaking of her heart but the release of the sun into into the new life that given the what circumstances are means she's not going to see him much again or indeed if ever and when she sort of when she hooked on to the signal that was that after a good two or three minutes of doing it 50 different ways we must have been on take 17 18. she suddenly got it like an extra set you could see it was if suddenly she went into slow motion and the head really went like that and then she got the phrasing absolutely perfect in the space and i knew we'd got i said cut and i said wow thank you judy i just want to absolutely triple check we've got that and i went to the sound guys and put things on looked at it and then watched it and then oh christ this there's something on the soundtrack there's some something something is this and said i'm frasier that is your that's your intake of breath when she got it right and so i'd literally gone through it that's she she'd taken my breath away and and i had unfortunately placed it on the on the soundtrack we got rid of that but we didn't get rid of her brilliance and you got obsessed with editing in during the pandemic when i could the the danger of being able to go into absolutely everything um do you know what i spent a lot of time doing was going back through the archive footage of news footage of the time danila who is our dublin-based editor um was there and i was in in the home count it's just outside london and um we for covered reasons we couldn't be in the same room uh so i had every you know i had the entire project as it were in in the avid for me it was i was able to be much more precise particularly about particular things to do with young jude's performance and that kind of forensic burrowing was super helpful um because you're always trying to capture thinking um because his performance is as much to do with how he reacts and how he contemplates and reflects um as it is about what he says and so i was able to uh also marvel frankly at the amount of material he could give us it wasn't like i was trying to find a you know um uh a needle in a haystack there was a lot there was a lot of good stuff to choose from but uh it meant i suppose i got my hands much more around the film in a different way and why van morrison as your soundtrack he is from belfast and at that time in our lives he had uh two years previously in 67 he'd released uh really at a quite young age astral weeks an album that was been on the you know high in the charts for a year or so he was something of an urban hero for us because he there were belfast songs on there there's a very famous song called madame george which was about a um a colorful um uh character from the from the city um and he was always ear catching because you couldn't quite work out where he was where he was from uh because a boy from belfast shouldn't have that soulful voice he was influenced by american music that came via records from his father but what i'd say is what is what his um music has is something that he talks about um which is his uh sort of um connection to the street he calls himself the music he says the music of a corner boy one of those kids you see on the street he has a soul he just has soul and and he has a voice that in itself is a sort of miniature awkward not miniature actually a complete orchestra and in my experience of working with him on this i sensed this sort of very complete artist someone who has been put here to make music and actually he felt the script spoke to him he had he'd had to do a lot of traveling away from belfast he still lives part of the time there but he has had this extraordinary international career um and has always always gone his own way and so in in the film you get i feel like the heart and the soul of the city musically and to give you an example the song carrick fergus which is a very um for the irish familiar air not it's a sort of not as well known ubiquitous as danny boy but carrick ferg is a very mournful beautiful tuned simple tune and been recorded by many people in many ways but when you hear van morrison sing it as the father is leaving the sun early in the morning little boy is waving in the window and um and van is singing about with the chieftains the leader of their troop passed away this very week um playing just on the harp and then some strings it's beautiful he takes something that others might refer to a sort of cheap music or prosaic folk music and which it isn't but he takes a simple tune when he sings but the sea is wide and i can't swim over in that voice that it really it gets you it really gets you but it was a choice interesting to to to use him throughout and and there were some original songs as well he wrote an original song which opens the movie and then he and then he provides this um uh what score we have which is this sort of saxophone electric piano led mood piece which i think is a perfect understanding of of um a sort of reflective ruminative um celtic quality uh and he he he responded to the film uh with that um there had been uh originally there was there was an experimentation with other 60s classics but he he became it just became clear that that was that was a that some of some of those very famous songs felt as though they'd been written for the movie that's what it seemed like by the time you slotted them in one other artist ruby murray who was our sort of doris day ruby murray was a singer late 50s 60s big big um hit artist at that time she was from the north of ireland she makes it into the movie uh in a song that is sung through the radio um because she was also somebody we were all very proud of so jamie dornan and katrina bay are just amazing uh beautiful as you say very glamorous perhaps we didn't know they could do what they did here um how did you know even if you see um katrina in ford versus ferrari i thought that there aside from what she does in outlander i thought that there was a real sort of fire there in the particularly the scene with christian bale in the car when he he has to has finally been dragged out of him that he's going to go back to racing i thought she was very impressive in that um i spoke to her and i hadn't realized she's from the south of ireland i knew that but i hadn't realized she'd moved her father was a police officer they moved to a border town when she was quite young right on the border with the north of ireland so at a very frisky time so she she knew about that struggle very clearly my own mother had a um would definitely had a sort of and my father they had a sort of uh i would call some electricals is between them uh you know whether they liked it or not um and i felt that she just had that passionate thing and my mother also was very you know within a limited budget loved fashion she loved clothes you know so i thought that um um i sensed i sensed a depth a depth in katrina a passion and uh and also a sense of fun i like her i liked her her laughter also in both cases with her and jamie for very good looking people who can sometimes um i don't know why some sometimes that could have been some weird kind of burden for them and they get a bit self-involved or insecure in other weird ways anyway they weren't they feel very normal and i like to work with people who kind of you know just get on with it um jamie i loved in the fall tv show with julian anderson in which he's uh very powerful and again i spoke to him and it felt like he he knew the guy he's from belfast um and uh in all cases they were going to bring something that meant that these depictions were not meant to be literal documentary um accounts of my family again the capacity to listen well one of the favorite things of mine uh that jamie does is when he's talking to the boy um just before a funeral and he's talking about what he it's a very sort of simple scene there's not much to say but he handles it very well and even a couple of times the reception of bad news uh the the thinking the thinking is a very you know it's a powerful thing to do on screen and they both have that capacity to be present and react and um and and also a big a big watch of feeling as well so um they delivered i didn't know they had karaoke back in the uh back in the day and maybe as i say you know maybe there's a little bend of the truth there i don't know but what i know is that those um those do's a favorite shot of mine in the film is uh there's a shot from the back and in the uh on the table it's in a working men's club basically where you clear the tables back this kind of everything would have go on in there you know uh but there's two jars of pickled eggs uh which are horrible things to eat but you know it would be like the catering pack version of those that would come into a to do like a wake you know i think it was partly because at least you were offering food and because they were quite hard to eat they wouldn't go so quickly you know and as you see it earlier both of them are packed um uh while mr but peop certainly there were people sang all the time and got up that's angle then they put them i want to go back in time a little bit um i saw the tragedy of macbeth denzel amazing in the title role and you brought him out with much ado about nothing at a time when a colorblind casting was not a big you know a common thing it was a sheer talent thing um of um admiring him enormously as an actor i remember seeing him in glory um with edzerwick film and there's a scene down by a lake where he has a very simple scene with i think it's commanding officer and i thought i remember thinking gosh i've never seen acting like that before i just it's so it's so real i just it it's it's so vulnerable um it's so open that really impressed me we definitely practiced color cast and gender blind color blind and gender blind casting in all our theater work prior to that hadn't really thought about it and also um equal pay and all these kind of things that were just seemed natural to us at that time so i always felt in shakespeare that this is all entirely possible as our gender swaps i feel the creative imagination should not be limited by these things but denzel i can't wait to see that it must have been fun not to have to act in this uh it was um it was so consuming anyway that uh and it was a delight to both watch and frankly learn a lot from jude but also try particularly to find the ways to make a young performer comfortable and and yes when when you have to be there much earlier to put on um whatever it might be or whatever prosthetic or this or that um and and also make sure you know those lines and be focused it's it's a challenge so this time there was plenty going on so i was i was very happy to be on one side of the camera thank you sir thank you very much always a pleasure [Music] you

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Length: 36min 3sec (2163 seconds)

Published: Fri Dec 17 2021