By John Anderson
When he was an adolescent, Kenneth Branagh’s mother started reading detective fiction, and one title in particular — “Murder on the Orient Express” — really caught his eye. “It’s a great title,” said the actor-director, 56. “So clear, so direct, so punchy. And confident. I remember reading it back then and really ripping through it.”
By comparison, said Branagh — whose new adaptation of the 1934 Agatha Christie novel opens Friday, Nov. 10 — it took him seven attempts and 25 years to get through “War and Peace.”
“Now, I’m not saying ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ is a better book,” said Branagh, puckishly, “but Tolstoy deals with so many characters that are so hard to follow, and Agatha Christie has about 15 who are potentially central to the action and you know who everyone is. What she does is a real juggling act” — and one that Branagh tries to emulate on screen in his highly stylized, visually lush adaptation set aboard a train bound from Istanbul to Paris, carrying a dozen potential murderers, and one nasty, ventilated corpse.
The movie features an international cast that includes Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer, Penélope Cruz, Judi Dench, Manuel Garcia-Rulfo and Branagh himself — as the elaborately mustachioed detective Hercule Poirot. It departs from both the book, which began with a recap of a crime Poirot had just solved, and the 1974 movie, which recaps a different crime — the one Christie based on the Lindbergh baby kidnapping, and which will be at the center of the slaying committed five years later, by a person or persons aboard the luxurious and, at one point, snowbound train.
Branagh’s version, with its script by Michael Green (“Blade Runner 2049”), begins in Jerusalem, with Poirot in the middle of solving an antiquities theft,
“I thought, ‘Let’s see Poirot in action. Start the movie with a dénouement,’ ” Branagh said, “so when he gets on the train we, the audience, already knows who he is, and how he’s smarter than the average bear.”
Branagh said he loved the ’74 film, “which was made by a master, Sidney Lumet, whom I had a chance to meet later in his life. He told me he wanted that movie to be a ‘romp.’ And that’s fine. I wanted our version to be entertaining, but I also wanted it to be about the brooding undercurrent in Christie’s novel, about the death of innocence. I needed to feel from everybody that we’re not just in a romp, but a situation which could mean life or death for everyone on board.”
Source: newsday
Hello, my name is Jack Sparrow. I'm a 50 year old self-employed Pirate from the Caribbean.
No comments:
Post a Comment