Kenneth Branagh & Jamie Dornan On ‘Belfast’ And Judi Dench’s Immediate “Yes” [Interview]

TORONTO – Before “Belfast” won the Toronto International Film Festival’s prestigious People’s Choice Award, took audience awards at three other fall festivals or landed 11 British Independent Film Awards nominations, Kenneth Branagh and Jamie Dornan sat down with The Playlist to talk about the former’s autobiographical tear-jerker. Masked in a Toronto hotel suite the morning following its TIFF premiere, the conversation occurred during a calm before a growing awards season storm. And, more notably, a rare day of in-person interviews.

READ MORE: “Belfast” is a stirring coming of age drama with magnificent performances [TIFF Review]

The Focus Features release centers on Buddy (newcomer Jude Hill), a 10-year-old boy living in Northern Ireland just as The Troubles are making their mark in Belfast in the late 1960s. His mother (Caitriona Balfe) struggles to keep Buddy away from the increasingly violent clashes between the Catholics and Protestants while his father (Jamie Dornan) comes and goes due to the fact his only real shot at employment is in other parts of the U.K. A welcome respite from the real world drama is the love and affection Buddy’s grandparents (Judi Dench, Ciarán Hinds) provide after school. With life becoming incrementally more difficult as the weeks pass, Buddy’s parents have to decide whether it’s time to leave their beloved hometown for a new life in England.

The film features an almost entirely Northern Ireland-born cast. In fact, many viewers will be surprised to discover that despite being born in York, England, Dench’s parents are both Irish. When Branagh called to offer Dench the role he was actually shocked by how quickly she said yes.

He laughs recalling, “Literally on the phone, ‘Judi I’ve got a…’ ‘Yes. No, don’t tell me, it’s fine. It’s fine. Just tell me when we start.'”

Over the course of our interview, the two men discuss their own screenplay journeys (Dornan has a project in the works), the unexpected fun the cast had in strict, early COVID production protocols, how Branagh chose Hill out of hundreds of auditions.

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The Playlist: Kenneth, this is obviously a very personal film. How long have you had this gestating in the back of your mind as something to bring to the screen?

Kenneth Branagh: I think for a long time. I wondered whether I would do something that was about family stories from much further back. That’s where I’d begun. And I’d make notes if I had an image, or I’d make notes on cards and things. So, eventually, I got just a list of cards for incidents and moments, that I then pulled out at the start of the pandemic, and began to see whether they hung together, whether unconsciously, they had produced some sort of a narrative. And it seemed as though they did. So, it had been a long time. Jamie’s just written an excellent screenplay. And I wonder whether it had been marinating for a long time, or did you go to feel the work had been done, and then it got written quite quickly?

Jamie Dornan: I think a lot of it’s, the work’s done subliminally, or unconsciously. Once we actually sat down to write it, it was all, they were all new thoughts, but they felt like that already being formed in some other part of us. So actually they were accessible to us without realizing it. In a funny way, I think a lot of time when you’re writing stuff, it is events or stories that have already manifested themselves in your mind, whether you know it or not. And then it’s just releasing of them in a different form.

The Playlist: Can you say what your screenplay’s about?

Jamie Dornan: I have been working on it for a while. Similar to Ken, the lockdown presented this opportunity for time and availability to mind your own mind, and not just learn other people’s lines and turn up to work. And [I] never really had the time. And then, yeah, it’s a coming of age story, a 17-year-old girl. And one summer in Belfast in 1990. So it wouldn’t be 1969 and won’t be black and white. But yeah, we’re in that stage of our producing team, all fixed with an international sales agent, our next stop is getting money.

The Playlist: And you want to direct?

Jamie Dornan: That’s all for discussion, but potentially, yeah.

The Playlist: That’s fantastic. So, Kenneth, you worked on pieces of it during the initial stay-at-home portion of the pandemic. At what point do you remember, thinking, “No, wait, actually I need to work on something or we’ll go crazy, being stir crazy at home”?

Kenneth Branagh: It was March 23rd. [Laughs.]. I remember, at that stage, we didn’t know what was happening. And I had taken a week off, there was a technical issue that we had to wait on some cooking of digital material for “Death on the Nile,” in order to finish it. So, I had a week off, and I thought I’m going to start noodling this project, just for a week. That’s it. And then I came back in that night from the first day’s writing, and Boris Johnson told us we were locked down. And it just felt well, we’ll just get on with it, just drive through. And, so, I just committed. For me, it was somehow necessary. That was early doors. It was such a very hard thing to comprehend that it was really happening. We really were going to be prevented from doing a lot of quite normal things. It was quite a slow burn. And I thought, well, while this is happening, I think this feels like about the most unusual atmosphere for somebody like me to write, and I’m going to go for it. So, then I was [working at it] seven days a week for the next two months.

The Playlist: How quickly did you begin casting the film?

Kenneth Branagh: I started casting, and talking to Jamie say maybe four months later.

The Playlist: Wow, that’s really quick.

Kenneth Branagh: Yes, it had a momentum that was part of what we’re talking about earlier. It ended up coming out sooner and in a more intense way. And I felt as though we just never knew whether we’d be un-locked down. We didn’t know at that stage, our industry, everything being shot, theater, film, nothing was happening for a bit. So the goal was O.K., “Get my sister and my brothers read it. O.K., thumbs up. O.K. with the family.” And then can we get it financed? And then, can we get it cast? And then, shall we do it right now then, because who knows what’s going to happen. A series of pretty lucky breaks happened for us, but it was one of those things where it was a rolling momentum that you knew you had to go with while the opportunity existed.

The Playlist: What were your thoughts when the script came your way?

Jamie Dornan: I couldn’t believe it really in a way. In the best way. I’ve been three days shy of starting a miniseries when the pandemic started. And I was in New York. My family ended up back in the UK after three weeks, instead of a year.

Kenneth Branagh: Wow.

Jamie Dornan: The whole discombobulation of that event, throwing everything, three young kids is insane really, the unsettling the whole thing was, I guess. And presented with a bit of a blank slate in front of me, something which was great, because it encouraged me to write [my own] script. We wrote the first half in six weeks. But also, I was toying with, “What am I doing next?” Thank God I had this time to do that, but I’m an actor. I’ve got to act.

Kenneth Branagh: You need to work. It’s really, you need to work.

Jamie Dornan: Just that idea of, I want to work again soon. And there was humming and hawing over whether I was going back to shoot this thing. And then we got a script from my agent, and it’s called “Belfast,” which at the time that made me [perk up]. That place means more to me than anywhere else in the world. So, it was one of those dreams situations. I think that Judi Dench was already attached by this stage. I could have not read the script and said “Yes” very easily,. But then I read the script and it’s this beautiful, heartfelt, perfectly encapsulated vision of that place, and the people in that place. So, yeah, it was a very easy decision making for me.

Kenneth Branagh: We sent it to you on a Friday, you read it immediately. We spoke on Saturday. Sometimes people go, “Don’t even. Wait a week.”

Jamie Dornan: What? I just read it and knew.

Kenneth Branagh: Because they want to negotiate. I’ve got bollocks to negotiate. And so that made it very simple. And also as you say Judi Dench, it was even simpler with her. Literally on the phone, “Judi I’ve got a-” “Yes. No, don’t tell me, it’s fine. It’s fine. Just tell me when we start.” O.K. Literally, she just…

The Playlist: Before you even told her what it was?

Kenneth Branagh: Before I even told her what it was, yeah. I’ve got a cushion at home, which has embroidered on it “It’s Ken Branagh on the phone.” And Judi, “Just tell him yes.”

[Laughs all around.]

Kenneth Branagh: I grapple her that.

The Playlist: Obviously you wanted to find Irish actors. Even actors from Belfast. Both Jamie and Ciarán are from there And I think Jude is from…

Kenneth Branagh: Just outside Belfast.

The Playlist: Was that important to you or was it just luck?

Kenneth Branagh: No, it was very important, I think. We felt like if we can’t get the kid, we can’t make the film. That was one thing. But then we have to have Judi, so she’s like, she breaks all rules, but her parents are from the south of Ireland and spoke to her about this eventually the first time she said, “Oh my God, I remember going back on the boat the first time they went back because they left the family, as this film does.” And she said it was a powerful, powerful moment in her life, watching her parents, seeing that coastline approach, and getting completely overwhelmed. So she understood that time. She just did that television program “Who Do You Think You Are?“ And it’s the first place they took her, straight across in the boat to Ireland, because clearly her whole background is tied up in Ireland. So, she had that in the DNA.

The Playlist: There is a sense of joy in the actors’ performances, but you’re also one of the first films shooting during COVID, Was it a fun set? Was it serious?

Jamie Dornan: I thought it was amazingly fun. And I think when you consider, what we were up against actually, and logistically how difficult some of it was for us all sort of miracle, really that we were there. Everyone, the whole cast and crew getting tested every day, not rapid tests, tests properly sent off and we’d get the results every single day for seven weeks, whatever it was. And just the mask-wearing and the bubbles and the one-way flow. Some of the aspects of it should have been a recipe for disaster and complications, and a break in the norm. And as a result, make it quite a fatuous filming experience, but it was entirely the opposite of that. It was incredibly bonding. I think there was an aspect that we were all going through this together. We’re all very lucky to be there, to be able to film something during these times. It was just a glorious summer.

Kenneth Branagh: Well yeah, the fact that you go to Belfast, it’s a good reason to be working. We weren’t there that much, but Ciarán sent a nice note afterward. He says he’d never been on such an honest or warm set. And I thought that was only because he’s a highly experienced actor. And I liked that COVID gave us some time with each other as well. Suddenly you’re doing a scene that is in some smaller rooms in these houses. There’s you two [Jamie and Ciarán], and there’s me and there’s [cinematographer Harris Zambarloukos], who’s operating the camera as well. And maybe one other person, maybe they’re outside. So as we slowly get ready to go, there’s a silence, there’s a quiet, there’s a concentration, there’s a freedom. There’s a lack of pressure. You don’t feel literally the physical hoards of people going, “It’s so important.” So that was different.

The Playlist: I have to ask about Jude. He’s such a charismatic talent for such a young actor. How did you find him?

Kenneth Branagh: We lined up about 300 actors, we whittled it down to half of that, and then 100, and then 50, and then 12 and then six. And eventually, he’d been through a lot of rounds. He was the most present, and he was the one who was serious in his approach. But once you started the play of acting, had a playfulness, loved his football. I felt as though he had the combination. He did Irish dancing. So, there’s a certain discipline about physicality [with that]. You see him in the shot with Ciarán and Judi, and his feet are like that because he stands like that. That indicated there’s been some discipline there, there’s been some physical whatever. But he loved to play. And I thought, well, if he can connect with some of the other people on the set who love to play, and all the rest of it, and be present, then it’d be great. You were watching him blossom every single day. He’d get better from day one. [From not] looking at the camera, to improvising.

Jamie Dornan: He just loved to play, and he’s found himself in the right game. Essentially what we’re doing, we’re all playing. And he just had a real openness and willingness to listen. And I have three kids, my eldest is about to turn eight. So she’s a year and a half younger than Jude was when we shot. And listening isn’t always something they’re great at, but he really did. He really listened, sometimes you’d think it wasn’t going in, because he’s like, “Yeah, that’s great. No, I heard. Let’s play football.” But actually, he took it in, every direction that he got, he carried it and often put his own thing, his own way of taking directions And that face, Jesus, the face. You just want to watch him.

“Belfast” opens in theaters on Nov. 12.