COVER STORY : Once More, Onto the Screen : Continuing to try to demystify the Bard, Kenneth Branagh brings Shakespeare’s ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ to the multiplex

Baby-faced, flushed, blue eyes flashing, Kenneth Branagh arrived for a late lunch at a London restaurant from Stratford-upon-Avon, where he was starring in a full-length Royal Shakespeare Company production of “Hamlet.”

He came to discuss his film of William Shakespeare’s “Much Ado About Nothing.” As both a screenwriter (“Enchanted April”) and a dramatist who staged many Elizabethan plays and Jacobean dramas, I was interested in talking to him about the challenges of making movies of Shakespeare’s work. We agreed that “Much Ado About Nothing” is a hard play to make believable. Just look at the plot:

The Prince of Arragon (played in the upcoming film by Denzel Washington), with his companions Claudio (Robert Sean Leonard) and Benedick (Branagh), visit Leonato (Richard Briers), the father of Hero (Kate Beckinsale) and uncle of Beatrice (Emma Thompson).

While Hero and Claudio fall in love and plan to marry, Beatrice and Benedict reveal a witty, barbed relationship, though they are tricked by the others into believing they are in love. Meanwhile, Don John (Keanu Reeves), the vengeful brother of the Prince, stops Claudio’s marriage to Hero by arranging for him to see Hero apparently making love to another man. Claudio publicly denounces Hero on her wedding day--she faints and apparently dies. Beatrice gets Benedick to challenge Claudio to a duel; however the plot by Don John is unmasked by the constable Dogberry (Michael Keaton), and there’s an eventual happy ending. (The film opens Friday in New York, and May 14 in Los Angeles.)

Before we talked about “Nothing,” however, we naturally moaned about the state of British theater and of the so-called British film industry, and then complained about British theater directors. (Actually, I bitched; Branagh was more cautious.) Having made ourselves feel better, we were ready for “Much Ado.”

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Barnes: Why did you want to make a film of “Much Ado About Nothing”?

Branagh: Several reasons. I wanted to make another Shakespeare film. I’ve had such a huge mailbag over the last four years since “Henry V” was made from people for whom that picture made a big difference. Having made a couple of other films I felt I knew more about how to go further towards demystifying the nonsense that goes with Shakespeare whilst retaining, hopefully, the mystery of the material where it exists. Three-quarters of “Much Ado” is in prose. It’s very easy on the ear and it’s one of the more sunny comedies, though perhaps “As You Like It” is the greatest example of that. “Much Ado” is a mature piece that is both brave and funny. It was a combination of all these things, a step forward for Shakespeare on film in my mind and a film about love and friendship. I hope it contains good gags and great observations about human behavior in a feel-good movie.

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Barnes: In your “Henry V,” I saw an overarching vision of the play in terms of movies. It was a view of war as a thoroughly messy and unheroic business and came through very strongly. What sort of vision did you have of “Much Ado”?

Branagh: The heroism involved in love, the amount of sacrifice that’s required for it and for another human being not to react, for instance, as Claudio does. He is a man of undeveloped instinct and passion. On the other hand, Benedick and Beatrice are two battered, rather wounded creatures who profess to be independent and not requiring romantic frills. But they have a wisdom that comes from their pain and they seem to me very rounded, interesting human beings yet they’re just as vain and silly as the others. I think that it’s all too true--a level of ridiculousness, shouting and swearing, which one encounters at weddings, at births, at funerals, where outrageous scenes take place. As Hamlet says, you hold a mirror up to nature.

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Barnes: All artists hold a mirror up to nature, but it’s the angle at which they hold the mirror up that is important. You say this is a naturalistic play for Shakespeare. However, you come up against a problem with so much of the plot turning on people overhearing other people saying things. That’s non-realistic, a stage convention. We can accept this in a play. It is more difficult in movies, because movies strip away theatrical conventions and leave you with the plain facts. If the facts aren’t believable on a naturalistic level you’re in trouble.

Branagh: Well, you’re right and in a sense in doing it you have decide a kind of convention from the word go in the movie, that will allow the audience to suspend its disbelief. You have to learn to play it as truthfully within the context of what you’ve set up as possible. We trimmed the text in order to not give the audience the logic nuances that are part of every film audience, certainly every preview audience in American films, where we are enslaved to a chillingly matter-of-fact, (an) unpoetic response to stories.

Here we had to create a heightened world. We move very quickly. The quickness of the hand deceives the eye, to some extent. For instance, in the play Don John comes on and says, “I saw Hero talking in a window to this man the night before the wedding.” But it’s never seen. We put that meeting brutally and frankly on screen and have Claudio having to be restrained from shouting out. That is not in Shakespeare. But I think little touches like that help.

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Barnes: You should have done more of it. Why weren’t you more radical with the plot? The usual answer “this is Shakespeare” doesn’t hold because Verdi played fast and loose with “Othello,” as he did with “The Merry Wives of Windsor,” and nobody knocks him for that. Film is a serious art form, and I see no reason why, if in the translation from play to movie it doesn’t work, you take it apart and put it together again, so it does work.

Branagh: That’s a good point. Welles’ “Othello” could just as much be called “Orson Welles’ Othello.” Anyone who had not read “Othello” or knew the play would be none the wiser having seen that movie. And yet they would be entertained by a very extraordinary piece of filmmaking, but I suppose there is a tradition.

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Barnes: English culture has got us by the balls and we all sing soprano.

Branagh: To be honest at this stage with film No. 2 of Shakespeare, I think I hesitated about how far I could go in terms of moving the story. I’ve been careful about that. We did transpose things. But I didn’t feel a strong sense of wanting to do more than that; I wanted to tell the story as clearly as possible and I wanted as little of the kind of directorial view that, for instance, Welles has with “Othello” as possible. Maybe with another play I would feel different.

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Barnes: In movies, structure is vital. If you get that right, other things fall into place. “Henry V” has a very strong linear structure, but the problem with “Much Ado” as a play is that it’s not particularly well put together. I feel that even as a play it touches on darker aspects and then shears away from them because Shakespeare was probably commissioned to do a comedy and was told don’t get into these tragic aspects. So when you get to the Claudio scene, (in which he denounces Hero on their wedding day) you expect the play to follow that through and open up the most extraordinary darkness between these people. But instead it’s shrugged off and goes into the sunnier mode.

Branagh: In the last section of the movie there was a different kind of gravity. We bring Don John back on at the end. And I remember saying to the boys, look I’ve got him back on, but what are we going to do with him? We thought, shall we see Don Pedro spit in his eyes or Don John spit in his eyes? And the reason we didn’t come up with something is that essentially we were grafting something on and when Shakespeare has not done it (it) is hard to do it and feel justified. When I did “Henry V,” I started the film with the hollow crown speech from Richard II because I thought this is an essay on kinship. So I had Henry on the cliffs of Dover speaking out to the sea, and it felt just plastered on. It’s a bit like bringing Don John back at the end of “Much Ado.”

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Barnes: Even though “Much Ado” is prose, it is stylized, and the most difficult thing in movies is stylized language. Film is not a language-orientated medium. People don’t listen anyway. We are so visually orientated we can take the most sophisticated visual tricks but give an audience anything which is verbally complex and you are in trouble. Were you conscious of this when you were doing the movie?

Branagh: Yes, I was. I tried to tackle it by putting words on the screen and someone speaking to the audience to allow the audience to tune in to the fact we believe words are dramatic in themselves. I wanted the words to be there, white on black, and someone speaking them to make the connection. Words and an intelligent, understanding voice saying them in a way all will understand.

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Barnes: I don’t think it has anything to do with the actors, but the audience and the medium.

Branagh: I agree with you, but one of the ways in which at least we attempt to make an exception is by slightly helping to re-educate actors to say lines and use energy which they might otherwise use to kick a door or deal with a prop. It’s needing to use a particular word or phrase and to express what they feel and to marry that with the movement of the camera. We have to have anchor points of sheer visual pleasure for an audience who would otherwise be tired out by a long dialogue scene: a piece of verdant Tuscany, or rippling horse flesh or of Don John, running away down a tunnel. It’s an interesting challenge to make words work in a way that I wanted them to do.

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Barnes: That dialogue in “Much Ado” is stylized. It’s easier to attune yourself to it in a stylized setting. The moment you set that stylized dialogue in the real world of trees, landscapes, bushes, earth, there is a clash. But when you get into the non-naturalistic world of halls, corridors and rooms, then the non-naturalistic dialogue and settings are all of a piece.

Branagh: I know what you’re saying, and it’s an interesting point that’s never struck me in exactly the same way. But one of the things that made me want to pick Shakespeare for films is because past attempts to put these plays on screen in a major way was the BBC Shakespeare, which to me was a colossal disappointment. It was partly to do with a kind of obsession with stylizing things, and they got it wrong repeatedly. Either they would go for some kind of adventure playground, or some sort of studio realistic setting. I believe the challenge is to go outside and make that work.

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Barnes: I didn’t mean to say you have to build the sets necessarily. One of the best Shakespeare films is Tony Richardson’s “Hamlet” with Nicol Williamson. It works and it’s mostly interiors. It was shot in the Roundhouse Theatre, a converted train shed in Camden Town, London. I take that to be stylized.

Branagh: Yes, I’ve seen that, it’s very good. It would be easier to make films that way because it would cost a lot less. What you’re talking about was achieved in the Welles “Macbeth.” But he’s so inconsistent that he’s infuriating. He seems to have a brilliant idea and then the money ran out or something.

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Barnes: But he was marvelous. In many scripts the dialogue is purely functional. It gets you from A to B and never pretends to do anything else. In fact, they’re worried if it has any life in it because it’s distracting from the visuals.

Branagh: One remark about this screenplay when I was trying to get finance for it was, “nice story, too much dialogue.”

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Barnes: I find Shakespeare very reactionary, particularly in his comedies. The Dogberry scenes in “Much Ado” have always made my hair curl in embarrassment. Any working man in a Shakespeare play the author will either make them fools, clowns or subjects of ridicule. What a snob. No wonder the English made him their national poet. You didn’t lessen that snobbery.

Branagh: I wouldn’t disagree with what he does with the low life, although I think that it does imbue people with a rough wisdom and heart that is genuine. His treatment of them in a superficial way is--I would agree--rather snobbish and bourgeois, but that’s what he was, a bourgeois.

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Barnes: I never get that with Ben Jonson. . . .

Branagh: You’re absolutely right about that. Shakespeare was a social climber, wanting to impress people outside his social class. But I think, for instance, the character of Claudio is, as it were, no more lovable or affable than someone like Dogberry. Shakespeare also does make this apparently stupid man the instrument of everyone’s redemption. What we do is make Dogberry mad, a strange dead-eyed psychopath, but silly.

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Barnes: Say a bit about acting in Shakespeare. You’ve been in the position of doing both characters--Benedick and Henry--both onstage and in front of the camera. Did you adjust consciously or unconsciously?

Branagh: A bit of both. You consciously adjust, more so with Benedick because you have to be aware where you’re pushing for the comic effect. The whole difference is where you put your energy. As for the projection of your character, the camera will find it if you are it. Pushing doesn’t help. You have to communicate, to convey the words. Tonight on stage I’ll have to speak with more volume that I am now, or on film. But there is no less energy used. If you play a Shakespearean role about 50 times, then I think it begins to seep in in a significant way. Some strange thing happens around that mark. For a film actor the answer is to be truthful and happy and as real in front of the camera as possible.

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Barnes: And as broad as you like too, as long as it’s true and concentrated. I don’t believe you have to underplay in every instance.

Branagh: Underplaying is a bad cliche.

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Barnes: You shouldn’t be too aware of your voice?

Branagh: Absolutely. One of the reasons why we cast so many Americans was that we could reduce the possibility of being tricksy with voices.

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Barnes: Also, they shouldn’t be too aware that they are doing Shakespeare.

Branagh: No, that’s fatal. My idea of hell would be to enshrine some tight-arsed, fruity-voiced declaration which somehow implicitly said to people this is good for you, we are part of a special club who knows how to do it.

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Barnes: And that this is a classic?

Branagh: I’d rather never work again than get involved in that. There’s no point in doing that kind of thing, and I feel that very strongly about Shakespeare. There has to be a reason for doing it now, and doing it in a special way. If you don’t have that, if you’re not driven by some passion, then it’s dead and you’re playing to a very small minority, a self-congratulatory elite. I want it to be seen by large numbers of people all across America. I want it to be the hip thing to see. Let’s face it, I’d rather have an audience.

Barnes: That seems a good exit line.