Talk Nov. 3, 2021 (NYTimes.com)
By David Marchese
When Kenneth Branagh strode boldly into the cinematic world with his 1989 adaptation of “Henry V” — a surprise hit that earned the first-time director two Academy Award nominations — it portended big things for the then-28-year-old. He has since achieved them, though not without some missteps and not, perhaps, in ways he would have predicted. Branagh, who is 60 and who made his cinematic name with a series of vibrant interpretations of Shakespeare, has over the last decade reinvented himself as a director of big-budget, big-earning Hollywood extravaganzas, among them “Thor” (2011), “Cinderella” (2015) and “Murder on the Orient Express” (2017). In the latter he also starred as Detective Hercule Poirot, a role he’ll reprise in next year’s “Death on the Nile.” But a much smaller and more personal work may yet yield his biggest career coup. The semiautobiographical “Belfast,” which premieres Nov. 12, takes as its inspiration the dislocation — literal and figurative — experienced by Branagh and his family during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in 1969. The film, which he wrote and directed, is being discussed as a leading contender for Oscar glory, the first time that has been true of one of his efforts since he was a much younger and much less professionally battle-scarred man. “For Christ’s sake,” the amiable Branagh says about his winding career path, “who says that one should have a life of ease?”
Did you and your family ever talk about what you went through in 1969? Feeling you had to leave Belfast for England would have been tough by itself, let alone being compelled to do so by sectarian violence. I’m curious if the emotional ramifications were ever discussed. Nobody’s asked me that before, and to be perfectly honest, I’ve never thought about that. No, nothing like that happened, and I think it would have been helpful. What did happen was the family unit and the individuals all sort of closed down and went in on themselves. Maybe there was a fear of talking about it. I think my family had to believe that the sacrifice was worth it, and how flawed as a solution it was or whether it was the right decision never came up. But it must have been under the surface in quite a significant way.
Which makes me wonder about what you were hoping to accomplish by making the movie. And I mean personally, not artistically. What were you trying to puzzle out? Perhaps to understand that situation. That rupture was the most significant event in my personal life. There was a sense that before that mob came up the street I knew who I was and that I was at peace. From that point onward, a whole series of identities and masks was constructed. What I wanted to do was peel some of those away. To do some self-remembering without indulgence, simply trying to open what had been covered up. Because there’s so much of who I am that was formed in that period up to 8 years old and before that riot occurred. But from that moment there was a guardedness, there was an inability to roll with things in the way that one had done before.
What you’re describing is the aftereffect of trauma. I hesitate to use the word in the sense that this little story exists in a place among groups of people who had many, many more traumatic experiences. This was never spoken about partly because a cardinal sin for my parents was to be suggesting that anything you’d been through was worthy of categorizing in such a way. There’s no question that being shaken by the events of that time from my very particular 8-year-old perspective was, yes, I suppose you’d have to call that traumatic. But another cardinal sin was to indulge in your suffering. And yet over the years I’ve thought one doesn’t have to be doing that to go back and try and understand that this was a difficult time, which plenty of other people might recognize as such. Not to elicit pity but to share with them recognition that might be insightful in some way.
Here’s something else that I’m hoping you can give me some insight on, even though it’s related in only a roundabout way to “Belfast” and the tribalism that features in the film: We’re increasingly obsessed with trying to figure out in which bucket to place people: us or them, good person or not. And I haven’t been able to avoid doing that with Van Morrison, whose music is all over your movie and who’s been so aggressively skeptical and aggrieved about public-health measures during the pandemic. He’s also released songs with titles like “They Own the Media” — this is stuff that’s at best ignorant and at worst, worse. My judgment of Van jolted me out of the film every time his voice came on the soundtrack. So I clearly haven’t been able to figure out a satisfying answer to the good art/bad artist question, but how do you think about the issue? This way of trying to understand the world, which I encountered back there in that particular area of tribalism in Belfast — you’re with us or you’re against us — it seems to me allows for little of the humanity that appears in the gaps between those harshly drawn lines. In those gaps all sorts of human behavior occurs. Sometimes irresponsible behavior and sometimes heroic behavior. I have not understood or followed particularly what Van has spoken about in this regard. He is entirely and utterly an artist, and he has his particular unique Celtic brand of it, including a sort of inbuilt defiance of convention, independence of mind. With such passion also comes, inevitably, strong opinions and a very particular and in his case ever-changing personality. But I found him, as an artistic ally, a real mensch. That was my direct experience and the one that I can best talk about, and it was excellent.
Obviously when you were 8 years old you had no clear sense of the politics figuring into any us versus them mentality. Of why, for example, beyond the fact of their being Catholic, your neighbors’ windows had been smashed. But how did your background affect your subsequent understanding of the politics in Northern Ireland? Although there was this fascination with what the Catholic religion did — this business of confessions seemed handy — my father was always clear with me that if people are honest, decent and true, then it didn’t matter where they came from or what they were and what they did. As rosy-tinted as that seems, that’s how I feel. What’s evolved is the necessity of understanding more than silly thoughts about confession, actually trying to understand the differences and what can be celebrated, understood, disagreed with respectfully. But the process is difficult. That desire to understand what appears to be, in crude language, “the other side” — it’s very easy to get lazy about. But I do believe that voices can and should be heard. More than heard, understood, and that’s the difficult thing, because you’ve got to work at understanding.
I’m sure that answer was sincere, but I also can’t quite tell if it was an elegant dodge. Growing up Protestant, you were a unionist, I assume? We were always nominally Protestant in the sense that that’s where we came from and that’s the church which we were sent to, but my father was essentially an independent. He encouraged independent thinking. I think anybody’s view of politics in the north of Ireland has to have changed over the years, particularly since the Good Friday Agreement. If nothing else, I meant what I said in the sense that you have to be ready for seismic shifts in a landscape of possibility. Creative pragmatism within politics has been more readily available than previously. The shift has been significant enough to make me feel as though the flexibility I’m talking about, which may feel like an elegant dodge, really is about keeping your eyes open to what have been quite miraculous movements.
Your emotional investment in “Belfast” is different, I would think, from your emotional investment in the big-budget Hollywood films that you’ve done lately. How does that difference manifest in the final product? I ended up at “Thor” because I’d made three films where I had a lot more freedom: “Sleuth,” “As You Like It” and “Magic Flute.” They did not find audiences or any particular critical approbation. I wanted the work that I made to be seen by people, and after you’ve struck out three times, people are not falling over themselves to hire that 47-year-old former wunderkind Kevin Brannigan or whatever his name was. But that “Thor” opportunity came up, which I had to basically audition for. I found that quite bracing. One of the things that got me the job was I’d written the first half dozen pages of a screenplay, and I read it to Kevin Feige to say, Here is my personal inflection on this. Although, as they say, we went in a different direction, it was still in the film: my personal take — the Dutch angles, which for me seemed natural but created a miniature furor. Marvel actually tried to see whether they could horizontalize them again. But I was thrilled they couldn’t; that kept a personal stamp on it. You try and do that in all the films. They are amazing opportunities, and you’re well paid, but it’s also an enormous amount of stress, so you really only want to do something that you think will reward you in terms of gold of another kind.
You referred to yourself a second ago as “former wunderkind Kevin Brannigan.” You did have that initial burst in your career from “Henry V” till “Frankenstein,” which was a real setback. Did you learn anything from that quick ascent and subsequent comedown that helped you later on? It’s an interesting question. Doing “Henry V,” I’d never envisaged that there would be a career as a movie director after that. We simply made that film, which every step of the way was a miracle. To then get this opportunity to go to Hollywood with “Dead Again” and shoot on a stage that Orson Welles shot “Citizen Kane” on — that was thrilling. It was all so intoxicating that you didn’t think much about it. I suppose by the time you got to “Frankenstein,” maybe you were starting to think too much. So it was a slow putting back together of trying to understand why things had gone [whistles and points down]. I remember when I did “Henry V,” what Sam Goldwyn Jr. said to me in his amazing house, where I remember walking past a painting and going, God, that looks like a Matisse; that is a Matisse. Christ the night! Then realizing, there’s a Picasso. I asked him about that and he said, “Take care of your career and you can have those things on your walls. But what you’ve got to do in your 30s, you have to be onscreen in contrasting roles twice a year if you’re a leading man. You’re not a conventional leading man, by any means, so think twice about going off and doing bloody plays.”
Advice you didn’t follow particularly well. Not so much.
You just said you’d tried to understand why things went south back then. Did you arrive at any answers? A friend of mine talked in these terms once: He said that the great boxers have only seven great fights in them. He was talking about actors maybe also only having seven great roles in them where everything comes together. In between those you’re going to do a lot of dancing, you’re going to do a lot of calculating, you’re going to try and play the system — as if you had any control over it. There was a time when I used to read the trades encyclopedically. I could tell you about a junior executive who got a development deal for a spec script who was moving over to Lorimar to do something else. In the end I had to stop. I was trying to solve the conundrum of a career in movies, and I was not the man to do that.
Have you solved anything now? No. But I may have discovered, for me at least, there’s nothing to solve. That Beckett phrase of fail, fail again, fail better is maybe one to bear in mind. But who pretends that life is one slowly ascending curve of human development? Most of the time you have to smash into something: the death, the broken relationship, the horrible career moment. Then you think, Well, what matters to me? What do I enjoy? Or even just, I’m still here.
This interview has been edited and condensed from two conversations.
David Marchese is a staff writer for the magazine and the columnist for Talk. Recently he interviewed Alice Waters about being uncompromising and Neil deGrasse Tyson about how science might once again reign supreme.
(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)
