One of the UK’s greatest creative filmmaking forces and director of multiple Oscar-nominated Belfast, Kenneth Branagh, looks back over three decades of big-budget production.
Sir Kenneth Branagh is a behemoth of film. A man who subscribes to the ‘more is less’ principle of movie-making with absolute faith in the essence that big budgets make successful movies. But this offers a peculiar contradiction. After all, the 61-year-old is such an artistic soul that a script and a stage would all but suffice given the Belfast-born actor, producer, and director’s ability to connect an audience to an idea.
How else to explain his effortless excellence across so many Shakespeare projects, from Henry V – for which he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor and Best Director – through to Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Hamlet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and As You Like It.
Yet, his big-screen work away from the Bard goes the other way, with high-quality, mass-scale projects that refuse to be held back by budget – consider Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Valkyrie, Thor, Murder on the Orient Express, and of course Death on the Nile, in cinemas now.
“Death on the Nile is an immense project and I have always been confident that all the investment and commitment would pay itself back, both financially and artistically,” says Branagh. “It’s one of those films that could have been made on the cheap, but it’s the fine details that really begin to shine when you have a bigger budget to play with. It’s the luxury of doing something really good and knowing you have the time to go back and take another look at something if it hasn’t quite come through the way you had expected. It’s quality control.”
Ultimately, he says that he’s extremely lucky to not only have made the sorts of movies he has over the past couple of decades, but to find the backers who believe in such projects, “because it’s not always been like that”.
“It was a real famine back in the ‘80s, so few movies were being made. These days sets are massive, and investment is huge, and I would like to think the output validates that. But as ever, it’s the audience who are there to judge, and that’s the way it should be.”
