Kenneth Branagh
Kenneth Branagh
Sir Kenneth Charles Branagh is a Northern Irish actor, director, producer, and screenwriter. Branagh trained at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. He has directed or starred in several film adaptations of William Shakespeare's plays, including Henry V, Much Ado About Nothing, Othello, Hamlet, Love's Labour's Lost, and As You Like It...
NationalityIrish
ProfessionDirector
Date of Birth10 December 1960
CityBelfast, Northern Ireland
CountryIreland
Kenneth Branagh quotes about
The glory of 70mm is the sharpness of the image it offers.
Adults are just children who earn money.
When I'm acting, I'm in the director's hands. I'm very happy to be. I like to be focused on what I'm doing.
After Frankenstein, I feel as if I want to make a film about somebody having a nice cup of tea.
The long version of the play is actually an easier version to follow. In all of the cut versions the intense speeches are cut too close together for the audience and the actors.
The elasticity of Shakespeare is extraordinary.
Everything is important, but there is a weight to these big or expected things and then there is the logistics of them and it's trying to find, while you worry about for instance the ballroom scene, how do you get 500 people to go to the loo in corsets and don't cost you an hour and how do you remember while you're organizing all that to take a breath and say, 'Well the scene is about all of that and it's about [Prince] hand on the small of [Cinderella] back as well' and we need time to do that properly as well.
I don't think Hamlet is mad, nor is he predisposed to be a gloomy or tragic figure.
There is some mysterious thing that goes on whereby, in the process of playing Shakespeare continuously, actors are surprised by the way the language actually acts on them.
I only really cast people who are desperate to be in it - who were dying to be in it, whose talent I believed in and were dead ready to do the work that was necessary.
It's no accident that Cinderella has been in the culture for thousands of years, and in cross cultures. I've traveled a bit recently, and in Russia, they completely believe they own this tale. And in Italy, they feel it absolutely is part of who they are. There is a timeless web to it.
As soon as someone I don’t respect tells me I can’t do something, it just makes me want to do it even more.
It's very strange that the people you love are often the people you're most cruel to.
I come from the theatre, my bones are in the theatre; it’s as natural as breathing to want to be in the theatre