When the Job Is Odious

It’s hard to think of another actor who can so effectively convince laymen of the joys of his profession as Kenneth Branagh. He waxes lyrical about acting and actors, the process of putting on a show or rehearsing a film. There’s a boyish enthusiasm about him when he talks this way. Here’s an actor, it seems, who never encountered a role he didn’t like.

Until now, that is. In the chilling new HBO drama “Conspiracy,” which airs Saturday night at 9, Branagh plays Reinhard Heydrich, one of Hitler’s most trusted lieutenants in the Third Reich; it was his job to set in motion the Final Solution, the extermination of millions of Jews across Europe in World War II.

To effect these plans, Heydrich convened a top-secret meeting of 14 high-ranking Nazi officers in a mansion at Wannsee, in Berlin’s suburbs, in January 1942. “Conspiracy” is a dramatization of that meeting. Some officers around the table are uneasy when mass extermination enters the agenda, and voice objections. But as the meeting proceeds, it becomes clear that the Final Solution is not up for discussion. It is a policy approved at the highest level, and the task of the eerily persuasive Heydrich is to find a consensus among the group about its implementation.

“I found it disturbing to [portray] the man,” confided Branagh, over afternoon tea at a large central London hotel. “There’s a spiritual revulsion against playing him. You don’t want to be saying the things he was saying, or be part of his psyche. I found it got under the skin in an invasive way.”

Still, Branagh plays Heydrich with verve. His hair dyed blond and swept back sleekly, he is the last person to arrive at Wannsee and makes a flamboyant entrance, immediately demonstrating his superiority. He goes on to run the meeting like the chairman of a corporation, sometimes showing deference and courtesy to other points of view, and frequently calling breaks for drinks and lunch to defuse tension, but ruthlessly proceeding toward a point where his 14 colleagues agree to genocide.

Most of the Nazi officers who attended Wannsee were obscure names--the exception being Adolf Eichmann, who was tried and executed for his war crimes in Jerusalem in 1961. He is played in “Conspiracy” by the cast’s one American actor, Stanley Tucci; most of the others (including Colin Firth as an uneasy Dr. Wilhelm Stuckart, state secretary of the interior) are stage-trained British actors.

Director Frank Pierson (who won an Oscar as screenwriter of “Dog Day Afternoon” and who directed “Truman” and “Citizen Cohn” for HBO) placed most of the action of “Conspiracy” inside the meeting room--which was reconstructed at Shepperton Studios, near London, with four walls, to the exact dimensions of the original. (Exterior scenes at the beginning and end were shot at Wannsee.)

With several extended scenes and long tracking shots, it feels like a play being filmed. The eye-level camera angles underline the feeling for viewers of being present in that room. After rehearsing, it was shot in 21 days.

“I think the experience got under the skins of everyone involved in it,” Branagh recalled. “You’d rehearse moments, and a piece of dialogue would hit home. We partly coped with it all through a lunatic Monty Python humor. When I read the script, my reaction was jaw-dropping astonishment at the tone of this meeting and the apparently easy, casual quality to the discussion of the fate of an entire race across Europe. Yet it felt like the quiet political infighting of a board meeting at a big company.

“Being around that casual tone, and the manner in which the material was dealt with was as shocking as one’s exposure to more obviously horrific elements of the Holocaust itself. This was a job, farmed out by a Fhrer who had decided issues like this could be delegated. It was all about logistics, and those people ‘round the table were irritated. It was an annoyance, all that administration being brought in to solve this Jewish problem. ‘Oh, it had to be done, but what an annoyance.’ That was the attitude.”

Because of this contrast between the exasperated, morally indifferent manner in which these Nazis contemplated the Final Solution, and the unimaginable awfulness of its consequences, Pierson and his cast chose to play down the melodrama inherent in the Wannsee meeting.

“Conspiracy” screenwriter Loring Mandel said Pierson and editor Peter Zinner became interested in doing the movie after they saw a subtitled 1984 Austrian-German docudrama, “The Wannsee Conference.”

Initial research revealed that minutes of the conference contained no direct quotes. The filmmakers then did extensive independent research on the meeting and the background of all the participants. Loring said he turned in his first draft in the fall of 1996.

Several years and many redrafts later, “Conspiracy” flirts with being undramatic for much of its 87-minute length. As the Nazi officers arrive at Wannsee to be greeted by Eichmann, much is made of their repetitive “Heil Hitler!” salutes--to the extent they become creepily amusing. The camera lingers over the food and drink consumed at the meeting, and the place settings; Hannah Arendt’s memorable phrase about “the banality of evil” often comes to mind.

“The idea was to stay away from being theatrical, and resist the lure of easy melodrama,” said Branagh. “There was no desire to catch great moments. It’s obvious from the way it was written that some of the information deserved to ring on the air a bit, but Frank tried to take that out.”

Another problem for Branagh was finding anything in Heydrich’s character or upbringing that might explain his cold-blooded willingness to undertake genocide on such a horrific scale: “But nothing in his background supplied any clues. He had a loving, supportive family. There seemed to be no traumatic incidents in childhood, no sibling rivalry. In some ways he was an ideal Nazi--he was an excellent musician, an Olympian fencer.

“One of the questions you have to try and answer is some definition that allows you to play the character of the man you’re playing. But I discussed this with Stanley Tucci, and he felt the same about Eichmann as I felt about Heydrich. You feel there’s nothing there.

“There was no compassion inside Heydrich. He had dirt on all fellow Nazis. Hitler and Himmler knew he was a lethal weapon who was happy to do all the dirty jobs. Anything no one else wanted to do, delving into moral backwaters, he had no problem with. Playing him, I felt if he had been asked to eradicate Eskimos, cabinet-makers or gymnasts he would have proceeded with the task in the same way, with the same passionless, soulless quality.”

For all his personal reservations about playing a character such as Heydrich, Branagh is happy to have been a part of “Conspiracy.”

“I thought it was an important story to be told,” he said. He was also impressed by the attitude of HBO Films, a company he believes is now tackling substantial stories that might have once found a natural home at major movie studios. “It’s hard to imagine [‘Conspiracy’] being financed in a feature context,” he noted, “or for it to have been cast with the kind of actors we had. It was not about trying to be starry or grab attention.

“There’s an audience for these kinds of stories, certain kinds of serious, not solemn films. HBO has found a creative identity, which is drawing filmmakers and actors because of the freedom it offers and the originality of the material.”

Like much of Branagh’s recent work, “Conspiracy” is a project initiated by someone else. Contrast this with his early career, when he was the prime mover of most of the films in which he appeared.

He first received world-wide acclaim in 1989 as the director-star of “Henry V,” a triumphant film adaptation of Shakespeare’s patriotic history play that critics compared favorably to the Laurence Olivier version. He was not yet 30 at the time, and he was saddled with a wunderkind label and an expectation that he would automatically join the pantheon of film greats.

Branagh made himself the keeper of the Shakespearean flame on film, and his company, Renaissance Films, produced a well-received movie version of “Much Ado About Nothing” and a distinguished full-length “Hamlet” on film. (He also appeared as Iago in a Castle Rock film of “Othello.”) He interrupted his forays into Shakespeare with light, comic, self-produced films with ensemble casts, like “Peter’s Friends” and “A Midwinter’s Tale.”

But then about three years ago his film career seemed to stumble. He appeared in a series of movies that either failed artistically or did not effectively showcase his talents. These included Robert Altman’s “The Gingerbread Man” and Woody Allen’s “Celebrity,” as well as “The Proposition,” “The Theory of Flight” and “Wild Wild West.”

Last year his film version of Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labours Lost,” staged like a classic MGM musical, received a critical mauling and died at the box office. Branagh recently turned 40, so he can no longer be classified as any sort of wunderkind .

And clearly he is in a transitional mid-career period. Certainly he has not been inactive, and has been acting in other people’s films for a spell. He stars in “How to Kill Your Neighbor’s Dog” with Robin Wright Penn, which was shown at last year’s Toronto Film Festival but has been tied up in distribution problems. “It’s a very funny, black piece of work, a contemporary comedy,” he said. “I play an English playwright in Los Angeles, railing against the world and suffering from writer’s block. His wife wants children, but he doesn’t. He’s funny and witty in the world, but he can’t write the great play.”

Branagh has also completed “Rabbit Proof Fence,” an Australian film directed by Philip Noyce. It deals with a lost generation of half-caste Aborigines separated from their parents and re-educated in settlements. “It’s based on a true story about three girls--they’re aged about 14, 11 and 9--who escape from the settlement. They’re pursued by a Mr. Neville, who I play. He’s a stubborn but compassionate imperial administrator.”

Still, Branagh’s new project is the one that excites him most. Shortly after this interview, he departed for Greenland to make a film about the legendary English polar explorer Ernest Shackleton, and his doomed 1914 attempt to cross the frozen wastes of Antarctica. The film is being financed by Britain’s Channel 4 television.

“The director, Charles Sturridge, approached me about it a year ago,” he said. “I’m fascinated by exploration, polar exploration, and that whole golden age. It’s been a great ongoing research project. I love research. It’s like having your own little private university--your Third Reich library increases, then your exploration library.” He smiled. “Sometimes the film gets in the way of the research.”

The original idea was to shoot the Shackleton film in Antarctica: “But Greenland is more practical from an infrastructure point of view. It’s so hard to get down to Antarctica, and we have to get people out if they fall sick. There are 75 speaking parts, and 120 crew. We’ll be living on an ice-breaker, four to a cabin. Shackleton was a remarkable personality, and a great leader of men. It will be the opposite side of the coin from Heydrich, who was fascinating to research but horrible to play.”

Next March, Branagh will return to the British stage for the first time since he played “Hamlet” with the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1992. He will play Shakespeare’s “Richard III” at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, in the north of England. (The Crucible is making a name for itself as one of Britain’s most adventurous provincial theaters: Joseph Fiennes recently starred there in a production of Marlowe’s “Edward II.”)

Branagh’s next Shakespeare film will almost certainly be “Macbeth,” which he expects to embark upon at the end of next year. This time, he will not direct. He sounds as if he has his hands full, yet he admits he has kept a relatively low profile: “I didn’t work a lot last year. I’m happy to say it’s been quiet on the Ken Branagh front.” He grimaced as he said this--over the years, Branagh has attracted some extraordinary hostility from the British media.

“It’s nice to check out from time to time,” he added. “You have the luxury of some choice. It’s what interests you, what you find yourself drawn to that you think you might do good work with.” One assumes he won’t be playing too many murderous Nazis in the near future? Branagh took a sharp inward breath. “Not for a while, maybe,” he said.

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* “Conspiracy” will air Saturday at 9 p.m. The network has rated it TV-14-LD (may be unsuitable for children younger than 14 with special advisories for coarse language and suggestive dialogue).