At the recently concluded San Francisco International Film Festival, Kenneth Branagh was awarded the annual Founder’s Directing Award. Preceding a screening of the director’s 1991 film “Dead Again,” he spoke to Jonathan Moscone, Artistic Director of the the California Shakespeare Theater, about his career thus far. Accordingly, the plays of William Shakespeare and Branagh’s interpretations of those works became the anchor for the two men’s conversation throughout the evening.
While of course Branagh is well regarded for both his directing and acting talents, given that he was receiving a directing award, the focus lingered on the behind-the-camera aspect of his career. He's best known for making Shakespeare accessible to wider audiences, a goal he has long held since his days co-founding the Renaissance Theatre Company in London. When he started to become immersed in the world of Shakespeare, he saw the plays as being excessively limited to enjoyment by high society types. The director recalled, “In England, it almost sometimes represents a class division. There was some kind of entertainment you had to have. A sort of qualification for it, and it made me feel as though there was a way that it could be done and a way that you could get it to people and make it available to people like me and my family and my background, which was non-theatrical and non show business. I guess I got sort of passionate about that and it led to doing a theater company that was trying to do that. Make the ticket prices a little cheaper.”
The success of his theater company led to taking that same philosophy into the film world. Branagh’s 1989 version of Shakespeare’s “Henry V” ended up making a lasting impression for the director. In his mind it was an obvious next step, as he explained, the theater success, “...led to forming a film company and we tried to do it in a particular way that didn’t sound declamatory and off-putting and that made it feel as real and human as I saw it being in the great hands of masters. You couldn’t do that as an objective idea; you had to do it reactively because you felt it wasn’t being done somewhere else. It wasn’t always rational, it wasn’t always reasonable, it wasn’t always thought out particularly, it wasn’t always clever. But it at least had a fire in its belly.”
READ MORE: http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/sfiff-kenneth-branagh-receives-directing-award-says-macbeth-may-be-his-next-shakespeare-adaptation-20120508#
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