"He is the most accomplished, acclaimed and ambitious performer of his generation. In 1984 he dazzled audiences as the youngest actor ever to play the title role in Henry V at the Royal Shakespeare Company. He starred in the Masterpiece Theater mini-series Fortunes of War . He built his own repertory company and led it through sold-out seasons in London and the provinces. He has written two plays and an autobiography, Beginning ."

"Mr Branagh's film of the same play had no such contemporary relevance but it gripped audiences just as strongly in 1990 by emphasising the reality of war. His Agincourt, unlike Olivier's stylised version, is brutal, albeit victorious. Audiences who had lived through the Vietnam and Falklands conflicts knew he told the truth." ("Much Ado")

Branagh has said,"I also felt that a general feeling of unease, of conspiracy, of political uncertainty - that level of reality which we could see in our normal lives and that fascination with what goes on behind closed doors and how politicians can rationalize one brutal, violent act by reference to some other apparently important policy - all of it helped galvanize the film and get us away from any sense of some sort of chivalric pageant. (Cineaste)

In another interview, Branagh had more to say about the political nature of his Henry, but in the beginning of the quote, he's talking about Olivier's delivery of Shakespeare's lines:

MEIER: And then it came your turn. BRANAGH: For me it was much more the personal journey of an individual who was growing into what was required of a statesman, and his responses to those public demands that were made upon him. His responses were urgent, passionate, and by the time he gets to the St. Crispin's Day speech he is much more aware of his place in history and of his need to perform a role for the people around him. He then takes much more delight and relish in the act of speaking. My Henry was much less kingly to begin with. Olivier was kingly throughout, and that affects his style. MEIER: Is that choice to do with today's society's different attitude to great public figures in general or...? BRANAGH: Certainly today we are provided with much more behind-the-scenes looks at people--the warts-and-all examination of all public figures, spectacularly demonstrated every four years in America , where to run for president is to have your soul and every other part of your anatomy bared. So that, post-Kennedy, there are no Camelotian figures anymore. Olivier as Henry V could be, at that time, more regal.

MEIER: And that inevitably results in musical differences?

Emma Thompson as Princess Katherine and Branagh as Henry V Source: The Kenneth Branagh Compendium: Photo Gallery http://www.branaghcompendium.com/ photos_screen_2.html

BRANAGH: I think so, because the Henry that we presented had much more earth-based concerns. I think, today, we are much more interested in what his responsibilities cost him in terms of the loss of friends, the isolation. The personal effect of that was rather nobly borne by Sir Lawrence Olivier. But, for a modern Henry, it's a much grimmer prospect. The legitimate needs for friendship, for companionship, especially in today's world where the concentration by the media on every aspect of one's life is so intense, are that much more important. And we enjoy seeing that struggle. And, if we are more interested in ordinary details now, it's because we wish to know them as human beings, or we demand to, perhaps.

As he said,"the fact of my relative youth then, as distinct from the more mature performance of Laurence Olivier in the other film which I mention only because there is another film, not by way of comparison or any other way, I hasten to add - but I was surprised at how strongly that played, from the earliest rushes, and we shot it more or less in continuity. I found it exciting to see how little I had to do, and it seemed to me that involved responding to the doubt in the language of Henry V early on, and the caution, the nervousness, the youth, the guilt, and all sorts of other things that were different from what Olivier chose to emphasize in terms of his leadership qualities and the general feel of a wonderful, celebratory pageant that his film had." (Cineaste)

Remember, Dame Judi is one of England's most highly respected actors. Tells you something about Branagh's self-assurance! But I thought more of Darth Vader when I saw this opening, so I had to wonder about Branagh's imagery.

And by taking the ending lines for himself, Branagh makes the play even more politically ambivalent.

The films even looked so very different. The Olivier was shot in bright, shiny Technicolor. The Branagh film was visually much darker. Lots of murky blues and greys in the color palette. Things were much dirtier. When we're in the boarding house with Pistol, Mistress Quickly, Bardolph and Nym, we see the dirt and the grim. It looks lower class. And like Olivier, Branagh include flashbacks from Henry IV . But sometimes he changes things. When Bardolph is going to be hanged, there is a flashback scene to Act 1, Scene 2 of Jack Falstaff proclaims"Do not thou, when thou art King, hang a thief." This flashback line is instead given to Bardolph, to make it more poignant when Henry hangs him. But he has to hang his old friend, just as he had to abandon Falstaff. It's part of his embracing of political realities and maturity.

Cineaste: I loved some of the film's other textural details, such as, during the long tracking shot across the Agincourt battlefield, the enraged French women who at one point try to attack Henry. Branagh: We were trying to make a film of some commercial or watchable length but also still trying, in a cinematic way, to complete the picture, to make it as complex as possible. There's no question that many did not regard Henry as the savior, and that such a battle also involved tragic consequences for all sorts of other people tangentially involved. That tracking shot was an attempt, after having put the audience inside the battle, to suddenly stand back for a moment and say, 'Look what happened!'

Cineaste: 'This is a victory?'

"If you're doing something like Henry V, for instance, it's useful to talk about the concept of honor as understood by people of the time, to talk about the concept of a Christian king, to bring that into rehearsal for the sake of the actors' imaginations, so that sometimes they can understand the real import of things which may seem to emerge more casually from the play for us. produces a kind of arch Shakespearean acting which, because of its emphasis on the complexities of the text, alienates people.

Branagh: Yes, and that is a strong tonic in resisting the idea of banners and flags and celebration, when you read eyewitness accounts, as it were, of the battle and begin to understand that there were so many deaths by suffocation because people's bodies piled up on each other, and learn about the kinds of noises that were heard from the battlefield for hours and days afterwards from people dying very, very slowly, the awfulness of that. I remember us having a rehearsal discussion and talking about how people would like to go. Would you like a nuclear bomb to fall on you, or would you like six inches of cold steel, during combat, in terrible, face to face conditions, on a tightly packed, wet, sodden battlefield, where arrows are raining down on you, and where it was necessary to hectically keep revolving and fighting in a way that was bound to produce chronic fatigue over a period of hours? Is that the way to go? I think those influences were important. Cineaste: In terms of your political fleshing out of the film, since you kept in the political betrayal of Cambridge, Scroop and Grey, the threats of rape, murder, and pillage at the gates of Harfleur, and the hanging of Bardolph, why did you decide to cut Henry's order to kill the French prisoners? Branagh: Well, it's the subject of much debate, as you know, both historical and textual, and to have stuck with everything that represented the real king historically would have been fighting against so much else in the play. I felt that we could achieve a sense of Henry's ruthlessness or brutality without it and make for clearer drama. On one level, it felt appropriate, because to have him do that at that point was to be utterly inconsistent with the rest of what we were presenting as a troubled and ambiguous character. It seemed to me that it would unduly draw attention from that ambiguity and suddenly make him one kind of character, and that that would be dramatically less interesting.

Cineaste: But its absence, for those who know the play, is almost underlined by Henry's outrage at the killing of the baggage boys. It seemed to me, given the overall grittier tone you were aiming at, that retaining that scene would add to the complexity of the characterization. I know you wanted to emphasize the Christian nature of the king, but ruthlessness on the battlefield does not necessarily contradict, even during that era, a deep sense of religiosity.

Branagh: It's a debatable point, and it was something we argued about at the time. In the end, I felt that it was appropriate for the dramatic shape of what we were doing, in terms of pictures, showing the camp being attacked just beforehand, and that it added up dramatically. As I think about it, you may well be right about its actual impact had we included it.

Corliss, Richard"King Ken Comes To Conquer: A Brash British Star Turns Henry V Into An Antiwar War Movie," Time , Nov 13, 1989 v134 n20 p119.

Crowdus, Gary Crowdus."Sharing An Enthusiasm For Shakespeare: An Interview With Kenneth Branagh," Cineaste , Winter 1998 v24 i1 p34(8).

Klawans, Stuart," Henry V ," The Nation , Dec 11, 1989 v249 n20 p724.

Meier, Paul."Kenneth Branagh: with utter clarity," TDR ( Cambridge , Mass. ), Summer 1997 v41 n2 p82(8)."Much ado about Shakespeare." The Economist (US), Oct 2, 1993 v329 n7831 p95-7.

Rothenberg, Robert S."Much Ado About Nothing," USA Today (Magazine), May 1994 v122 n2588 p96(2).