CANNES, France (Reuter) - Kenneth Branagh brought his opulent, four-hour Hamlet to the Cannes film festival and insisted Shakespeare's tragedy was much richer when presented in the full text.
The film, said to be the second-longest major American or British feature film of all time -- only one minute shorter than the origina cut of Cleopatra -- was shown out of competition at the Riviera festival.
"I wanted to show Hamlet as an individual in a large context -- family, love, nations, power," the bearded Branagh, who both directs and plays the title role, told reporters.
"I don't want people to be scared of the whole text. The play is much richer that way," he said.
"I had a strong sense of what I wanted to do, and when I wanted help I was surrounded by Hamlets, including Derek Jacobi," he said of a heavyweight cast that includes Jacobi, Jack Lemmon, Robin Williams, Kate Winslet and Charlton Heston.
Shot in a vaguely defined 19th-century period at Blenheim Palace, in central England, and at London's Shepperton Studios, the film shuns ascetic adaptations of the play and is an orgy of color and rich sets, packed with visual effects, including truckloads of artificial snow covering the palace grounds.
Branagh's Danish prince, whom he has played on stage nearly 300 times, cuts a dashing figure as he agonizes over whether to murder his uncle (Jacobi) in revenge for killing his father and marrying his mother (Julie Christie). Winslet is outstanding as the prince's doomed love, Ophelia.
Aside from the full-length version shown in Cannes, Branagh also has cut a two-hour version for theaters unwilling to gamble. But, worldwide, the long version will be the one more generally shown.
"I've tried to do a compressed version, to retain some of the epic qualities. In other versions, Hamlet becomes a domestic drama," said Branagh, whose six other director credits include Shakespeare's Henry V and Much Ado About Nothing.
Branagh has Hamlet deliver the "To be or not to be" soliloquy in front of a mirror, with his uncle hiding behind it.
"I wanted the speech to be less about taking a decision on whether to kill himself and more about whether life was worth living or not, and to really have him asking himself," he said.
Shooting the movie on wide 70mm film made for sharper definition, richer colors and a sense of vastness in landscape scenes. But the bulkier cameras needed much more light and were also noisier, so they had to be smothered by duvets during dialogue scenes.
"Directing at the same time as acting was exhausting. The sword fight was the most tiring. We had three cameras, it was quick, and we had to remember the thousands of movements. I felt I had spaghetti in my head.
"But in cinema there is the advantage that you can see what you've done on the video terminal and shoot a scene again," Branagh said.
Hamlet already has been released in both the United States and Britain, where it has won widespeard acclaim, and international critics at Cannes similarly welcomed its special out-of-competition screening earlier this week.
Tired after juggling the simultaneous directing and acting, Branagh has only an acting role in Robert Altman's soon-to-be released The Gingerbread Man, as a southern lawyer in a story scripted by best-selling writer John Grisham.
Asked whether, as a director now dubbed cinema's Shakespeare guru, he planned any more adaptations of the bard's works, Branagh said: "The fact that people like Al Pacino (Looking for Richard) doing Shakespeare takes a lot of pressure off me. You can see how many different ways you can do Shakespeare."
"Hamlet is a young man's play. I wanted to do it by the age of 35. I'd like to do Macbeth, but I have to wait for that."
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