Kenneth Branagh Quotes
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My dad, for the first 15 years of my career, on every visit he made to a play or a film set, would find the oldest person on set and say, 'Do you think my son has a future?'
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I live in the English countryside, so I'm surrounded by magpies.
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'Frankenstein' feels like an ancient tale, the kind of traditional story that appears in many other forms.
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If it's good art, it's good.
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When you cast someone like Natalie Portman, the character can't just be the love interest.
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Music and language are a vital element. We, as actors and directors, offer it to people who want to experience it. Sometimes the actual meaning is less important than the words themselves.
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Shakespeare is rhythmic; he is musical in the sense that he likes poetry, and he's musical because he constantly refers to settings where there's singing and dancing.
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In the hands of a great poet, words have ways of affecting us in ways we don't understand.
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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.
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A lot of the films I've done have links to other movies that I've directed in the past.
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My parents are the reason I wanted to make Shakespeare available to ordinary people.
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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.
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I think the best actors are the most generous, the kindest, the greatest people and at their worst they are vain, greedy and insecure.
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In Northern Ireland, I truly, effortlessly, knew who I was. I knew where I belonged. I felt completely and utterly secure.
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In the course of my lifetime, that world went from violence to a kind of peace.
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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.
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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.
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I only really cast people who are desperate to be in it - who were dying to be in it, whose talent I believed in and were dead ready to do the work that was necessary.
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It's quite hard for people to just accept that they're very contradictory.
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One of the things that makes Hamlet unique among Shakespeare's characters is his courage to face up to the darker elements of his personality.
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I think that music is crucially important in Shakespeare - and, clearly, was an important part of the Elizabethan theatre. And, it's always been something that was a profound element of the experience of Shakespeare that I have been drawn to - and interpreters have, as well.
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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.'
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I only got 'War and Peace' on the third attempt.
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The records - what little we know about Shakespeare, including the records of the plays in his playhouse - were often the story of how quickly they came off if they didn't work. They had to move on. They were absolutely led by box office.