Murder and violence, revenge and intrigue, sex and desire, paranoia and madness: these passions drove Kenneth Branagh to bring Shakespeare's Hamlet to the big screen.
How long is Kenneth Branagh's new film version of Shakespeare's Hamlet? Long enough that even the film's distributors are joking about it.
"Afterwards," quipped Castle Rock president Martin Shafer at the New York premier, "we're having an early-bird breakfast!"
We can experience all three hours and 58 minutes of his epic, not counting intermission, for the next two weeks, after which it will be re-released in shortened form.
Branagh, 36, has been famous for getting away with the impossible. The current wave of Shakespeare films can be traced to his success with Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing.
But even among more mainstream films, a four hour length is difficult to sustain, not just at the box office but in terms of story telling.
Shaffer appears unworried. He points to the success of The Godfather Part II; Dances With Wolves; and The Last Emperor rather than to flops such as Heaven's Gate and Cleopatra, adding that exhibitors want the four hour version.
He says they believe audiences for this film simply want all of it, since Hamlet is one of the greatest plays ever written.
It also doesn't need to make a lot of money: The budget was a modest $18 million.
Branagh loves the idea that intimate personal problems can change the way borders are drawn in Europe.
"Even if moments weren't working at fever pitch, the structure of the play makes these things add up," he says. "Everything connects in this piece. Everything."
One might think Branagh was hedging his bets with cameo appearances by the likes of Billy Crystal (the gravedigger), Robin Williams (Osric), Kate Winslet (Ophelia), Richard Attenborough (English Ambassador), Brian Blessed (Ghost), Jack Lemmon (Marcellus), John Gielgud (Priam), Judi Dench (Hecuba), Gerard Depardieu (Reynaldo), Charlton Heston (Player King), Derek Jacobi (Claudius), John Mills (Old Norway) and many more.
But the film was approved before any such casting was discussed or finalised. Branagh was simply entrusted to come up with an intriguing line-up.
Many, including Winslet, one of England's best new actors, had never done Shakespeare before.
Neither had Julie Christie, who plays Hamlet's mother, Gertrude. It was a fascinating flourish of casting, as Christie was virtually retired from film for the past decade.
Far from a crass, glitzy purveyor of populist Shakespeare, Branagh is, in many ways, uncompromising.
In many ways, this Hamlet is highly personal. So is his own performance, which is loud and confrontational, almost too big for the screen.
The film's palace rooms, filled with two-way mirrors and secret doors, aren't just flashy film-making. Branagh uses them to fuel and explain Branagh's paranoia and madness.
"I said there had to be two hidden doors in every room...and a feeling of excess and unevenness," he says. "There's this inability for Hamlet to be alone. That dogs him. We tend to be interested in people in power, and that they have perfectly normal problems but must deal with them under a microscope."
Branagh himself has had a taste of life under the public microscope lately, thanks to his marital split from Emma Thompson.
He doesn't point fingers or analyse. He's fatalistic.
"We're responsible for ourselves. I am what I am and she is what she is. And these things are a mystery. They're written the way they're written.
"I'd love to work with her in the future. Maybe not in the immediate future. But she's one of the greatest actresses we have."
And his reputed relationship with Frankenstein co-star Helena Bonham-Carter? "We see each other," he says simply.
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