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Reader SurveyFade to Black: Kenneth Branagh, Director
Sep 1, 2007 12:00 PM, By Darroch Greer
"That chance to unsettle — that was the really great visual invitation and treat here,” Kenneth Branagh says of his latest directorial effort, Sleuth. “As perverse as it seems, and as paradoxical as it seems, two men in a room talking about a woman we never see I find about as cinematic an invitation as I've ever had.”
Of course it's not just any two men in any room. This is Michael Caine and Jude Law in a screenplay set down by Harold Pinter. This is not the cozy, country manor masquerade Sleuth you may remember from the 1972 film version starring Laurence Olivier and a younger Caine. Oh no. This is the Anthony Shaffer play re-imagined by Pinter as a sinister, nasty tale of male one-upmanship where the depths of each man's character keep getting plumbed beyond recognition. Plus, the makeup's better.
“It just seemed like a meaner, psychologically dirtier thing,” Branagh recalls from his first reading. “It garnered that intuitive response from me that I felt like I could hear and see and feel a different kind of film there.”
Branagh says he was entranced by the spare, nuanced style that is Pinter's forte. “It's almost comical with Harold, the lack of screen direction,” Branagh says. “Occasionally, he'll say, ‘a chair.’ … But everything he does say, of course, is loaded with meaning. The biggest … ideas that he put in the screen directions were that the outside of the house was a period one and the inside was, as he puts it, ‘startlingly modern: all steel, glass, and wood.’”
In essence, the house was a third character. For this, Branagh, Production Designer Tim Harvey, and DP Haris Zambarloukos designed an interior worthy of the Tate Modern: a private gallery for the crime novelist played by Caine, a chamber of clever, high-tech devices.
“We were constantly looking for a kind of imagistic response to this rich language, this rich dialogue,” Branagh says. “Also, it was language and dialogue that often seemed to carry some other hidden message, some kind of form of menace or some form of humor” — laden, he says, with double and triple meanings that influenced every piece of framing. “We said, ‘There will never be anything casual in any frame here.’ Every color, every object, the spatial relationship between them, the distance from the object to the lens, etc., had to be thought about very carefully. I mean, it would be the case on any film, of course, but here it seemed that it was part of the game. It was part of the visual game that you were offering the audience to take part in from the beginning.”
The shooting schedule was a tight 23 days, 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Branagh says he is proud that there was no overtime. Shots were shot-listed. There was a little storyboarding. The DP and designer came to rehearsals where an intense rhythm developed from the run-throughs, allowing them to shoot from three to nine pages daily, even with the demanding look of the film. Zambarloukos shot anamorphic with Kodak stock.
“We were also using an image intensifier on the 35mm camera in order to reproduce the green night-vision effect of the security cameras at night on location, even though we shot it during the day on location. We did not shoot night for night,” Branagh says of how they achieved not only the color but the degradation of the security image.
“We did more tests on this movie than on any film I've ever been involved with,” Branagh says. “The concentration and focus of the two-men-in-a-room element of it allowed us to be comprehensive in the way we planned for it. Initially, we thought we would produce a photochemical grade, but in the end we did a digital grade. Haris' feeling was we wanted what we saw in dailies to be close to what we were after.”
