Actor-director Kenneth Branagh arrived in Edinburgh to accept the festival’s inaugural Outstanding Contribution to Cinema award from festival director Paul Ridd and immediately joked that he would break it up into little pieces. “Actually, I wouldn’t,” he told the audience, “but if I did, I would give to you, and I’m not just being sappy. Certainly, the reason why I’m standing here is that because over the last number of years, so many of you have been kind enough to support the films that we do and that are celebrated here at the festival. It just wouldn’t be possible to be working in this industry without appreciative audiences who take a risk and who spend their cash and invest their time.”
Speaking to The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw, Branagh discussed his 40-year career in movies both as an actor and director, having screened his 1989 debut Henry V. The event began, however, with an entertaining sample of his upcoming Apple film Mayday, an ‘80s-set action film in which he plays a disillusioned KGB agent who teams up with a US Navy pilot (Ryan Reynolds) who is stranded behind enemy lines.
Branagh was full of praise for writer-directors, Jonathan Goldstein and John Francis Daley. “You may know their work from Game Night and Dungeons & Dragons,” he said, “both films of deceptive ease. Really entertaining, popular movies that are very cannily done. They had planned all the action and the style sequences, so the invitation was for me to step up and enact their imagination. They’re both excellent directors, but I find it terrific to be directed by two directors. They can gang up on you in a really good way, in a helpful way.
“I read the script in one sitting,” he recalled. “I was in an airport, during a long delay in coming back home. And I remember thinking, ‘This knows exactly what it’s meant to be. It’s grasp of the period and its sheer desire to entertain — but with a lot of very skillful touches — is great. Why the hell are they asking me to be in?’ I thought Zach Galifianakis should play the part actually, but I was very pleased they asked me.”
Since the part he’s playing is Russian, Bradshaw asked if he would consider playing Vladimir Putin. “It depends on the writing,” said Branagh. “But it also depends on whether you feel that somehow, you can serve [the role] appropriately. But there’s no question that such characters, for all the reasons we’re all too familiar with, are riveting. I guess it’s pretty important to analyze, investigate and understand how and why, in as much as we can draw inferences from what little we know of the inner lives and inner machinations of such regimes, how these people operate. He’s a figure that dominates our experience in many ways, along with a number of other key figures. So just like Shakespeare wrote about all those people in control of the power in our lives, he’s a creature that fascinates us, and from whom we might learn something in the investigation.”
Branagh went on to say that his next project was a little more traditional, given his theatrical background, being a documentary about the history of British theater in the 20th century. “It’s directed by a young British actor, Freddie Fox,” he said. “You may know him from numerous pieces of work and movies, but most recently Slow Horses. He has incredible access to a number of significant people across that period. He particularly focuses on what made the impact of the theater, socially, and the change that it spoke about — whether it was to do with LGBTQ rights or the political situation in Northern Ireland, et cetera — but it also contains a really keen interest in performance.”
