Kenneth Branagh on My Week With Marilyn, His Brush With Olivier, and the Curse of the Difficult Actor

As arguably the film world’s closest contemporary equivalent to Sir Laurence Olivier, the classically trained, commercially adventurous actor/filmmaker Kenneth Branagh makes an ideal candidate to play the great man in this week’s My Week With Marilyn. Branagh inhabits Olivier at a rare career ebb: Flirting with irrelevancy in the decade after his Oscar-winning Shakesperean triumphs Henry V and Hamlet, the legend enlisted Marilyn Monroe as his leading lady in his screen adaptation of Terrence Ratigan’s play The Prince and the Showgirl. He also brought aboard a young assistant named Colin Clark, whose dual memoirs of the period (The Prince, the Showgirl, and Me and My Week with Marilyn) provide the framework for screenwriter Adrian Hodges and director Simon Curtis to explore Olivier’s vexation with the troubled actress (played exquisitely by Michelle Williams) against the backdrop Clark’s infatuation with her. Branagh spoke recently with Movieline about the responsibility to playing an icon, salvaging good work from a bad relationship, and his cherished counsel from Olivier himself. So you were onstage on Europe when Marilyn has had its coming-out party in the States. Were you keeping tabs on the response? Yeah, to some extent. I was very interested, of course. Simon showed me an early cut, and I was very taken with it. One of the things that struck me about it that I was surprised to find was so powerful — for me, anyway — was this sense of innocence and delicacy and fragility in the world. It did somehow have kind of a heartfelt [sensibility]— light-seeming, but leaving a greater sort of residue after you’ve seen it. It’s kind of an elegy for this lost world where this proto-supercelebrity, Marilyn, is offered a little parenthesis of potential freedom. But the world of red telephone boxes and bobbies on the beat and people so well-turned-out… I mean, when I look at pictures of the time of Olivier and Vivien Leigh, they really did dress like royalty. They wouldn’t leave a stage door after a show unless they were perfectly turned out. It’s Old Hollywood. Nobody was interested in grungy-looking actors. And although, as the world moves on, there’s something in the film that sort of mourns for the era of people keeping up appearances — making an effort, etc. There’s something touching about it. Anyway, I was struck by that quality — that affection inside the movie. Being an actor and a student of acting would probably provide a lot of background on Olivier in itself. How much more did you feel like you needed to know beyond that? How much research did you feel like you needed to do, and how much of your own touch did you want to bring? I went absolutely encyclopedic with it — enjoyably. I got a hold of everything that I could find that he wrote; his autobiography, Confessions of an Actor, and his other book, On Acting, as he calls it. I read numerous biographies on him, including the latest ones. And then I pulled out everything that I could that was on video or on tape or on the Internet. There’s this fascinating documentary he does with Kenneth Tynan in the 1960s called Great Acting. It’s on… great acting. There’s a fascinating interview with Michael Parkinson, a great British interviewer, from the late ’60s, quite specifically about the Marilyn incident. He’s quite candid about his own frustration and his inability to get to her — to either understand her, appreciate her, know how to direct her, talk to here or indeed compete with her, feeling as he did that she sort of walked off with the movie. She knew how to do it, and in some strange way, he didn’t in that circumstance. So I threw myself at all of that, and indeed, with that information, I went back to Adrian Hodges — the screenwriter — and David Parfitt — the producer — and Simon Curtis, of course, who were very helpful about wanting to further flesh out what appeared to be this pivotal moment of self-knowledge for Olivier. Again, he was quite candid about being associated with Marilyn at this time — when she was the biggest movie star in the world — would renew him, as he says in the movie. It was a period where he was very sensitive about being out of touch. Revered, but feeling like he was about to go into a museum, he was so “great.” He wanted to be young and edgy and cool, and he was about to be, because after this movie he did The Entertainer, which was part of a New Wave of British drama. And he’s wonderful in it. So for me it was trying to find everything that one could about someone so that a couple things could happen at once: You could see why he was the great actors with the clothes and look and they style and affectation of voice and movement, but also, there was this sort of hunger and anger underneath as well. As a director, have you ever encountered an actor you couldn’t get to? Yes, I have. What do you do? I’ll tell you what it is that I understood about Olivier: It’s very unmanning. It really leaves you literally struggling for words. You’re in a different kind of vulnerability yourself — you’re certainly under pressure. There’s a producer, and there’s a budget, and there’s a clock ticking. And although you would love every encounter on the set to be one where people explore, and it’s beautiful and a wonderful creative adventure… That’s all true! But we need to get it done by midday! They say about moviemaking that the first thing in the morning, you’re making Citizen Kane. By lunchtime, it’s Starsky and Hutch. And by the end of the day, it’s Celebrity Squares. Anything to get it in the can by the end of the day. And when you get an actor — or in my particular case, an actress, not in a leading role but in an important supporting role, and this was some years ago — like this, it’s very, very uncomfortable. There’s no shared language. There’s trickery and a sort of obfuscation and obstructionism going on. It really leaves you between a rock and a hard place as a director: If you see the end result is not what you want or what you think the piece deserves, but you don’t know how to get there, and from the other side, people are saying, “It’s terrible, but there’s no time to do anything about it.” But you can’t make that person angry because if they leave, then you’re in these positions where your halfway through, and what are you going to do? Shoot the movie again? Not in my position, you’re not, because it’s going to be another couple million dollars. Nobody’s going to write that check; they’re going to say, “Just make it work.” So it can become a sort of agonizing experience. I didn’t particularly find an answer; I just found that it was imperfect. So I found sympathy with Olivier. I didn’t find myself frustrated, but I did find myself blocked — completely blocked — in the communication department in a relationship that totally depends on it. And you realize, when that happens for that brief period you’re shooting a movie and that brief period during the day when you’re shooting a scene, that once it’s gone, there it is — being not very good on film forever. That haunts you. Ugh. Yeah, that really keeps you up at night, because it’s always such a precious experience to get a film together at all because it’s so costly and so crazy. So when it’s slightly imploding under your very gaze, it’s tricky.