XXIII edition
10/15 December 2013
Interview with Kenneth Branagh
In 2009, British actor-director Kenneth Branagh joined New York Times media journalist Bill Carter for a Times Talks discussion about Wallander, Henning Mankell and One Step Behind. What follows is an abridged version of their conversation.
Were you familiar with the books before you were engaged in this project?
I was, I read them all.
You had read them all just for pleasure?
Yeah. I read crime fiction and I like this part of the world. I spent a long time working on Hamlet over the years… It doesn’t necessarily have to mean that you have to think about or visit Scandinavia. I did both things and thought about the impact of the weather, basically.
I did an Ibsen play, Ghosts, in which I played Oswald as a young man [and] Judi Dench was playing my mother. Michael Mayer, a very fine, brilliant man, was the English translator of many of Ibsen’s plays and as we reached the end scene with Judi…where the family secret that because of his father’s syphilis, the mental problems, the brain disease as it were, that Oswald may have inherited, is now out in the open. And he says to his mother towards the end of the play: "Give me the sun, mother, give me the sun." It’s the beginning of what you might call an incoherence and I remember asking Michael that although it was beautiful and a metaphor, what did he think it meant exactly? And he said "Well it’s absolutely, directly related to the weather. If you’re in Norway, across the winter you get the sun for so little time during the day that the darkness in which you live for much of the year is a terrifying thing."
When I was in Sweden shooting these, I don’t know if we’ve got lots of Swedish people in the audience - I love Sweden by the way so nothing I’m about to say is meant to be remotely offensive. But I saw a sort of pagan delight in embracing the summer, particularly midsummer’s day, they form a sort of family, a sort of national togetherness. It starts about six weeks of holiday for many people and the nation stops. The nation stops and has a drink or two, was my experience, and stays up pretty late and they dress trees and they often dress a bit funny. Not funny, interesting! Exotic, marvelously culturally wonderfully marvelous.
It seemed odd to me at the time but I’d had a drink or two at that moment as well. I think partly because they love the outdoor life….but Swedes would say to me, friends up there would tell me: "Ooohh, you don’t want to be here in the winter. And the further north you go you don’t want to be there in the winter"! I was in Gotland once, referred to [in One Step Behind], but actually I went to the island of Faro just out of Gotheborg, which is off the eastern coast of Sweden, further north and the island that Bergman lived on. I was there shortly before he died. And gosh...gosh...it can be freezing!
A pretty desolate place, right?
Yes, it is, it is, but it’s wonderful. It’s interesting that at 47 Bergman went there and said: "This is my landscape." And he lived there for the following 40 years.
And made all those cheerful films!
Exactly. Go and visit Faro and you start to know a little more about where it came from.
Well what was your impression of Wallander as you read the books? Did you connect with his gloomy…well, he’s not gloomy so much as he is exhausted…
I actually think that he’s not a depressive, or a depressed man. I think that he has a capacity for introspection borne out of his job and the requirement of deep analysis and rumination about human motivation. Talking to policemen over there it was clear that many of the things we probably all know about how regularly the perpetrators of crime know their victims, are often in the domestic unit with them, and the process shortly after a crime is committed of discovering that it might be the wife, or the husband or the brother or the son, it often depends on a kind of a very sensitive understanding of motivation and behavior.
He has that capacity, and given the nature of the crimes, obviously that doesn’t necessarily allow too much room for "sunshine," as it were. Several police detectives that I’ve spoken to over there have said that his problem was that he didn’t, as it were, find his golf. You know he needed to…he needs to find a way of washing that man right out of his hair at the end of the day. And he doesn’t do it. He takes it home, he lives and breathes it.
It affects his life in a lot of ways.
In a way, the reason why I think he’s not a depressive is that somehow he has made a painful choice. I’m not remotely sure I’m right about this, because one of the gifts that Mankell gives is a great area of mystery about this character, that’s why many people read and enjoy and have their own versions in their heads. There have been Swedish versions of Wallander on screen already. There’s a lot of room for maneuver, but I think that I had the sense that Wallander chooses to experience the intense pain, the vulnerability, engendered by his close contact with this kind of world, because he believes it’s important to continue to understand the outrage of this kind of violence, cruelty and unkindness. And he chooses not to select a detachment technique, because painful as it is, he doesn’t want to be familiar or casual about his response to the extraordinary.
This is a haggard-looking man. He’s beat up and exhausted and his eyes are red. How did you get this effect?
Well, one of the ways in which I prepared was to look at the books and have a "sleep chart" for Wallander. Henning Mankell in the books is often quite specific about the days, often a small number of days, over which a case plays itself out. And as part of that he also is very clear about how much sleep Wallander has and it’s often two hours, an hour… Then he gets up, when he’s obsessed, and once estranged from his wife and he’s alone and if his daughter’s not there, and he wakes at three and he has what he feels is a strong or intuitive insight into the case, he will go into the station and not necessarily worry about whether he should take a change of clothes for tomorrow or whatever.
When I’d go do a scene and realize he’d had only an hour’s sleep, I’d say to Camilla, our makeup artist, "Why don’t we make him a little red around the eyes there..." At one stage, of course, his daughter gives him a hug and says, "Dad, you really do stink"! He just doesn’t take too much care. It’s interesting…and the sleeplessness is a quality often that Shakespeare uses, he denies his tragic heroes sleep. Famously in the Scottish play by Shakespeare, that I won’t mention the name of…
And of course all the classic symptoms that go with that are what Wallander experiences. A propos of that look, Mankell said that, having written two or three books and put him as a sleepless man who’s not eating well, and without exercise, he said to a doctor friend: ‘You know, he’s in bad shape. If he had a disease…what’s he heading towards here?’ And the doctor said in a heartbeat: ‘Diabetes, that’s an absolute certainty, he will get diabetes.’ So I gave him diabetes and he became more popular."
To me he’s like the antithesis of the hardboiled detective. This guy is so soft-boiled that’s he runny. His emotions are really flowing out of him.
Yes, Mankell regularly has Wallander sort of ambivalent about whether he should actually draw his gun or not, he never feels comfortable with it. There’s a moment, I think in one of the books, when he’s told about how to use it again, he won’t do the refresher [course], he knows that occasionally it must come out but there’s no sort of proprietorial pride in it in any way, in any macho way, or in any just sort of pragmatic way, as a man in a dangerous job. So he’s almost anti that kind of hardboiled thing. I think he’s incapable, he doesn’t know how to assume what might be useful in other people’s lives, he doesn’t go in and turn his collar up, and loosen his tie and swagger. He hasn’t got that sort of brag and he’s a fellow who gets up in the morning not quite always knowing where he is, he’s the fellow who goes in and wonders what’s happened that day.
So there’s a weird kind of innocence about him, that I think means that much of what other people might regard as the necessities of life are forgotten or abandoned or discarded, but it leaves quite a lot of space to be a very remarkable, intuitive detective.
Yeah, he has great skill I think but he doesn’t seem to be in very good shape. At one point a guy is just jogging and just keeping up with that guy exhausts him.
I remember we did a draft of the script where Rick Cotton, who wrote these scripts very beautifully from the novels, had a scene where… Well, one of the things Mankell delivers is a very strong procedural drama, he tells a tale, he makes you turn the pages. But sometimes, of course, what that means is that you’re in a land of clichés and if you’re going for a certain kind of reality that we were after that’s born out of our understanding of whatever we were thinking Sweden was, then on the whole you are trying to avoid scenes where someone goes, "So, inspector, you expect me to answer your questions, do you?" One of those kinds of things. And it all gets a bit arch and people sort of get protective and do "detective show acting."
And we had a scene like that and I remember saying "So back to basics: What’s he got? He’s knackered, he hasn’t slept, and the [other] character is a sort of keep fit guy. He’s angry...and also dismisses, as so many people do, Wallander. They see this kind of shambles and they assume he’s going to be a beat behind the band. So this fellow goes off on a jog and Wallander has to conduct the interview while running alongside him. And it is…indicative of a certain kind of Wallander: "Well ok then, you’re doing that, that’s fine." There’s something sweet about that, but it’s also utterly pathetic. He’s huffing and puffing and trying to remember important questions about a key crime and it helps if one can stay on the right side of a sort of self-conscious eccentricity in that regard. I think it makes for something quite distinctive.
And in the end he needs is a glass of water.
He certainly does.
You spoke about his daughter. I think that’s quite the most interesting relationship in the books. He has a grown daughter named Linda and she really factors in almost all the books and very frequently he is called upon to intercede on her behalf. And that kind of drives him but there’s also a great scene where he kind of confesses that he’s been a crap dad.
Yeah, and it comes out, of course, in the knowledge that he is able to face what is an exaggeration but has much truth in it, said with a word like crap because I suspect that he would resist, that he would find that a casual and sloppy word, but he uses it because he needs to just take a step towards her, acknowledge it. His ability to say it comes out of a disastrous, catastrophic and fatal relationship with another younger woman. But it’s touching that he is able to do it, that he tries to do it, that he stumbles into it.
You see a relationship where two people really do have a strong connection, I suspect love each other very much, but he doesn’t know quite how to say it, how to do it. He’s a prisoner of his intellect as well, sometimes, because he doesn’t want to pretend that he has transformed into a touchy feely dad all of a sudden. And she’s as sharp as a pin as well, so the two of them finding a reality in their way of communicating is one of the things that I think is part of the drama that I like very much.
This scene is really great for a lot of reasons. You really do see his emotion and how fragile he is. He’s a fragile character.
Yes. He is.
And also there’s a great clue in that scene, by the way. Which is also fantastic. [Mankell] drops that in the scene and unless you’re really watching carefully you don’t get it. But I think that’s one of the interesting things about him as a writer because I think he’s writing a character, not like a genre person. The detective field does have a genre character - and this guy is not that at all.
No, not quite and he often seems in scenes like that that he has one layer of skin missing as a result partly of the job that he does, and the character that he is, the personality that he is, and it requires a sort of rather naked approach to it. You know you really just have to try and be in the moment in the scene with the other actor - it’s not true always, but it’s particularly necessary here to not make it seem as though it’s somehow formulaic or generic in any way.
So you did shoot these in Sweden?
Yes, indeed. Although movie magic being what it is, lots of great cheats have occurred in different parts of the world. A favorite film of mine is Black Narcissus, have you ever seen that film? A Powell and Pressburger film where the Himalayas were in Denham, in Buckinghamshire! So it’s possible, but we certainly found [it best] to go to the real place itself, Ystad, negotiating our way through the little trainloads of German tourists who come every year to visit Wallander places, cafés and libraries and bars and hotels and things, including, disastrously for the owner, the address where Wallander lives.
Oh really? It’s a real address?
Yeah, we did the same thing, we were on a rekkie about a year before we did it and we said, "We should go somewhere else." The location scout said: "You know it’s not as interesting visually, it’s in a funny part of town. Character-wise, it’s interesting because it’s just about the right size and everything but we’ve talked to the guy and he doesn’t..."
There’s a person living there?
Yeah yeah yeah. But we went there and we had the same experience where literally your hands are at the knocker and they go: "NO! NOOO! HE DOESN’T LIVE HERE!!!" And then as you leave another group of Germans would tourists are coming up the road and I imagine this guy with an air gun and he’s just there: "You’re not, you’re not shooting here, it doesn’t matter, I don’t care if it’s the same address!" It’s like 22B [sic] Baker Street, except this guy’s actually living here and being driven potty by well-meaning, passionate fans of the books. The books are a huge success in Germany, where the outside Sweden lobby for these books began, and they come and are fascinated and eager to get a feel for the place.
I should point out that you just won a very significant award, right?
The series won the BAFTA for Best Drama Serial in our first season and that was a huge, huge thrill for us and it’s what really has allowed us to go back and do three more. And a special thrill was that we were nominated for two and the other category was the People’s Choice, the BAFTA category that was voted for by the public, in which we first time out were against on one of Simon Cowell’s programs...
X Factor?
Yeah, X Factor, which gets gazillions of people watching. So to even be in...
In the running…
Yeah. Gloomy Swedish man against jolly popular reality TV show - we were staggered. We were very thrilled.
Have you met the author?
Yes, I met him indeed in Gotland, in unusual circumstances. I had gone to this week of celebrations of Ingmar Bergman’s work, which played out for one week every summer on the island where he lived, and every year he would complain that it was ridiculous and that he was appalled and sickened by the sycophancy and mania of these idiots who would come along and do things like this and talk about Winter Light and Fanny and Alexander and there would be four or five programs a day and he would have nothing to do with it.
And every year he showed up to every single one, always making dramatic entrances. He always came in 10 minutes in, he’d be at the back of the hall going "NO! No! That’s not what..." And Bibi Anderson and Harriet Anderson would have sort of stand-up fights. He turned it into an event every time. And so I went there to premier a film that I had directed of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, which had previously been done very brilliantly by maestro Bergman and I played it in this tiny, tiny cinema in Farosund by the ferry over to Bergman’s island. And I went to the loo and I won’t go into too much detail here, but I was doing what was necessary and next to me, similarly occupied, was Henning Mankell, and we both went "Oh, how lovely to..." So we met in the loo, in a wee cinema in a very tiny, tiny corner of Sweden and we talked while we did that about Mozart.
But you recognized him?
I recognized him, yes. Let’s not go any further with that… From the book jackets!
But was it popular in Britain, your first run of these three?
Yes, to our delight it was. We took nothing for granted. We’re aware that this is a genre heavily populated by some excellent shows and the audience is so sophisticated now. One of the things we were concerned about was that the pace of these films is slower. I would say that our attempt has been to fill the silences with the many layers of meaning and substance that Mr. Mankell offers up, but they take their time, they invite the audience in a different way. It’s not very flashy and swift editing, it’s a different kind of approach, and we were most surprised that that was one of the things that people commented on.
Plus, visually the shows are quite striking I think, and we were very lucky, one of our producers, Ole Søndberg from Denmark, said "There’s a fellow you must meet, he must shoot it!" Six, seven months before we started I met this fellow, English guy, lives in Denmark and we met and we got on very, very well. He had shot all of Lars Von Trier’s movies and I said: "Oh gosh, they said you might not be available, you have a very tight year." He said: "Yeah I’ve just come off this film in India, it took forever" and he said, "You know it’s great, I loved it, I had a wonderful time doing it but nobody’s going to go and see it…" "What was the name of the film?" "Slumdog Millionaire"! I said, "You never know, catchy title, might work."
So Anthony Dod Mantle then photographed the first and the third films and he brought to it the eye of a man who’s lived in Denmark for a long time and there is a friendly rivalry between the Danes and the Swedes and the Swedes and the Norwegians and so he had a view of Sweden that was very particular and it had a great energy behind it.
