Kenneth Branagh Quotations | Page 2

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?'

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.

Probably 90 percent of the stuff I make has inevitably been done before... Whether it's playing Hamlet, which has been on the go for 400 years, or pieces from the cinematic world that also have been essayed before, I feel released by that.

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.

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.

The idea of accumulating ambitions or achievements didn't get much further than wanting to do the next exciting thing. I really haven't set out with any list of achievements.

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.

'Thor' has got several big battles in it, a reckless, headstrong young hero who has to confront his past and deal with a complicated relationship with his father, it has lots of savage Europeans hacking each other to death at various points, and all of this sounded very much like 'Henry V.'

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 I've found about 'Cinderella' is that what it provokes in an audience is really extraordinary. It appears to be a deceptively simple tale, but I've heard nothing but people drawing all different things out of it.

I watched a lot of musicals growing up.

I think people half know it but don't know it, you know? I think when you see the whole thing, there's just such a slew of new things there. You see them in a different light.

We wanted to do something that was a little closer to our own century and yet also was a world in which you could believe that people spoke in a slightly different way.

I made a bargain with myself. If I hadn't done it by 35, I'd walk away. Hamlet is at a crisis at this point in his life. This is a young man's play.

I was a big admirer of F.D.R. He saved Britain.

This is a very exciting departure for me as a filmmaker,

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

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.

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.

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

My definition of success is control.

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.

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.

It's no accident that Cinderella has been in the culture for thousands of years, and in cross cultures. I've traveled a bit recently, and in Russia, they completely believe they own this tale. And in Italy, they feel it absolutely is part of who they are. There is a timeless web to it.

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.

The elasticity of Shakespeare is extraordinary.

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

When I'm acting, I'm in the director's hands. I'm very happy to be. I like to be focused on what I'm doing.

Adults are just children who earn money.

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

Truth is like most opinions - best unexpressed.

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.

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.'"

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'm basically quite a cheerful person.

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.

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

The ferocity of passion that is engendered by people when they don't like what you've done is really tremendous. It's intense.

I'm just a foul-mouthed Brit.

Frankenstein feels like an ancient tale, the kind of traditional story that appears in many other forms. It appeals to something very primal, but it's also about profound things, the very nature of life and death and birth - about, essentially, a man who is resisting the most irresistible fact of all, that we will be shuffling off this mortal coil.

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.

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.'

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

I think the truth is the Marvel fiefdom exists very independently inside the Disney world, inside the Disney universe. They're not resistant to that kind of thing but they have their, you know there is a whole sort of machine energy and momentum that is the sort of creative drive behind the whole universe that has a big impact on the individual films. I'm glad those scenes got out there. And we've got a few interesting deleted scenes on this.

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.

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.

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

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.

I looked at the 1950 animated film [Cinderella], I read a couple of editions of the fairy tale that I have in my house and all of it seemed to say that there was room for a version that delivered, in this story, which seems to invite a feeling in p eopleand I think that is some version of a classical world.

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 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 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.

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.

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.