New ideas from Branagh

For all that audiences will get a kick out of the '30s musical numbers in Kenneth Branagh's Love's Labour's Lost, the defining conceit here is the series of "Navarre Cinetone Newsreel" sequences that frame the film. So it's a surprise to learn they were a late addition.

"It was a sort of two-o'clock-in-the-morning idea," Branagh explains at the Ritz-Carlton, during a quick Boston visit before dashing off to Newport and then the Tony Awards. "Harvey [Weinstein, of Miramax] and I agreed that something had to be done. So we did the newsreel. Much of what you see in the black-and-white sequences that make up the newsreel were parts of linking passages or montages that I thought would do the job. There was a long arrival sequence for the boys at the beginning that was a much more linear and conventional narrative with captions that took us to the beginning of the piece, and they would have been in color. The film in preview [pre-newsreel] had enjoyed a fitful sort of reaction; people were confused, so we found this way of telling the story. Once they heard the newsreel voice, once they saw the fun of jump cuts and degraded film and self-conscious staring into camera and the march-of-time music behind it, suddenly everybody knew where they were."

So, whose voice is it?

"Well, that's me. There's a bloke in England called Bob Danvers Walker, and when I was growing up, when you saw anything historical and they played newsreels of coronations and war footage, he was always the guy, and that voice was whizzing around my head as a kid. That English version of the American Movietone News, most of it's got that perky tone."

As for the closing newsreel footage, where World War II intervenes and the lads do their duty, Branagh says it wasn't an automatic choice. "When we came to post-production, we tried three versions of the ending. One was to stick with the ending as it is in the play, and it just felt terrifically unsatisfactory in the context of a boy-meets-girl musical. Then we thought maybe it needs to end on a number, so we switched `There's No Business like Show Business' to the end of the movie. But in that context, just after the death of the Princess's father, it seemed insensitive or glib. So what you see at the end is my original instinct about how the screenplay should finish."

In between, this Love's Labour's Lost preserves only some 30 percent of Shakespeare's original -- but Branagh points out that the cutting in his much admired Much Ado About Nothing was just as savage. "You keep thematic material that somehow makes you feel as if it isn't gone or as if cinema is somehow filling in the gaps, be it in looks or atmosphere to make you feel that more than is literally there is there. You cut to the point where you can play it at the appropriate speed so that the air around it does a thing of not making you feel it's rushed."

Would he be offended if a critic described this movie as "sit-com Shakespeare"?

"I'd be intrigued. I'm a huge fan of Friends and Frasier, where the comic facility of the performers and the economy of the writing and the whole level of performance is so astonishing. I worked with Courteney Cox once, and I went to see Friends recorded when they were in London making a couple of episodes [Ross and Emily's wedding], and I was amazed to get a little insight into that process and see the work that went on, the numbers of drafts, and then the work on the day and the work in recording it."

And what about Branagh as a song-and-dance man?

"When I was at drama school, we did it all the time, and it was absolutely part of the training. We did a Gershwin musical, Lady Be Good, we even nicked one of the numbers from that, 'I'd Rather Charleston,' and I was in the chorus playing a waiter. I did a couple numbers in a play as a character who emulated Jimmy Cagney, and I had about six months to learn a solo tap number to 'Give My Regards to Broadway.' Though I'm not a natural at singing or dancing, I enjoyed both enormously. And the crew all commented how having the music around made for a terrific upbeat atmosphere. We wanted that to come across, we absolutely wanted to put a smile on people's faces."
-- J.G.

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