Kenneth Branagh Quotes

Across all Cinderella versions it was clear that the 21st century was not very much in evidence, particularly in the character of Cinderella so it seemed, it felt actually as though it hadn't been done for quite some time, not with the kind of lushness that we could do it with, with an absolute removal of the passivity of Cinderella and finding an amusing way, a lighthearted but significant way of making her proactive and not a girl who's life is about waiting for a bloke.

I choose to be inspired by things that have been done well in the past. So, I don't worry about being compared, because I think that does paralyze you.

You can't live in nostalgia-land.

Even if people are all from the same place, there can be very, very different approaches. It's one of the things I'm fascinated by. It's why I like directing. I like to see how different people approach trying to be truthful, on camera or in the theater, and whether you can make them match up.

I did not expect to be allowed to be an actor, to be allowed to eventually direct things.

Actually I think 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' could sit very very perfectly in the middle of a Disney world I think.

Sometimes I used to think to myself, 'Have I lost a sense of humor?' but I don't think that I have. I think one can be as snarky and sarcastic as lots of people, but I have never found that it makes me particularly happy.

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.

One of the problems with Shakespeare is that you can never give him a ring.

Variety is very, very good. Going from medium to medium, if you get the chance to do it, from theater to television to film, which are all distinctly different, keeps me sharp. What works in one doesn't work in the other, and you have to be looking for the truth of the performance, whatever way that medium might demand.

I was studying at the Royal Academy of Arts, and I was playing the role of Dr. Ivan Chebutikin in Chekov's 'Three Sisters.' I was about 50 years too young for the part.

My experience of great storytelling, working with classics, is just finding a way to present it simply but let the story do its own work, or be an invite to the audience's imagination.

Sometimes it comes out in what I call tricksy behavior. That's not always easy to deal with, but it's fascinating. The key thing is to make sure that somebody's tricks don't trip up somebody else.

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.

I'm very conscious of the fact the directing career has taken some odd turns. Maybe there's enough bulk where I'm now pigeonholed in the 'eclectic box.'

I do think that, for instance, we've been very lucky to have theatrical careers and be associated with Shakespeare which sometimes gives you a kind of bogus kudos.

In the course of my lifetime, that world went from violence to a kind of peace.

I was stuck in a wheelchair playing this deranged villain. I felt this mass amount of rage at being so confined. I thought, 'What can I do that is the direct opposite of this situation?' The only thing I could think of was that I could sing and dance.

Two billion people watched the royal wedding. Clearly, they're interested in that - the outside of what appears to be lives that have a certain amount of privilege. They have gifts, they have history, they have a sort of unusual and separate position, which maybe involves paying a price.

Helena Bonham-Carter and I sat down to talk about [Cinderella movie] and she said, 'I really want to do it but only one thing I insist on and that's wings.' She had to have wings and [costume designer] Sandy Powell didn't want wings to begin with but had to be talked around, but that was fun.

I am very much looking forward to new adventures - including, I hope, Broadway - sooner rather than later.

Sir Derek Jacobi has been an inspiration to so many actors and audiences throughout his brilliant career. To see him in Shakespeare is an event in itself.

I would say my voice is actor-neutral.

Somehow I know there was something so right about my doing Frankenstein and taking so long over it that I've probably been laying some ghost inside myself. It was a very necessary job for me to do, but it'll take some time to recover from it.

What you want is the opportunity to work and an audience. Prizes after that are just a great big bonus.

In any given project, there are a few moments where there is the usual disappointment, as it were, when you look in the mirror, and you realize you're not 23 and looking like Brad Pitt.

I don't know that the Brits have the monopoly on being organized, but they do have a way of working with which I'm familiar. It's not necessarily the best way, but it's a way.

Life is surreal and beautiful.

I did not make this a long film for its own sake. I wanted to make an entertaining film and offer it out there for those who want to see it. If word of mouth suggests there is an audience out there, hopefully their cinema will show it.

I have a pathetic urge at some stage in my life to be able to pull out my wallet and pull out a little card on which it would say, 'Kenneth Branagh, artistic director.'

The glory of 70mm is the sharpness of the image it offers.

I've always loved pure, silly slapstick comedy. It always makes me laugh.

At the end of every stage performance, the audience all applaud me for doing my job, but I have friends who work in offices who don't get that.

With people in corsets you need, an hour and a half in you have to give somebody something, you have to have those trays with a little bit of fruit going around or something because you get that blood sugar [dropping] thing, so it's curious because that's in your mind at the same time as you're about to say, 'I think it's about the humanity and the depth of feeling and we need to feel [Cinderella] soul expand and by the way, more cheese for the people in the back.'

I don't feel one could even remotely touch the idea of intimidating others, but because I've understood the other side of the experience, I will occasionally, if I smell that could even be in the air for a few minutes, say to the director, "Please, you must tell me anything you want. Please say all the things you think might be terribly hurtful like, 'That was boring.'"

Even when a film is finished, when I direct a film, sometimes it's a dark profession, but it requires a peculiar form of courage that I admire.

A brother who is unhappy is a dangerous relative to have.

The director needs to be in command on set because everything crumbles if that's not the case.

I live in the English countryside, so I'm surrounded by magpies.

I think I do have a way of predicting - not always accurately - what is a nerve-wracking day for actors, what may be a difficult scene or a difficult moment, how small - and it may be down to one line - a thing maybe that is upsetting or undermining a performance.

I don't think Hamlet is mad, nor is he predisposed to be a gloomy or tragic figure.

I think that a lot of exciting elements are finding a place where a film is happily, truly about something.

A lot of the films I've done have links to other movies that I've directed in the past.

It's quite hard for people to just accept that they're very contradictory.

What happens is that with difficult processes on a film, they get very intensely compressed because a clock is ticking.

I like to cast actors I admire, one's that are talented. Each one will bring something new to the part. This play has been done thousands of times and now certain characters are too familiar.

I've heard from quite a few people, you sense that there is an ownership of the [ Cinderella], it was so personal for so many people, so I was interested in trying to work out why that was.

Even in the case of a god, audiences - paradoxically - enjoy recognizing the human traits.

There's always something to think about in terms of problems that are dark and important and immediate and scary.

I suppose, at 50, you value things in a different way. So you value connections, you value your friendships, you value your health, and you are much more aware of time passing.

I'm just a normal working class boy from Belfast.

Certainly, I'm excited by epic subjects. It doesn't particularly frighten me.

The BAFTA is both absolutely fantastic and sort of meaningless at the same time.

The Chinese say, 'It's good to live in interesting times.'

I'll tell you what I'm grateful for, and that's the clarity of understanding that the most important things in life are health, family and friends, and the time to spend on them.

I'm involved in Northern Ireland Screen and have been for a long time, so I keep my eyes open and ears to the ground.

I fondly remember good times working on 'Thor.'

I noted about Cate Blanchett was her very positive lack of concern for how she turns out in [Cinderella]. She is happy to be a villainess and very pleased to be encouraged as I did with her to reveal this backstory and feel as though this was very human, that this broken heart of hers, if you might regard it that way, would be visible, but she never played for sympathy and I really admired that about her, so she's just there, she just is and uncompromisingly.

I read the final Wallander novel, 'The Troubled Man,' not long after it was published.

If it's good art, it's good.

In the case of 'Jack Ryan,' it was a huge collaboration, and I enjoyed it very much, and most of all, I want the audience to enjoy it, too. I want them to feel immersed in this world.

I certainly have been guilty of trying to sweep things under the carpet.

I went to Moscow and met some slightly powerful and scary people.

I did 'Celebrity' by Woody Allen. I did 'The Gingerbread Man' with Robert Altman. These were big talents.

For a nanosecond in the pre-Internet pre-digital age, I was a hot young actor, in the sense of popular, and then it passed.

I think television goes through phases, like other creative arts, where suddenly a group of people are producing exciting work all at once.

Many of us live in dysfunctional families, and so even if it's in a fairy tale, or perhaps because it's in a fairy tale, we have a chance to look at that side of our reflected lives differently.

I think what you're always looking for as artists is to be honest and to continue to be honestly driven by that which you are passionately engaged with. It should need not be forced.

'Jack Ryan' is a very fast-paced, very contemporary, very action-driven thriller.

Adults are just children who earn money.

'Frankenstein' feels like an ancient tale, the kind of traditional story that appears in many other forms.

I think we love the escapism of something like 'Cinderella,' and I think we do with 'Thor.'

I come from the theatre; my bones are in the theatre. It's as natural as breathing to want to be in the theatre.

I guess I've done a couple of boys-y movies and on the whole you get bracketed into things you've just done, so it was an imaginative surprise from my Disney family to pull me out of the hat, as it were [in Cinderella].

I'm basically quite a cheerful person.

Do you know what I feel about Dr. Who's? I feel the same way as I do about the Bonds. I love them all. I love them all! I don't have favorites.

I don't feel in a kind of race or competition with him or anybody else, because that kind of reactive thing isn't good, or isn't useful for natural creative instincts

I saw Derek Jacobi play Hamlet when I was 17, and he directed me as Hamlet when I was 27, and I directed him as Claudius in 'Hamlet' when I was 35, and I'm hoping we meet again in some other production of Hamlet before we both toddle off.

I think that Shakespeare himself raided fairy tales and chronicle writers, and he always looked to people who worked in the mythic genres, whether it was folk tales or popular novels.

Hamlet and Victor Frankenstein are each obsessed with death. Hamlet's whole story is a philosophical preparation for death; Victor's is an intellectual refusal to accept it.

If you've been to Moscow, it's a really exciting and great city, but it still feels like you should be a little careful about which way you're going to step.

I think that short films often contain an originality, a creative freedom, an energy and an invention that is inspiring and entertaining. I think they are, as Shakespeare put it, a good deed in a naughty world.

For all the cynicism that the world contains, people are a little more open to those things that maybe are to do with returning you to some kind of simpler, happier state.

To look out of a car in Scania, you see a painting on the horizontal - one windmill, one tiny farmhouse, acres of beet or grass.

I think the best actors are the most generous, the kindest, the greatest people and at their worst they are vain, greedy and insecure.

Carrying a movie is both a great privilege, it's a great opportunity, but it can be a great pressure, and sometimes that can make people behave very oddly.

Lighten up, just enjoy life, smile more, laugh more, and don't get so worked up about things.

In 'Henry V,' the story of the assumption of true and responsible leadership by Henry I think is hard-won. He has to lose friends; he has to risk his life.

I'm just a foul-mouthed Brit.

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.

Don't stand up when you can sit down and don't sit down when you can lie down.

I'm by no means an opera buff.

I wanted to have a place and a space, and a building, in which to create a season of work I am here because the idea of a theatrical home is very appealing to me

I only got 'War and Peace' on the third attempt.

When you cast someone like Natalie Portman, the character can't just be the love interest.

I'm interested in creating new work.

It doesn't mean old or younger. I've learned a lot from people much younger than me as well as people much older than me. So I think it's about honesty and generosity.

After Frankenstein, I feel as if I want to make a film about somebody having a nice cup of tea.

I am a long-time hide-behind-the-sofa-in-the-early-Doctor Who-in-the-1960s fan.

I'm a devotee of Stephen Sondheim. I think he's a genius.