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Sunday at the Edinburgh Intl. Film Festival turned into Edinbranagh, with a morning screening of the four-hour epic “Hamlet” followed by a wide-ranging onstage conversation with Kenneth Branagh, which began with him
receiving the inaugural EIFF Outstanding Contribution to Cinema award.
“Festivals are more important to our industry than ever before,” Branagh said, holding the award and arguing they offer a lifeline to films struggling to find a traditional theatrical path. He promptly turned the honor back on the packed audience: “You are the reason, certainly the reason why I stand here.”
Hosted by Guardian critic Peter Bradshaw, the talk jumped across Branagh’s sprawling career.
He recalled preparing his 1991 thriller “Dead Again” from Sydney Pollack’s office when he felt the room move. Then Pollack’s Academy Awards started sliding.
“I started to see the two Oscars do a sort of dance on the top shelf,” Branagh said. “It was an earthquake.”
“Dead Again,” his neo-noir follow up to “Henry V,” had its own shaky beginnings. Early previews were “disastrous,” with audiences heading for the exits. The fix? Restore screenwriter Scott Frank’s original idea of rendering the past in black and white. “Suddenly the preview score went through the roof,” Branagh said. “We were loved again by our studio family.”
Christopher Nolan offered a different kind of ordeal. On “Tenet,” Branagh asked whether his Russian oligarch should speak Russian backwards while moving backwards through time.
“I saw this terrible, dangerous light in his eye,” he recalled. Nolan’s answer: “Yes, I think you would.”
So Branagh spent lunch learning backwards Russian.
Then came Hogwarts.
Branagh had assumed Gilderoy Lockhart in “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” might mean three or four weeks’ work. Instead, “I was on it for nine months.” The crew list, he said, was “the size of a telephone directory.”
On his first day, Branagh thought he saw Daniel Radcliffe and Rupert Grint, only to discover stunt doubles and stand-ins filling an entire classroom while the young stars were at school. When the real actors appeared, Hogwarts had become its own ecosystem: “Notes were being passed. Little darts were being thrown at people.”
For Branagh, the scale was staggering, children essentially living inside a fictional school while surrounded by “the entire British film industry.”
The conversation kept circling back to Shakespeare. Branagh said his early theater company had a “missionary zeal” to make the plays feel immediate rather than bogged down by reverence. He wanted his parents to be able to watch Shakespeare “and not feel they had to read the play beforehand.”
“When Shakespeare was real, there was nothing in the way,” he said. “You just had truth. If it was truthful, you felt it, you understood it.
That instinct fuelled his directorial debut “Henry V,” made despite producer David Puttnam’s late warning that the film could collapse and damage Branagh’s career, a sentiment Puttnam later retracted in a gracious note of apology. Branagh said one of the most useful lessons he learned as a director could be summed up in three words: “I don’t know.”
The afternoon’s most personal moment came with “Belfast.” Written during the pandemic, the semi-autobiographical film emerged, Branagh said, after the story had sat inside him for roughly 40 years.
His sister’s reaction to the script: “My God, for a very private man, you’ve really put it all out there now, haven’t you?”
Branagh grew emotional.
“It was cathartic,” he said. “It was necessary. Somehow it was necessary.”
After a career spanning Shakespeare, superheroes, Poirot, Hogwarts and Hollywood, his closing advice to an audience member was simple:
“Keep practising and enjoy.”
