Oscar-nominated actor-director KENNETH BRANAGH is well known for his film adaptations of Shakespearean plays including Much Ado About Nothing, Hamlet, and As You Like It.
But now he’s bringing Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute to the big screen. He talks to film journalist Jan Gilbert about French airfields, the challenges of opera, and working with Stephen Fry.
MMM: What drew you to adapt The Magic Flute for the cinema?
Branagh: I woke up one morning and through the fax machine had come a letter from Stephen Wright [Executive Producer] on behalf of the Peter Moores Foundation [the film's principal financier]. It was an invitation to think about whether I might be interested in directing a film of The Magic Flute. It was a complete surprise to be asked to do something like this, and to be perfectly honest I was rather suspicious of that lonely fax!
Joseph Kaiser as Tamino and Benjamin Jay Davis as Papageno in Kenneth Branagh's The Magic Flute
MMM: You’ve relocated the opera to the trenches of the First World War, where did the inspiration for that come from?
Branagh: After meeting up with Stephen, and being asked to imagine how the opera might be done, I took some time to gen up on opera and The Flute. I listened to many recordings of the original Flute in German, and thought whether there was a way I could feel it, see it, and imagine it being done on film.
I also asked friends who adored opera and knew The Flute very well and discovered that the original instructions from Schikaneder [The Flute's librettist] and Mozart were fairly vague and that it’s been set in every possible location – on a beach, in Ancient Egypt, a trippy psychedelic version set in the 60s, and, my favourite, on the moon! So that allowed me to feel there was a great deal of licence.
But ultimately I centred on the First World War period because of a feeling there was an appeal in the music for harmony and peace, and that’s what I was drawn to. And this period provided a sort of epic scope in the visuals that I also felt was in the music.
MMM: What about choosing your filming location?
Branagh: We explored much of northern France. At one point two of the producers and myself chased around an airfield there with a small tape-recorder blasting out the overture to see if we could literally mark it out with tape, and to decide whether we could build an entire trench network for real in the French countryside. But after six and a half minutes of our overture I think the three of us, huffing and puffing, rather red in the face, decided we’d do it in the studio and use computer-generated images to “cheat” some of it! And the location was in fact Shepperton Studios.
MMM: A number of films you’ve directed have featured music and dance, including Much Ado About Nothing and Love’s Labours Lost, but what sort of challenges did you face bringing an opera to the big screen?
Branagh: Well, there were lots of decisions to be taken and some of the early ones were how we could accommodate what were very high musical ambitions in the film. We wanted it to be excellent musically, and we wanted it to be performed wonderfully well.
And there can be a cliché about the way opera is performed, which puts some people off, and is to do with folk standing and looking out front and being part of a sort of animated concert. I wanted to get away from that and find a way of performing. And Stephen [Wright] and I had conversations about whether it should be actors miming to the brilliant vocal recordings of opera stars, or whether we could get people to do both.
Amy Carson was a student when she auditioned for the lead role, Pamina
MMM: That leads us on to casting…
Branagh: We went all over the place seeing people in the belief, which turned out to be true in my view, that we would find people that could not only sing but who could act for the camera. What we did insist on was that people would come and audition for the brief dialogue moments and sing on camera, and also practise lip-synching, which is a very difficult thing to do.
René Pape, who plays our Sarastro, was an absolute automatic choice. Before this, he probably played Sarastro 100 or 150 times around the world, and continues to do so. It’s really part of his repertoire. Lyubov Petrova, who played the Queen of the Night for the first time and did it wonderfully, was very much our conductor James’s idea. And Amy Carson, who plays Pamina, was at Cambridge University as a choral scholar at the time, and this was her first professional job. I was excited by the combination of those kinds of talents.
MMM: What do you feel the film brings to the opera?
Branagh: There’s an immense challenge to find, as I’d previously experienced with Shakespeare films, whether you can take an art form that sits so firmly in one medium, in this case the opera house, and make it work in a different way. The challenge was to offer up a different kind of experience, not only of the music but also of the story, and not for the film to be simply a recording of a particular production.
For instance, we were able to take a different view on how the relationship between Pamina and Tamino develops. Instead of just having him look at her photograph, we took the decision to see them fall in love. That romance appears to be at the centre of the story, yet in the opera they sing and are together very little.
The same thing applied to the way we tried to marry the fairytale elements of the Flute with the darker, more philosophical elements of the second part of the piece, and how we tried to bring a cinema narrative logic to a plot which Stephen Fry, who wrote the libretto, said made no sense whatsoever when I first rang him about it! Not that we somehow have a knowledge and superiority that Schikaneder and Mozart didn’t, but there is an invitation in the presentation of a movie these days to try and answer as much of that as you can with the current state of knowledge.
Branagh set Mozart's opera during World War Two
MMM: You mentioned Stephen Fry, who wrote the libretto for the film. You’ve worked together before on your film Peter’s Friends. What was it like working with him again?
Branagh: A joy! One of the great moments on the film for me was when Stephen delivered the first draft of his libretto. Our meeting place was the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden. I’d never been backstage before so I was very excited, but Stephen said, [Branagh imitates Fry’s voice] ‘Why are we meeting here? Couldn’t you have just emailed me and told me it was marvellous?’ To which I replied, ‘Well, it is marvellous, but what we’re going to do, Stephen, is we’re going to sing it.’ And he said, ‘don’t be ridiculous! I can’t sing this!’
I said, ‘Of course, you can, Stephen, there’s only two of us, and our musical director. The whole point of this is for us, before we embarrass ourselves in front of very talented musical folk, to work out whether we’re giving them unsingable things. It is brilliant, and you’ve found the texture of the original, you’ve found very strong equivalents for the right kind of vowels and the right kind of pitch, but the first way of testing this is for us to sing it. So you’re going to be Pamina, and I’m going to be Tamino. And then later on you’re going to be the Queen of the Night, and I’ll be Sarastro.’ And so we were!
And all I can say is that in my life there will be few things that will give me more pleasure than remembering six-foot-six Stephen Fry in the corner of the room, leaning out of an open window smoking and singing, ‘la la la la la la la la la laaaaaa!’ You’d pay good money to see that! And in the end it made for a very rigorous scrutiny of the text, and it was a really fun way to do our rewrites before we had the pleasure of putting the libretto in front of real singers who sang it rather better than us two!
