-Our first guest tonight
is a very talented writer, actor, and director
whose film "Belfast"
is nominated for seven Academy Awards.
It's currently playing in select theaters nationwide
and available to stream on Apple TV+
and Amazon Prime Video.
Let's take a look.
-Every night before I go to sleep, when I say my prayers,
I ask God if he'd fix it so that when I wake up in the morning,
I'm the best footballer in the world.
Then I also ask him as well
that when I grow up, can I marry Catherine?
Even if she loves Ronnie Boyd.
But she could still see him, but she'd marry me.
That's what I want.
-Please welcome to the show Kenneth Branagh, everybody.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Hiya.
[ Cheers and applause ]
-Kenneth, congratulations.
Seven Oscar nominations. -Thank you, Seth.
-That must feel very special.
It was amazing. It still feels amazing.
And it was an incredible morning, actually.
We have four producers.
Two of us were in London. Two of us were in L.A.
We were both listening to the announcements live,
but there was a sort of time delay which meant that,
bizarrely, we got the information just a few seconds
ahead in London of them in L.A.
So they were watching us, because we had each of us muted
so we could hear the announcements.
And they were seeing body language going,
"No, we didn't get it -- Oh, yes!"
Just ahead, and not quite understanding what it was.
So they died a thousand deaths
while we got the information a bit quicker,
even though they were in the City of the Angels itself.
But still, it was an amazing --
it's hard to describe the kind of champagne moment that it is.
You don't really believe it's quite happening.
And then suddenly, anybody you've ever met in your life
is in touch with you for the next three hours.
-You know, very early in your career, with "Henry V,"
you were Oscar nominated.
Do you have a completely different perspective
going into the night than you had back then,
when you were just getting started as a film director?
-It's still pretty amazing.
It's so unusual.
I mean, this film, "Belfast," is about
a boy from a working-class family in North Belfast
who loved going to the movies
and saw all these kind of gifts from Hollywood.
So, to make a film that's in Hollywood
attracting people to the movies, and you realize,
"Hey, the kid from the working-class Belfast family
is me, and this is happening."
Frankly, Seth, I still haven't got my head around it.
It was bizarre enough that I was
doing Shakespeare as a 29-year-old there.
So to be here and telling a personal story
and having it touch people, that's --
I mean, it's a mind-blower.
-So, this is about --
you know, it's based on your life.
It's based on growing up in Belfast.
And I assume usually you have to
do a great deal of research about a film,
especially a period piece like this.
But because it was your childhood,
did you have to do the same level of research,
or did you just count on your own memory?
-I decided that I wouldn't ask, because I don't know about you,
but I find it's pretty hard to achieve
objective truth about anything.
I often find that with my wife and I,
there may be a dispute about
literally what happened in the morning.
It's probably not the same in your household, but we --
you know, we can't agree about, "we had coffee."
"We didn't have coffee."
"You said that thing. You said you would do it."
"No, I didn't. You said you would do it."
"That was yesterday." Anyway.
That kind of thing, in the course of 10 hours,
seems to happen regularly.
So I thought, I'm not going to ask my family,
and then I'll show it to them when I'm finished.
And I did, and my brother, who was part of the whole story,
then read it and he loved it.
He was very emotional.
He said, "But you didn't do that.
I did that, and you did that."
So, it was a whole kind of -- I was glad I waited.
[ Laughter ]
-And can we expect that your family
will make a rebuttal "Belfast" film
where they tell it the way it actually happened?
-Yeah. Yeah, I would think so.
Yeah, I think put your finger on it there,
because yeah.
Inevitably, you just decided,
this is going to go through the eyes of a 9-year-old boy,
And it's also a 9-year-old boy who loves movies.
So because, you know, I saw so many Westerns,
particularly from this country, a lot of the story
goes through that kind of lens.
You see people as the good guys and the bad guys,
and the street becomes your Wild West town.
And I guess, you know, my brother
definitely saw it in different terms,
but he was five years older and he knew everything.
And he still knows everything, and I still love him.
-Do you, historically, with your work,
have you shown it to family, sort of early drafts?
-I don't know about you, I find that
when I show people things that are work in progress,
it doesn't matter what you say,
and they'll claim they understand it --
so, you'll say to somebody that you know and love, say,
"So, this is an early cut of a film.
It's a special effects film, so there'll be
some flying machines and all the rest of it,
so there's some green screen or some blue screen.
So just bear that in mind.
There's some green screen and some blue screen,
so bear in mind, you'll see some green and some blue."
"Oh, don't, listen, I understand.
I see, I know how to watch a movie."
The lights go up and they turn around and,
"You know, there's a lot of green screen in that film.
You know, I actually, I don't know if you saw.
I saw a lot of blue.
A lot of blue, actually, in addition to the green.
There's green and blue."
"Is there? Ya don't say! I told you!"
So, I tend now to only show people
things when they're pretty blooming far on.
-I think that's a good lesson to have learned.
This isn't just up against your family's memories.
This is about the street you grew up in.
So I imagine you have neighbors from that time period
who it also, you know, personally affected
their memory of the place.
-Yeah, and it's been wonderful that since the film's come out,
several people who lived in that street have been in touch.
You know, we lived next to a park.
There were railings that were bent sideways
so that people my size could squeeze through.
Several people who claim to be the person
whose unique strength opened that bendy bar,
as we used to call it.
The Charles Atlases of the time have said,
"It was me, it was me, it was me."
But a lot of people have really said
how right they think the film got it.
It's how they remember it.
But they reminded me of things that I did not know.
If any of your viewers know what the following explains,
please tell me.
So, a friend of mine from the street,
wrote to me recently and said, "In the summer," he said,
"your hair was always greasy."
And I said, "Why?"
He said because your mother, in the summer,
as a matter of course, would cover it with butter.
I don't know whether
she intended to put me in a bread roll or something,
I don't know, as a punishment.
But it may have been to do with conditioning my hair,
which, you know, is largely still here,
so maybe I should thank her.
But little details like that were lovely to hear
from people who were really there.
-I feel like you -- I mean,
if the butter industry is hearing this,
they should really hire you as a spokesperson.
I mean, that head of hair, you with some butter,
saying, "This is the secret."
[ Laughter ]
-Listen, I think you've got a fine head of hair there, Seth.
Have you secretly been using butter?
-I don't like to say it, but I have been buttering my hair
since I was a kid, yeah.
[ Laughter ] -We have very similar mothers.
-I Can't Believe It's Not Butter!
-So, Dame Judi Dench is fantastic in this film.
And she was here recently and talked about,
you guys have a very long history of working together.
She has directed you onstage.
You obviously directed her now in this film.
And she told a story about you
getting kicked out of a studio, a television studio,
for laughing during a production of Ibsen's "Ghosts,"
which is not known as a comedy.
What exactly happened?
-Well, if, like Judi, you are a genius
and when you are playing these dark roles
and you inhabit all this sort of sturm-and-drang woman
whose father and husband have ruined her life
and now her son has inherited this terrible disease,
and, you know, life is in a field
where the sun only goes across for a narrow part of the day
in the summer and everything's pretty gloomy.
When you inhabit that with that intensity,
I think it makes you very sort of giddy.
So when you have to do --
so, you've done the big, you know, fancy scenes.
Then we had a scene where all we had to do was eat dinner.
The late, great Natasha Richardson
delivers some potatoes to myself,
to the great Michael Gambon, and then to Judi.
When Judi had been passed by Natasha Richardson,
the potatoes had been dumped, and then Michael Gambon
was invited to join in, and Natasha said,
"How many potatoes can I give you?"
And he said "17."
Judi Dench then literally fell forward.
So her head, the dame of the the British empires' face
is now in the potatoes, and all she's doing is laughing.
Gambon, because the camera's gone past him,
slides underneath, and now it resides on a close-up of me.
And Natasha Richardson is holding the plate
with the potatoes, and the spoon is rattling,
because she's laughing so much.
At which point, a voice comes over saying, "Stop!
Stop! You know who you are!
Get out of the studio, now, Ms. Dench and Mr. Branagh,
and do not return!"
So it was her fault. It was her fault.
Plus, she ruined all her makeup, which I didn't.
-I'm very glad you cleaned this up for everyone.
The last thing I want to ask, this is a movie that,
obviously this was a time of great violence in Belfast,
and yet there's a great amount of humor in the film.
I would imagine that must be a part you remember
of your upbringing, that even in a very troubled time,
there was a great amount of laughter amongst your family.
amongst that community, that neighborhood.
-The quickest way to a joke in dark times
was how you got over it.
There's a scene at the end
where a much-loved character passes away,
when my father was involved with that moment in real life,
he had to share a downstairs room
with an open casket and a body,
and five days' worth of the locals coming
and trying to get back, in terms of drink,
what they felt they had been owed
by the person who had departed.
It's very intense. It's dark. It's mad.
People drink a lot, but by the end of it,
you then, after all that keening that the Irish do --
they own their grief -- suddenly, Jamie Dornan comes on,
who I think you look very like, by the way.
-Thank you very much.
And you're a director.
You have an eye for this kind of thing.
-Exactly.
Tell your wife it was literally, you were down to the last two.
It was you and Jamie,
and the only reason he got it, Seth, was that
he did this fantastic version of "Everlasting Love" at the wake,
which allowed everybody to get out of this dark, grieving scene
into a big, mad, knees-up, singing scene.
When you have that in your repertoire,
I think Jamie Dornan is out the window,
and your wife will renew
her keen interest in your romantic possibilities.
-Well, you have really sent me off with
a sort of, I don't know, esteem-building
I don't get from a lot my guests, so thank you so much.
Congratulations on the film.
Good luck at the Oscars.
Kenneth Branagh, everybody!
-Thank you.
-"Belfast" is playing in select theaters nationwide,
and available to stream on Apple TV+
and Amazon Prime Video.
We will be right back!