"Can I offer you the squishy chair?"
The sun is descending spectacularly outside Kenneth Branagh's hotel window, but just now the actor, writer and director has his considerable social skills trained on a visitor. Taller than you'd expect and dressed in a beautiful three-button suit the color of old office furniture, Branagh has eyes that shine with unqualified smartness. If he's frayed after a long day of interviews it's hard to tell; his posture argues years of sit-ups and soirées, of hallo-ing strangers at the door.
I locate the squishy chair while he amuses himself quoting Hitchcock's Rebecca (Joan Fontaine to Laurence Olivier: "We ah heppy, ahn't we? So very heppy.") It's pretty funny stuff. I unravel my tape-recorder mike (Q: "Do you like the sound of your own voice?" A: "Not particularly, no," followed by a hearty laugh) as he settles on the couch, lights a cigarette and blows smoke away from us both like a matinee idol.
Branagh's presence is vivid, unnervingly natural despite the artificiality of a hotel suite and the presence of two attendants, who disappear when we begin to talk. But then, he's wearing theatrical make-up and his newly blond hair is sprayed back. It's fitting, since the braid of nature and artifice is a recurrent theme in Shakespeare's work. As if to acknowledge that, Branagh quotes freely from the Bard. Never to show off, though; the lines he quotes are plainly inside him.
His vibrant, emotionally harrowing four-hour production of Hamlet is, however, utterly honest and untheatrical. With Branagh in the title role and a cast that includes Julie Christie, Billy Crystal and Robin Williams, the film offers a refreshingly sinister Polonius (Richard Briers), a sharply sexual note in the Hamlet-Ophelia (Kate Winslet) subplot and a Claudius (Derek Jacobi) who is a perceptive usurper.
The actors have praised Branagh's good humor and focus on the set. "I tried to be in an acting state where you can be in the moment, react to what they've [the other actors] just said, and try to make it come out as though you've just thought of it," he says. "And forget about 'It's here forever, it's the full-length version, I've got to be something.' I just wanted to be real." He contrasts this situation with directing "where you've got a cell phone in one hand, a dagger in the other and you're wondering when to throw the confetti, which is going to take forever to clear up."
I tell him that my notes on the film consist mostly of phrases like "Derek Jacobi is fucking amazing."
Branagh sparkles. "Derek Jacobi is fuckin' amazing," he says. "he's so available to direction-- he's a sort of acting machine. Kate Winslet is the same way. It's their natural home to be performing. They work like dogs, they've got their research done and they can turn on a six-pence. As opposed to Julie Christie, who finds the process agony. But if they've yelled one scene and you say 'OK, now do it in a whisper,' they kind of seize on things like that. They'll happily throw things away. Derek is such an intelligent actor, and easy to work with. He does the Times crossword in 30 minutes every morning, the bastard."
Branagh doesn't pretend that his grasp of the play is definitive, only that at 35 (when he shot the film), he was of age. "My process through various productions of Hamlet has been one of waking up to the fact that I can't put my hands around it, I can't define it. I can't nail it or nail the character--that my Hamlet's this kind of a Hamlet, or that the play is this or that."
An admitted workaholic who is rumored not to have gotten over his separation from actress and filmmaker Emma Thompson, Branagh notes that Hamlet--our culture's preeminent play about the horror of discovering that all things deteriorate--has a definite grip on him. At 11, he was overwhelmed by a Richard Chamberlain version: "Irish, Protestant, working-class," he writes in press material, "I knew nothing of 'fardels' or 'bodkins,' but I knew that there was 'something.'" With a modesty that seems dubious until you meet him, he adds, "I was interested in soccer and girls. Shakespeare was for swots." At 15, a Derek Jacobi production of the play in London gave him the shakes. Swot or no, here was a character Branagh needed to get closer to.
But other plays he says he'd like to adapt for the screen--Love's Labour's Lost, Macbeth and The Winter's Tale--plays about jealousy, ambition, swearing off women, seem autobiographical too. Branagh is careful about his private life, but you can hear a personal note in his discussion of Hamlet's rage: "He couldn't accept that Ophelia was in an absolutely untenable position when she appeared to betray him, and he could not accept the impossible position that Rosenkrantz [sic] and Guildenstern were in. Somebody once said to me, 'You know that all suffering is a resistance to what is,' and Hamlet suffers through the play. But don't we all? We aren't granted some enlightened, Zen-like state to get through the vicissitudes of life. But I like the way he arrives at something different at the end--he senses the imminence of his end and is at peace. That's the speech I always head for in the play, the one that ends 'the readiness is all.'"
Naturally.
[notes in the margins]On the added sexual note in his Hamlet, Kenneth Branagh says, "Some people don't like the flashbacks where Hamlet and Ophelia sleep together--but there are lines for me that're proof enough. And think, it's worth making clear that these characters are not from Shakespeare Film Land, but real people for whom that kind of thing would have muddied their thoughts."
Kenneth Branagh had auditioned Kate Winslet for his 1994 film Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, but he didn't cast her because something "bugged" him. "I realized, you see, that I had met a star," he recalls. "She's a remarkable girl, like she's been through the wars on the Titanic--very strong...So I said, 'Do you mind if I ask how old you are?' She said, '17.'" Branagh does a spit-take. "I thought she was 29."