Christine Aylward: TV, theater, film, your career has spanned so many different areas.
Can you tell us a little bit about the point in time where you knew you wanted to be in the entertainment industry, like when it all clicked for you and came together?

Kenneth Branagh: Well, it was in a way a bit of a cliched moment of being in a school
play, when I was probably 16, and just enjoying it so much. It was just as simple as that. I mean, I was good at sports, average at sports, but I knew how to join in and stuff, so that had given me a certain kind of place in the school. So I felt secure, secure enough to audition for the school play, which was something called, "Oh! What a Lovely War." It was eventually a Richard Attenborough movie, but it was a great theatrical piece
that involved lots of different kinds of scenes, lots of different characters. So I got to show off a great deal. I suppose what I, that's what it seemed like. It was fun to be
other people. It was fun to do accents. It was fun to be in front of a live audience, to hear people laughing, applauding, and the camaraderie of the group that were doing it. I was 16. We were kids. We all liked each other. Hormones were going crazy, so maybe I'm not surprised that it can be a fun experience.

But I also had a teacher who said subsequent to this, in front of the rest of the classes - I think he was a supply teacher or somebody who was standing in for a teacher who should have taken us - and he said in front of them, "You should go and see the
play because there's a guy in there who could be a professional." It was the first time I'd ever heard that phrase, "professional," and then I asked him, "Do you mean a professional actor?" He said yeah.

So I decided to start finding out what that meant. I come from a background where there's no show biz, no entertainment background. I mean, we're all Irish, so everybody sung and told stories and did things. Family do's were always full of people
who'd got a bit of a turn in them. They could do a poem or a song or something. But the road to understanding how I could, from a working-class background - Belfast originally, and then to Redding, which is about 40 miles west of London and where I lived, suburban Enfield - it was a big jump to make.

But around 16 to 18, that was when I sort of ate up everything I could possibly read, everything I could possibly hear about the theater. Theater originally, because I had no conception that one could have a life in television or film or all these things that seemed incredibly exotic and far away. So it all started then, and what was absolutely the case at that time was that there was an absolute certainty I felt in my bones that this was
what I was meant to do. It made me so happy. Everything else that had ever been suggested about, I don't know, going into insurance or trying to be a carpenter like my dad, I had no practical skills at all, never have had in terms of making things. There was just a sort of clarity about that, and for me, from that point, it was never, never, never about, "Oh, I could be famous. Oh, I could make money." It was just only if I could find a way for acting to be my job, that that would just be a life-time dream come true. It all kicked in from about 16 onwards.

Christine Aylward: I'm curious, was it that theater seemed the practical approach
because you were actually in a play, and film was on the big screen? Did you go and see movies when you were growing up?

Kenneth Branagh: I love going to pictures. In fact, as a family, we used to go to big
. . . we did go quite a bit. I remember key early experiences. We went to things like "Sound of Music" and "Chitty Chitty Bang Bang" in big theaters in Belfast originally, and we liked it. I loved that. "The Great Escape," a great war picture, prisoner-of-
war picture. I remember there were the four of us, my brother and my parents. But it just seemed impossible. I mean, I used to walk around the back of the television to try and take it off to see where all the little people were when I was much younger.

I was very interested in films. I did look at the credits. I would watch from a very young age. I wondered what all these names were for, because there are more names than the actors. If it was helpful and it said, Person X played Person Y, and you knew, "Oh, I see, there's an actor who plays that, not really that person." But then all these other people. Lighting; what was lighting? What did that mean? Continuity, what was that?
Make-up? Well, I couldn't see much make-up, what was all that?

So I was pretty fascinated by it and about how it went on, but
it truly seemed so far away I couldn't . . . there was a
disconnection between images there or on the big screen, whereas
the theater, there was a real place. You went to work. You were
very much involved with it. It was touchable, seeable, doable as
it were. There were examples of it in my town. But movies? That
was like in Venus in some way.

Christine Aylward: So having a carpenter father and being a practical Irishman, when you decided to pursue a path in acting and dramatic art, how was that received by your family.?

Kenneth Branagh: Well, they were very surprised. I think they thought that the good
time I'd had, having fun in a school play was a passing phase.
Lots of people had it. It didn't mean they had to become actors,
you know? They were concerned. It was not a world they knew
anything about.

I remember the school's career adviser, who would help us with
sort of job searches as we reached school leaving age, gave me
an A4 side of paper, which began with, "An empty theater is a
lonely place. Away from the tinsel curtain and the clapping of
the audience, the seats are empty, and you will find that the
unemployment rate in the theater is 83% or 87%," or some very,
very high figure. They knew that, and they knew somehow that the
world of the theater might be, would involve maybe going to the
big bad city. There one would meet unreliable people. I would
always be in debt. If I wasn't gay, I would become gay. That all
sorts of things would happen that were new to them.

Nevertheless, they brought me up with this sort of insistence
that as long as I was happy doing something, they were ready to
support it, and so they did, nervously. They never actually
tried to put me off, but I could see that they were bewildered
about how to help. Then it was helpful to them that . . . my
father, who was in a way a very old-fashioned guy, wonderful
man, but he needed the sort of validation, in his terms, of
something called The Royal Academy of Dramatic Art.

If you weren't going to go to university, which wasn't really
something that impressed him anyway, he'd have been thrilled if
I'd gone into the business with him. He did a five-year
apprentice when he was 14. He'd have been happy for me to do
that. But The Royal Academy, that sounded like that was a grown-
up, and he knew that statistically it was hard to get in.
Thousands of people applied, and they only took a few people. So
when that journey was happening and I applied and auditioned and
went through a series of rounds and steps to eventually get in,
that gave him some relief.

I was at a point in our history back home where the government
was still paying for the fees and maintenance of people who went
and did arts. So I was able to go to London. If my parents had
had to pay, it would have been very difficult, but as it was,
their taxes allowed them to reap the benefit of that, and I was
able at 18 to go to the big bad city and study acting.

Christine Aylward: So you started your career in theater?

Kenneth Branagh: Yeah.

Christine Aylward: And then film, and film became touchable to you. Can you tell us
about that, the moment that you realized that and what the
transition was?

Kenneth Branagh: There were a couple of moments. First of all, my very, very first job
ended up being a television play, which I found in The Stage
newspaper. The Stage is printed every week, and frankly isn't
always the most likely place to get a job, but of course they
advertise for certain positions. They wanted a kid with a
Northern Irish background who might be able to play in a
television drama. So I eventually auditioned for it, got it in
the end. It was a studio, multi-camera studio thing.

I then went into the theater and did six months in a play called
"Another Country." I was playing opposite Rupert Everett. When
we left, the two actors who took over work were Colin Firth and
Daniel Day-Lewis. We were in the theater next door to a young
actor called Gary Oldman, who was making his debut in the West
End, and just up the street was a young man called Tim Roth. So
on Shaftesbury Avenue for about six months, there was this
little group of people who were all just stepping out at the
same time.

But I went to do a television film of a Virginia Woolf novel
called "To the Lighthouse," and it was on that film . . . so I
was 21 and it was down in Cornwall, six weeks in the summer. A
director called Colin Gregg and a very good light and cameraman
called Ken Westbury. With those two, I went through the whole of
that job asking questions. "Okay, so what are these little train
tracks that you're putting the camera on?" "Well, they're just
tracks."

"So what's this machine the camera's on?" "It's a dolly." "Why
do you do it?" "Well, we can move the camera on it, and then
this floating head, we can move this round."

"What is that person doing there, the side of the camera?"
"That's the focus puller." "Oh, really, and what is that?" "Oh,
it's to keep your eyes sharp, and when you move, they have to
move, and they take tape measurements." "What's the tape measure
for?"

I was absolutely relentlessly starting the process of
investigating how do you do this, how do you make it? I see what
I'm required to do, but it was completely fascinating to see all
of that.

Christine Aylward: And were you asking those questions from an actor's point of view,
wanting to see how you're being filmed, or from the perspective
of I want to be a director?

Kenneth Branagh: Not from the perspective of wanting to be a director, because I
didn't see how that could possibly happen. I loved acting, but I
was intrigued by the game of it. So, for instance, it isn't
necessarily a healthy thing because sometimes it makes people
too technically conscious. I was interested to know that if I
moved very, very quickly and hadn't told anybody, particularly
in a scene, that I was going to do it, then the chances of it
being out of focus might be higher because the focus puller, if
they were focused on me, might find it difficult to adjust that
quickly.

Then I was aware of why marks were down there. It was marks not
only for me but for the focus puller, for the lights and
everything else. So I suppose I was building up that technical
knowledge as well, sometimes having the occasion of doing
something that I thought was maybe terribly effective, and I was
very good or I felt very good, but I was pointing the wrong way
and nobody saw it. So I was slightly aware of trying to find
out, well, what are the ways on film as an actor that I give you
the performance, that you see it? Not so I play to the camera,
but just if you were aware, and some people develop quite the
opposite, just be unaware and they'll catch it. I think maybe
any approach is fine, but at that stage that's was I was
interested in. It was a total sort of immersive interest in how
it all got done, believing that it kind of all joined up.

Christine Aylward: And is that what you think needs to be there if you're an actor who
wants to become a director?

Kenneth Branagh: Orson Welles said that, "If you want to direct, you should either
know very little or a great deal." In a way, friends who maybe
shoot short films or are starting to move into directing who
are, as I was when I first began, sort of wondering whether
there was some secret or there's things that you have to do,
things that you must know. Always terribly nervous about how you
use cameras. Oh, that's not my strong point. Lenses, oh god,
what do you shoot? They're using all these numbers. What do you
do?

It seemed to me that what you come to it with is your instinct.
Your instinct is as a storyteller. For me the knowledge,
technical knowledge, acquired was always about how will that
best help me tell a certain kind of story? I didn't feel the
need to become an expert in it, but simply I did need to know
people who really understood. So a great DP, or a great sound
guy or a great producer, to whom I could ask certain questions
and they would help enable that bit of the story telling. So I
never felt, never have felt the need to be a super-duper expert.
I need to know what the right questions are to ask, and
sometimes even someone as stupid as I can be can acquire a
certain amount of residual info.

But it was always about, it was performance-led. I was always,
always interested in actor/character/story, and so anything to
do with what could be acquired from a technical point of view
was always at the service of that. In the end, the two things
start matching up.

Christine Aylward: So tell us a little bit about your transition to your first directing
job, and also what your biggest surprise was?

Kenneth Branagh: Well, when I was 23 and I had gone to the Royal Shakespeare Company to play the role of Henry V in Shakespeare's play. So I ended up
playing the part in repertoire, but I probably have, I don't
know, 150 times or something across a period of about 18 months,
enough to have a very, very strong feel for the play. I just
enjoyed being in this pretty extraordinary sort of history play.

I was aware of starting to see the play in images. I just felt
that I could see it moving. I could see how it could be a film.
So this was across the following years. So I get to the point
when I'm 26, 27, when I suppose the most charitable view of it
would be that I was just tremendously passionate and
enthusiastic about acting, about films. I mean, I always went to
films and I was always passionate about movies, about seeing
them, once I was in a position to start going to see them on my
own.

Then a combination of things happened. I met with a fellow who
joined us on our theatrical adventures; a man called Stephen
Evans, and he, when we formed a theater company, this was a few
years later. So '86, '87, we formed this Renaissance theater
company. Amongst other things, we had three actor-directors;
three people who'd not directed before who were great actors,
including Judi Dench, Geraldine McEwan and Derek Jacobi. He
joined us, Stephen Evans. He liked the project and helped
finance this whole season, and said, "What else are you
interested in doing?" I said, "I'd like to make a film of Henry
V."

He seemed sort of unflustered. He had been a stock broker and
was moving into the world of the arts. He was very interesting