Kenneth Branagh is sporting a surprisingly outdoorsy look in jeans and a black polar fleece pullover. At the end of a cross-Canada trip to promote his new, four-hour Hamlet (which opens here on Friday, January 24), he's sinking into a plush chair in his Hotel Vancouver suite, his long legs propped up on the bed. Only his fencing-master goatee and practised flourish with the Marlboro Lights (usually a sign of someone struggling to quit) are visual reminders of his European roots.
Branagh likewise did a North American trek for Henry V, his first film as a director-star, and he says he prefers this approach to the media junkets, wherein journalists from all over fly in to see him and other principals. "These are hard pictures," he insists, "and you need to talk about them." In fact, his conversation is peppered with quotes from the play and ruminations on his production.
As a graduate of several venerable British theatre companies, Branagh is very much aware of the peculiar art of the Shakespearean actor -- with its own special substratum of would-be Hamlets -- in which the subtlest shadings of words from famous soliloquies are passed down through the generations, like holy relics to be held in the mouth. Branagh is part of a continuum that dates back to tights-wearing thespians of the 17th and 18th centuries, actors such as Thomas Betterton and David Garrick. He's somewhat self-deprecating off his turf, away from the set and stage, and, in a way, he's still wary of his subject.
"It is impossible to do the definitive version," he says, suddenly sitting upright, "because even if people don't know the play, they come at it with certain expectations about how the character should look, what age he should be. There have been cartoons and parodies of all sorts, and there's even a cigar called Hamlet. I think that's how I first heard the name: 'Happiness is a cigar called Hamlet.' But the play is so vast, the character is so complex, and it's so open to interpretation, as opposed to Henry V, which has a much narrower historical basis. With this, he [Shakespeare] was in his mature period; this is the play, probably more than any other, which has been looked to to confirm his politics and his attitude to the world."
He says scholars have used the Danish-set play to "prove" that the Bard was a misogynist or a feminist, a fascist or a liberal. "The same kind of diversity of potential is true of the central character. One reason people go to see it repeatedly is that it's probably the greatest straight part in all of drama. It's a personality performance and you are required to use all of you; Hamlet is someone who can be neurotic, mad, lyrical, antagonistic, humourful, or humourless.
"With this film version, having been a little more exact about who I thought Hamlet could be in previous versions, I wanted this one to be as various as possible. To play, moment to moment and scene to scene, as extremely as possible whatever he seemed to be feeling at that time: a sense of abandonment with Ophelia; wicked humour with Rosencranz and Guildenstern; a paranoia and provocation with Claudius, after he's killed Polonius."
In the past, though, he has committed himself to one kind of Hamlet at a time, including one built on "turbulent and dangerous lunacy", as the new king puts it. "I've done a mad Hamlet, which wasn't very helpful, and I've done a strong Oedipal thing too, with the classic kissing-your-mother- passionately bit, and that didn't seem to work for me either. In the end, the more familiar I became with the part, the closer I got to what actors aim for, which is that the part plays you. If you're lucky, maybe you forget actively about all those things and the poetry of the part sort of surprises you. Something mysterious happens, because the poetry, like music, acts on the spirit."
Even if this spirit is more likely to evaporate when cameras are rolling. "I think the process of trying to get the best out of actors on film is a continual process of informed trickery." For example, in one of Kate Winslet's big scenes, he kept making her repeat takes until her frustration fit in with his view of the character. "I tried to discourage anyone from bringing in something they predetermined might be effective. I like to encourage them, from take to take to give away some love affair with a particular inflection. Sometimes the cameras would be rolling and I would wait for a very long time before calling 'Action,' so that it started to healthily unsettle people. You're trying to recreate each time, rather than just repeat."
As a filmmaker, he hoped the play's new setting ("this 19th-century, paranoid hall of mirrors") would solve some problems, and the full-length, essentially unedited version also gives the supporting players bigger parts. But however it's presented, Hamlet can't help but bulge with unmistakably modern, bleakly existential facets. "It's a wonderful study of a dysfunctional family, where the breakdown of communication seems total. He [Hamlet] has a conversation with his father that he might have had before he died, and he's unable to have a conversation with his mother in the one month following his father's death. You feel if that conversation had happened at the beginning of the play, things could have gone a different way."
Often, this tale of guilt and revenge is read as a study in moral paralysis, but the real freeze took place before the play even started -- in a sense, it's the world Hamlet is born into that determines his actions and his fate. "I don't think he's an indecisive man. His problem is in the idea of taking a life in cold blood -- he's usually in a rage or at a cold remove." And because it's all seen through Hamlet's eyes, there is substantial ambiguity about the actual crime. "You've got to take everybody's truth in the play as being absolutely subjective. Hamlet's perspective is never really confirmed by anyone else, which puts him in an incredibly lonely and isolated position." In other words, no action -- taken or untaken -- can ever be seen as pure.
If these Rashomon-like grey areas are fleshed out by using the full text, some of Branagh's filmmaking choices are a bit, well, literal, as when his "Alas, poor Yorick" dissolves into a flashback with the old jester in the too, too solid flesh. "For me, that's a sequence that can often encourage the actor -- in the midst of one of Shakespeare's greatest hits -- to go into a kind of wistful reverie. I've never been convinced in the theatre, when I've seen someone hold a skull, that it truly belonged to a living, breathing being -- someone they knew, flesh and bone, and not someone despairing like Hamlet, but someone who made people laugh. I don't know how many people have actually done it, picked up the skull of somebody they knew. It would be chilling."
Overall, he decided to err on the side of clarity. "Yes, clarity and a definite decision to take a strong interpretive line in which clarity was at its maximum, but there were still vast areas for the mysteries of the play to sing on. You know, my own resistance to doing strong inflected, 20th-century versions of Shakespeare is because while it would make some parts of the play work wonderfully, it would absolutely kill other parts. But our primary goal was to tell the story as clearly as possible so that anyone who'd never seen or read the play could understand what was going on."
Then there's the problem of music loudly competing with dialogue. "That's something a number of people find a funny area in my work. I like music enormously, and I think it directs the audience in ways that are very helpful, but there's obviously a price to pay for that, sometimes. Maybe I'll get to the point where I do Shakespeare with no music at all!"
With that, he grabs a dagger the Georgia Straight's photographer has brought and begins posing for a gloomily dramatic series of pictures. But there's still time for me to offer him a quote from British critic Terrence Hawkes, who asked whether Hamlet officially begins at the first appearance of the sentry or when you walk into the theatre. The postmodern answer? "Hamlet has always already begun." It's a great line, but I admit that I have no idea what it means. "Neither do I," allows Branagh, breaking character with a big laugh, "but it feels right, doesn't it? And that's the main thing."