by Gill Pringle
Although he quickly lost his Irish accent, the award-winning director has longed to re-visit his roots, which he does in his nostalgic biopic starring Outlander’s Caitriona Balfe and Jamie Dornan as versions of his parents, Judi Dench and Ciaran Hinds as the grandparents, while endearing ten-year-old newcomer Jude Hill’s Buddy embodies a young Branagh.
Knighted in 2012 for his services to both drama and to the Northern Ireland community, the five-time Oscar nominated actor/director/writer has arguably done more to contemporise Shakespeare than anyone alive today.
When FilmInk catches up with Branagh, 61, in Los Angeles, he has just returned from the film’s Belfast premiere which he describes as cathartic.
It must have been a special moment to premiere your film at Belfast’s Waterfront Hall?
“Yes, there were about 1,400 people there and to have the reaction of the home crowd was electric and very emotional. Everyone was there, Van Morrison and every community group and it felt like the city was right behind us. And, frankly, I still get amazed to think about coming from those streets and then ending up here and where we were last night [at the Los Angeles premiere]. It’s surreal and unbelievable. I was talking with Judi [Dench] about the reaction from people around the world about her work and she said, ‘The thing is Ken, I like people and I like meeting people. It was nice to be among people last night, we’re happy doing that. We don’t need to be in some separate room being filtered’.”
How did your family adjust to the move to the UK?
“It was tough and I think that the sacrifice had its impact. The first part of life was the illustration that it takes a village to raise a child and then the village wasn’t there, the safety was there and the protection from violence was there, and the economic opportunity was there, but I think it was tremendously hard for everybody.”
So why was it the right time to make Belfast now?
“One of the reasons to do the film was that we never ever talked about it; we just didn’t. They were so certain and so determined to make the sacrifice work that you couldn’t look back, plus that Irish thing of ‘don’t dwell, don’t indulge, other people are always worse off’, so forget about your suffering because it isn’t suffering – you’ve got a job, get on with it. But 50 years on, I needed to. But it was tough for them. In the end they had beautiful moments but, you give something up, and there’s no question, what they gave up was significant, but we were very lucky and blessed in all sorts of other ways. When you leave, in whatever sense a home or a place, I think that involves dealing with some form of loss which can be painful, although the result can also be beautiful and bittersweet, like life is sometimes.”
You finally began to write Belfast during the first lockdown of the pandemic in 2020. How did the pandemic play a role?
“That was a part of it too – going back to look at it at a time when we were all considering those difficult losses in our own lives and what is valuable to us. It meant that it had to come out. As the story percolated inside me, I realised that it was not only about a very recognisable small family group in a stressful situation, facing some big life choices. It was also about a different kind of lockdown, inside the barricades at the end of our street in 1969 and inside the constraints that were tightening around the family as they struggled with the decision about whether to stay or to go. So, some of the circumstances reflected and resonated with today’s preoccupations around the pandemic – confinement and concern for the safety of yourself and your family.”
Take us back to the Belfast of your childhood?
“Belfast is a city of stories, and in the late 1960s it went through an incredibly tumultuous period of its history, very dramatic, sometimes violent, that my family and I were caught up in. It took me 50 years to find the right way to write about it, to find the tone I wanted. It can take a very long time to understand just how simple things can be and finding that perspective, years on, provides a great focus.
“The story of my childhood, which inspired the film, has become a story of the point in everyone’s life when the child crosses over into adulthood, where innocence is lost. That point of crossover, in Belfast in 1969, was accelerated by the tumult happening around us all. At the beginning of the film, we experience a world in transition from a kind of idyll – neighbourliness, sunshine and community – which is turned upside down by the arrival of a mob who pass through like a swarm of bees and lay waste to this peace. When they’ve gone, the street is literally ripped up by worried people who now feel they have to barricade themselves against another attack, and that is exactly how I remember it. I remember life turning on its head in one afternoon, almost in slow-motion, not understanding the sound I was hearing, and then turning round and looking at the mob at the bottom of the street and life was never, ever, the same again.
“I felt that there was something dramatic and universal in that event because people might recognise a crossover point in their own lives, albeit not always as heightened by external events.”
And you were inspired by the way Pedro Almodóvar described his film Pain and Glory?
“Yes. He called it auto-fiction. It was based on his own life but fictionalised to some degree and that’s what I’ve done here. I have written it very much through the eyes of a young boy, Buddy, who is a fictional version of me. He is starting to filter his experiences through exposure to a lot of films and TV and many other imagination-based encounters and stories. Those big screen images had an enormous impact on the development of my imagination and I wanted to show Buddy having those same experiences. He loves Westerns and Belfast had something of the Western town about it, so at times I did feel as if I was writing a Western that was being constructed in Buddy’s mind. The films he is watching have a clear sense of good guy vs bad guy, good vs evil, and he is able to latch onto that as he looks at the bad guy who lives at the end of the street who he sees punching people and who might even have a gun. So, it’s not an accurate version of anyone’s life because it’s the version that is playing inside Buddy’s head. Through the lens of time, 50 years on, there’s no question that what Buddy sees isn’t precisely what I saw, but there’s certainly a poetic truth inside what emerges, which comes out of something authentic and which I think is the stuff of most drama.
“But always, the point of departure for everything in the film, is the imagination of that nine-year old boy. I hope that audiences will be entertained by Buddy’s story. There is a certain spirit and a vitality in Belfast that I hope is reflected in the film, along with a very life-affirming humour. I hope people feel the joy and sometimes the sorrows of the city and what happens to the family and that they recognise it and sympathise with it and understand, by looking at the reflections of other lives, to feel that we are not alone. If that’s what people get from the film, I would be thrilled.”
So, the movie isn’t so much about visiting 1969 but remembering 1969. Did you remember your own childhood in Belfast with so much humour or did you need to construct that afterwards?
“I think you’re right. It’s about memory. The psychologists say that the facts of our life are less important than how we remember them, so I was remembering this – with the decision to look through the eyes of a nine-year-old, I was remembering him from fifty years ago. But I wanted to get the humour in there for what was always, for me, a coping mechanism.”
You shot Belfast in black & white and also use a lot of bold extreme close-ups on the actors’ faces. What was your thinking?
“The black & white was partly chosen for a forensic quality. Our brilliant cinematographer Haris Zambarloukos described this beautifully, saying, ‘Colour allows you to describe people brilliantly, but black & white allows you to feel people’, and you take away some things that you might not otherwise look at if you look more closely at them. I always thought it was possible to make epic films in intimate situations and in cinema the reason to invest in this black & white photography on a massive screen is the human face – which might otherwise be the sweeping landscape of a desert or mountain range – whereas in black & white, when a scene has earned the right to look this way. The specific example being Judi Dench at the end, where she has this kind of Mount Rushmore stillness. The camera is in there saying, ‘Tell us what you feel! Show us your heart!’ And she opens it up. That one huge close-up of Judi Dench was one epic shot in the movie. She was so bloody good.”
Some 300 boys auditioned to play Buddy. How did you land on Jude Hill as the perfect boy to portray Buddy?
“I have always found something very compelling about seeing great child performers presenting that moment in life where you have to ‘put away childish things’, as the minister says in our film. It happens in John Boorman’s Hope and Glory where the Blitz is the background for an accelerated childhood. Christian Bale in Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun was a breathtaking performance. Louis Malle’s Au Revoir Les Enfants is staggering in the way those kids break your heart. And you can tell that all of those films were incredibly personally important to their directors. They were stories they needed to tell, and they all had a significant influence on this one. In Jude Hill, we found a boy whose talent was ready to blossom but who was still enjoying himself as an ordinary kid. Playing football was as important to him as making the film and that’s what we wanted. At the same time, he was always very serious about the work, very prepared and very open. I was asking for a curious combination – I wanted him to just be himself and I also wanted him to be able to make all the tiny performance adjustments that I was also asking for. And he really delivered. He has an extraordinary openness and is so natural in front of the camera that it was sometimes hard to believe this is his first film.”
How did you stay in touch with your Irish roots after moving from Belfast to the UK?
“The accent went away over two or three years. I think what I wanted to do personally was just disappear. I just wanted to not stick out. I wanted to keep my head down from a position of knowing exactly who you were, when we suddenly didn’t really know who we were. And I really became quite a solitary adolescent. It was really only through the family of acting that I came back through theatre companies, and back in that extended family that I had left behind. As they say, ‘The Irish were born for leaving’ and that leaving comes at a price, and I most certainly lost my way for quite some time, I would say. It took me a long time to find my way back home with this film.”
Belfast is in cinemas February 3, 2022
