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.
Did you ever meet Olivier?
I never met him, no. I met and worked with some of his contemporaries. I saw Ralph Richardson, one of his great contemporaries, many times. I worked with John Gielgud, was in contact with Alec Guiness, and then I wrote to Olivier when I was 20. I was in drama school, and I asked his advice -- actually, weirdly enough, on the next film he directed. He directed The Prince and the Showgirl in '56, and in 1970, he directed a film version of Chekhov's Three Sisters, in which he appeared as the doctor, Chebutikin. He said it took him that long to get over Marilyn -- that she had put him off directing for that long. Anyway, I wrote him for advice: "I'm playing the doctor. Obviously I'm monstrously too young for it; he's supposed to be between 60 and 70. You played it so beautifully. Sir, what could you tell me." And he said, "I can't possibly give you any advice on something that must be your own creation. My advice is to have a bash and hope for the best."
He wrote you back? That was his letter?
That was his letter.
Do you still have it?
I certainly do! I certainly do. I was amazed that he replied. In a way, it's an encapsulation of the very thing that the picture hints at: When he's up against Marilyn, he can't really understand why you need to think about Coca-Cola, Frank Sinatra, not coming in on time, come on set, get upset, need 50 takes... You've just got to do it. Just do it! When there's a problem, just do it. You've got to fake it to make it. You've got to keep practicing. He famously said -- and this might sound immodest of him, but I think he was trying to be accurate. He's a very fine artist, so he could say this kind of thing and one would take it at face value. It was in relation to stage acting -- he said: "It's impossible to be great very often. Most of the time, if you're very lucky, you have to content yourself with merely being very, very good."
He accepted that, but I don't think Marilyn accepted that -- even though she was in work that lots of times didn't even have the possibility of being great because it was soufflé-like. But she seemed to bring a sort of beauty to what she did that when it did work did have shades of gray. She certainly aspires to it. I think she thought of the things we were talking about: Timetables, getting there early, etc. etc. These aren't things that should apply to people who take themselves seriously as great artists. If Picasso were on the job, you wouldn't go up to him and say, "OK, you're going to start Guernica tomorrow at 8 o'clock." He may say, "I'll start it when it comes to me." That's how she felt. But Olivier would start tomorrow morning at 8 o'clock. It may not be a sublime painting, but it was always going to be a pretty marvelous painting.
Do you remember your first time seeing Olivier on screen or on stage?
There are two things I remember vividly. When I was at school, and we were watching a film in an English class -- which we were thrilled about because it felt like we weren't doing any work -- and it turned out to be Henry V. And the teacher stopped the film. In a very, very effective screen entrance, there's a shot backstage, and then from the left, on comes this profile. And this fellow goes... [Quietly clears throat] The teacher stops the film and says, "Who's that?" And nobody had a clue. And he said, "That is the greatest actor in the English-speaking world. That is Laurence Olivier." It was Olivier's first entrance in Henry V, where he comes on very modestly, as an actor in the wings waiting to go on. And what you see is this great aquiline profile -- this very modest start, because he's so nervous -- and then he walks out on stage and he has this great scene with the Dauphin. So I remember that -- thinking, "So that's what all the fuss is about!"
And then in our English department store cupboard, there were two records. These old, bent LP records, and one of them was of Olivier doing speeches from Shakespeare. I asked if I could take that home; there'was one of him, and there was one of Gielgud. I took them home and listened to both of them. So most of what I remember is that slight profile of Olivier coughing, being modestly beautiful before his first grand entrance as Henry V, and then on record, hearing all this very dramatic music and being very struck by this very hypnotic quality of him starting to say, [adapts a husky whisper] "To be or not to be, that is the question" in this sort of far-away way that was part of his conception of Hamlet. I thought, "Oh, apparently that's what great acting is."
Those were very vivid, but working on this picture was to remind me of the other end of things: His performance in The Entertainer which is quite, quite brilliant, or even a film like Bunny Lake is Missing, which he made in the '60s with Otto Preminger? He's so real; he could be so fantastically underplayed. He was such a skillful, amazingly skillful guy.
Do you remember you first experience watching Marilyn Monroe?
I think it was in the train in Some Like it Hot. I remember thinking, "Jesus Christ, she's sexy. Oh my God. Frankly, I'd wear drag if I could get anywhere near her in that sleeping compartment." I wouldn't have known then what the word meant -- and I'm not so sure I do now -- but her voluptuousness. Her kindly voluptuousness. It has sort of an edge to it, whatever this combination she has of both innocence and a very present sexual quality. She was so irresistible in that. That's what I remember: Lemon and Curtis in drag, and her being so kind of... well, ready to take her clothes off in that particular sequence, because they were all going to bed, and they were all girls. With Marilyn, it was sort of the vividness of the looks. The peroxide, platinum blond seemed blonder than any blond on the planet. It was like Olivier in a way in terms of their faces. They had faces for movies. It's such an obvious thing to say, but it was the kind of face you could draw with four or five strokes of a pen. It had that striking, distinctive characteristic.
What about your first time seeing Michelle Williams as Marilyn Monroe?
It was one of those moments. It followed a Sunday morning at Pinewood, on the same soundstage where they had shot the original movie and we were going to shoot the movie. I had just come over from America; I was still directing Thor at that time, in postproduction. The two things I remember were Michelle speaking for the first time -- as Marilyn, at the read-through, in a read-through inside the film. I was constantly aware of these sorts of double-ups: "God, we're in the same soundstage, and she's just arrived from America," and on and on. And then the second thing was the next day, when I was talking to Judi. We were waiting for Michelle to arrive. They weren't planning to shoot on her, and they decided they might just see her walking away -- this very first shot. I'm talking to Judi, who was being shot, and then she looks to me and says, "Oh, crikey, Kenny -- look!" And I turned around, and there was Michelle walking... I say "walking," but you can't walk as Marilyn in that dress. You kind of... undulate. It's like she's on casters, you know? And we both had a look at each other -- Dench and I -- having heard her sound so right and then see her. Both were very striking feelings of, "I think this is the right actress in the right part."
My Week With Marilyn opens Wednesday in limited release.
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[Top photo: AFP/Getty Images]