Review from the Shakespeare Bulletin, Summer 2000, written by Professor Samuel Crowl. Crowl wrote a chapter on Kenneth Branagh for Shakespearean scholar Russell Jackson's new book, which features a photo from Love's Labour's Lost on its cover.
Crowl is working on a new book, "Shakespeare at the Cineplex", which will treat all of Branagh's films to date as well as the many others Branagh's success has inspired in the last decade. "Shakespeare at the Cineplex" should be available sometime in 2002.
The Crowl review joins playwright Wendy Wasserstein's essay from the New York Times. New York, New Jersey and Rhode Island articles also available below.
(Thanks to Virginia for the book news.)
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Shakespeare Bulletin, Summer 2000
Love's Labour's Lost
Samuel Crowl (Ohio University, Athens, Ohio)
Branagh's giddy version of Love's Labour's Lost is a companion piece to his bold Much Ado About Nothing: both films acknowledge his deep infatuation with the Hollywood films of the 1930s, 40s and 50s. His Much Ado (particularly in Emma Thompson's splendid Beatrice) captured the spirit of the 1930s screwball comedies, and his Love's Labor's Lost refashions Shakespeare's first festive comedy in the tradition of the American movie musical from Vincent Minnelli to Stanley Donen, from Fred Astaire to Gene Kelly. The romantic leads in movie musicals break into song as naturally as Shakespeare's lovers break into sonnet. Branagh sees to it, moreover, that dancing works as an implied metaphor throughout, from Berowne's opening query to Rosaline, "Did I not dance with you in Brabant once?", to the ultimate refusal of the women to dance out the answer to the men's wooing desires in the play's final scene. When Branagh's Berowne breaks into tap to beat out "Have at you, then, affection's men-at-arms!", his film adds a precious hearing to the ear as well as seeing to the eye.
This film shows such infatuation with its Hollywood sources that it risks being regarded as Love's Labor's Lite. Yet the film's energy and charm ultimately derive from its clever linkage of Shakespeare's early poetic flights of fancy with the brilliant melodies and lyrics of master American songwriters like Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, and Irving Berlin. The film moves seamlessly from Shakespeare to song, especially in the two great dance numbers, "I Won't Dance, Don't Ask Me" and "Dancing Cheek to Cheek," which frame the wooing games, and in "There's No Business Like Show Business" and "They Can't Take That Away From Me," which capture the way Shakespeare, in Love's Labor's Lost, explodes the conventional comic ending.
In a remarkable feat of synthesis, Branagh's film manages to give us, in ninety-five minutes, most of the play's plot; about twenty-five percent of its text; and ten song and dance routines that echo movie musicals as diverse as Esther Williams' water ballets and Gene Kelly's An American in Paris. As often with Branagh, there is a sense of eager amateurism about these efforts, which some find more winning than others. This might be called the Andy Hardy strain in his production aesthetic ("Hey, gang, let's put on a play!"). His film of Love's Labor's Lost is his homage not only to Fred and Ginger but to Mickey and Judy as well.
The best of the dance routines, Top Hat's "Dancing Cheek to Cheek," spins gracefully out from Shakespeare's verbal pirouettes on the relationships among love and learning and a lady's eyes. Branagh's Berowne circumnavigates the library of Navarre's Oxbridge academy as he lectures his pals on the power of knowledge as emanating not from leaden contemplation but from the "prompting eyes . . . of beauty's tutors." When he reaches "And when Love speaks, the voice of all the gods/Make heaven drowsy with the harmony," the film glides amusingly from Shakespeare to Irving Berlin: Branagh begins to croon "Heaven . . . I'm in heaven" as he and his fellow lovers lift up and off, twirling into the library's great dome, carried aloft by their buoyant wooing spirits. C. L. Barber has written that Berowne's peroration on love "leaps up to ring . . . big bells lightly," a spirit captured nicely here by Stuart Hopps' choreography. When the men return to earth--now Fredded up in white tie and tails--they spill out from the library into the courtyard to be met by their respective Gingers, each dressed in a flowing pastel gown, and we are treated to the momentary heavenly harmony among the four couples that we are denied in the text.
Branagh punctuates his mixture of Shakespeare's song and Hollywood's dance with another long-usurped movie staple, the Movietone News of the Week, where his own voice (echoing Olivier and Welles) serves as that of the rapid-fire narrator. Alessandro Nivola as the King and his companions--Branagh as Berowne, Matthew Lillard as Longaville, and Adrian Lester as Dumaine--have retreated into their little academe not only to deny themselves the pleasures of the world but also, one takes it, to avoid the growing winds of war, for the film is set in the long summer of 1939. The entrance of the French Princess, played by Alicia Silverstone, and her attending ladies--Natascha McElhone as Rosaline, Emily Mortimer as Katherine, and Carmen Ejogo as Maria--calls the men back then, in Branagh's conception, not only to the pleasures (the songs of Apollo) but to the pains (the words of Mercury) of the world.
The arrival of Daniel Hill's Mercade, the messenger of death, at the climax suspends, on the women's insistence, the wooing games for a year. It is transformed in the film to the arrival of the war and the call of the men from one set of arms to another. In a scene evoking Casablanca, the men bid farewell to the women at a foggy airport; as the plane disappears into the night, it skywrites "You that way, we this way." This should have been the film's natural conclusion. Instead, Branagh--perhaps at the urging of Harvey Weinstein, who wanted Tom Stoppard to rewrite the end of Shakespeare in Love so that Shakespeare and Viola de Lessups could get married (!)--gives us a mini-version, in black and white footage, of World War II, with the men emerging triumphant to be reunited with their women while an orchestral reprise of "They Can't Take That Away From Me" swells on the soundtrack.
Lester was a brilliant Rosalind in Cheek by Jowl's all male As You Like It in the early 1990s and the definitive Bobby in Sam Mendes' 1995 revival of Sondheim's Company; as Dumaine, he is the most accomplished of the men, particularly in the dance routines. Among the women, McElhone, in a few deft moments, suggests the essence of Rosaline's tart but generous with. Branagh, wisely, retains almost all of her important exchange, in the text, with Berowne when she sends him off to amuse the speechless sick so that he may learn that "a jest's prosperity lies in the ear/Of him that hears it, never in the tongue/Of him that makes it." Silverstone, amusing as a Valley-girl version of Austen's Emma Woodhouse several years ago, is unfortunately clueless as the Princess in negotiating Shakespeare's pentameters.
The local villagers suffer the greatest compression (and transformation as Holofernes becomes Holofernia) in Branagh's trimming of the text. The film creates a flirtation between Richard Briers' Sir Nathaniel and Geraldine McEwan's Holofernia and gives them a sweetly daft dance version of erome Kern's "The Way You Look Tonight" to mirror the love antics of the aristocrats. Nathan Lane as Costard is perhaps the most successful of all of the American comedians, from Michael Keaton to Billy Crystal, whom Branagh has cast in clown roles, and Timothy Spall's Daliesque Don Armado does a wonderful turn on Porter's "I Get a Kick Out of You."
The relationship between Hollywood and Shakespeare that was echoed in certain visual moments in Branagh's films of Much Ado and Hamlet becomes more than a hint or an echo in his Love's Labor's Lost. It is the creative energy that drives the film, provides its comic pleasures, and dictates its evasions and its elisions. Brangh found a teenage audience for his Much Ado, whose box office helped fuel the resurgence of the Shakespeare film in the last decade. If Branagh's current exercise in movie nostalgia doesn't bring in their parents (and grandparents), his Love's Labour's Lost may sadly signal the end of the revival.
(Thanks to Deborah B.)
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Bergen Record (New Jersey)
A Real 'Labour' of Love
June 10, 2000
Jim Beckerman
Let purists complain about the transformation of Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost" into a Thirties-style song-and-dance movie. Personally, Kenneth Branagh doesn't give a hey nonny nonny or a hi de ho. "One of my absolute tenets is my resistance to those who are proprietorial about Shakespeare," says the director-star, dressed in stylish black, a la Hamlet, for a recent interview in Manhattan. "I continue, and it is not false modesty, to view myself not as an expert at this, but simply an enthusiast, an interpreter of Shakespeare -- who is for everybody," he says.
Well, maybe Branagh is being a little modest at that. The foremost movie interpreter of Shakespeare since Laurence Olivier has approached the Bard from many angles -- from his revisionist warts-and-all portrayal of an English hero in his highly praised debut film "Henry V" (1988) to his lively take on "Much Ado About Nothing" (1993) to his epic "Hamlet" (1996), which broke all the rules simply by its awesome fidelity to Shakespeare's text, all 242 minutes of it.
In "Love's Labour's Lost," which opened Friday, he's gone to the opposite extreme. Only about a third of Shakespeare's original play remains in this 1930s-dress version that clocks in at barely more than 90 minutes. Nor is that the most radical departure from Shakespeare's 1598 comedy -- the first work to be published under the Shakespeare byline.
The high points of the film are when Branagh, Alicia Silverstone, Nathan Lane, Adrian Lester, and the lords and ladies of the court of Navarre break out of their iambic pentameter to croon and tap their way through such classic songs as Irving Berlin's "There's No Business Like Show Business," Jerome Kern's "The Way You Look Tonight," and George and Ira Gershwin's "They Can't Take That Away From Me."
No, it's not just a stunt, Branagh says. There is actually the ghost of a Thirties movie musical hidden in this early Shakespeare comedy about four noblemen (Branagh, Lester, Matthew Lillard, and Alessandro Nivola) who vow to give up love for three years, and four noble ladies (Silverstone, Emily Mortimer, Carmen Ejogo, adn Natascha McElhone) who help them change their minds. Branagh knows, because in addition to being a Shakespeare enthusiast, he's also a musical comedy buff. "They were always on television," says the 40-year-old Irish-born, British-trained actor. "Back in pre-cable days, they were the staple Saturday-Sunday afternoon product of BBC 2. I saw endless musicals."
He also cut his song-and-dance teeth at the age of 19 in a drama school production of "Lady Be Good," from which he salvaged the little-known Gershwin gem "I'd Rather Charleston," the opening number of "Love's Labour's Lost." There are striking similarities, he says, between the romantic comedies of the Globe Theatre era and the 1930s Astaire-Rogers musical comedies that played Radio City Music Hall. Both take place against a background of upper-class luxury. Both feature romantic mix-ups, suave heroes and heroines, low-comedy relief. "It's boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy finds girl," he says. "You willingly embrace the corniness of it, the predictability of it. With a plot like this, when the king and others start saying they're gonna give it up for three years, you know, you just know what's gonna happen. A 7-year-old could figure it out." And the similarities don't end there.
In this film, Lane's character, Costard, is patterned after the wise-guy sidekicks played in 1930s movies by Victor Moore and other vaudevillians. Holofernia (Geraldine McEwan) is the sort of lively middle-aged lady played in the Astaire films by Helen Broderick. One comic staple of the Astaire films, the pompous foreigner, has his counterpart in the Spaniard Don Armado (Timothy Spall), with his ridiculous Salvador Dali moustache. "Our ultimate aim, in the spirit of the films we were inspired by, was to make it seem effortless," Branagh says. "To make it seem that we just rolled up and did it."
No easy trick, that. Because in addition to having such great talents as Astaire and Rogers on tap, the 1930s Hollywood studio factories were geared to the mass-production of musicals, with the best directors, choreographers, and music arrangers under contract. Since the decline of movie musicals in the early 1970s, the occasional attempts to revive them ("At Long Last Love," "Evita," "Everyone Says I Love You") have mostly been exercises in reinventing the wheel. So it was for "Love's Labour's Lost,'" where everything had to be done from scratch. "This, for me, was a much greater challenge than doing 'Hamlet,'" Branagh says.
To prepare for this $16 million film, Branagh created a three-week "boot camp" where actors unfamiliar with musical comedy could be taught to sing and dance, and singers unfamiliar with Shakespeare could be taught to declaim. "Eight o'clock in the morning we got the company together for two hours of singing and dancing," Branagh says. "Then each was carrying their individual rehearsal schedules to go from singing and dancing to Shakespeare, depending on the individual." With so difficult a project, Branagh was grateful to get the endorsement of one man who really mattered: Stanley Donen, the director of such legendary MGM musicals as "On the Town" and "Singin' in the Rain." The credits for "Love's Labour's Lost" list Donen (along with Martin Scorsese) for "presenting" the film -- an honorary title more than anything else, Branagh says. "It was particularly thrilling to get Donen's thumbs up," Branagh says.
(Thanks to Paula B.)
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New York Daily News
Branagh Puts A New Spin on Old Will
June 9, 2000
By Denene Millner
Dig this: The sensuality of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet" is nestled in the "woo baby" of Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye's classic duet "You Are Everything."
At least, that's what one of Kenneth Branagh's teachers said when he introduced him to the Elizabethan playwright with a tape of the duo's Motown hit. "He said, 'Tell me what that's about — what you're getting from that.' And we said, 'I don't know,'" Branagh remembers. "He said, 'Sex! That's part of the nature of this duet, so let's look at 'Romeo and Juliet' and find the sex.' Immediately, we were intrigued. "It wasn't just a stunt. It was simply a graphic way of saying, 'Look, there are all sorts of different art forms — popular music, plays — that talk about things that we all experience,'" Branagh adds. "And so you were introduced in a way that was fun and meaningful, and that sparked up all kinds of arguments and debates."
Branagh admits that it was unorthodox. But it explains why his approach to Shakespeare as an actor and director has been equally, well, unconventional.
Film Stars in a New Light
In 1987, he directed a stage production of "Twelfth Night" set to music by Paul McCartney, while his 1989 screen adaptation of "Henry V" was generally regarded as the dark, atmospheric opposite of Laurence Olivier's lavish, colorful version. He also loaded up his 1993 "Much Ado About Nothing" with all-stars not associated with Shakespeare, including Denzel Washington and Keanu Reeves. And now, Branagh is at it again. Today, his "Love's Labour's Lost" comes to the big screen as a 1930s musical — keeping with his penchant for shaking up Shakespeare.
And shake he does.
Starring Branagh, Alicia Silverstone and Nathan Lane, "Love" is a look at what happens when four friends swear off love. The catch here is that they fall in love anyway — and, à la Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, they're prone to breaking out in song and dance to express just how pleased they are to be in love.
Branagh says his interpretation of "Love" runs true to form with his recipe for Shakespeare, which combines traditionalism and historical context with contemporary moods — an "exciting challenge," he adds, that keeps his films from becoming "nostalgic and retro." "With Shakespeare, it's always the issue of making the connection," he says. "And I think that sometimes it's good that we have to work for that. But it is true that there is always this issue of ... divesting people of their fear and intimidation and boredom with it."
Shakespeare for All
His approach may not be for purists, but Branagh really isn't interested in pleasing them anyway. He knows that his work is a far cry from the lushness of Olivier's Shakespeare — the films to which his work is most often compared. And while he doesn't really mind the comparisons, Branagh thinks the Shakespeare purists who lambaste his work just don't understand what he's trying to do: He just wants to bring the playwright's work to the people.
"Maybe it's because I'm from a working-class background," he says, "but in a way, it drives the resistance to that social devisiveness that springs from the people who claim, 'I'm clever because I understand Shakespeare and you're not because you don't,'" he says. "I'm a populist in the sense that I think it should be available to all.
"I don't mean that it should be watered down or diluted or patronize people," he adds. "But in this case, there are real issues. The language is 400 years old. You have to open the door for people. "If that reaction is ultimately, 'Well, now that I've had a chance to see it in an unfettered way, I found out I don't actually have any connection to it,' then that's fine."
(Thanks to Paula B.)
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Excerpts from the Providence (Rhode Island) Journal
June 6, 2000
"The idea of doing a play that people didn't really know terribly well -- that alone of all the Shakespeare plays hadn't been performed for about 200 years after his death -- and then that I fancied doing it as a musical, a genre that hasn't worked in any spectacular fashion for about 30 or 40 years, it was indeed a tough sell."
"And in terms of musicals, I suspect there's a whole generation or two that haven't seen such films or know such music and will be taken with the difference of it."
"In fact, in any screening that I've been at," said Branagh, "when the first number starts and people on screen actually burst into song, heads turn because people think, is this happening? I guess we lose a few people, but on the whole, a slow grin emerges on faces and people are shocked or charmed or whatever."
"Over the last 10 years, in the sort of revival of Shakespeare that there's been in filmmaking, there's been more than a bit of tinkering. I think people have welcomed that as a means of, if nothing else, opening up a bit of debate. I've always felt that's useful. Keeps the plays alive. And we still haven't become quite as bold as they were in the 18th century when they were rewriting the end of Romeo and Juliet, putting them together and marrying them. Or keeping King Lear alive at the end.
"And as far as the other kinds of risks, in a way you're lucky if you're in a territory where you're doing something unusual and daring. So that was exciting."
The film was cast with actors "who could do Shakespeare with meaning and with clarity and with naturalism and who would be appropriate for the parts. And as long as they were musical and rhythmic to some degree, the challenge for them was to inform the singing and dancing with the sense of character so you didn't feel as though you were suddenly switching into something much, much slicker. I didn't want to see joins between the characters and the singing." Needless to say, there was a lot of rehearsing.
"My experience has been to let the people come to you in order to weed out the folk who are passionate about doing it, who know what the workload's going to be, who share your view about how it should be spoken and not just loving themselves in it. These things get announced and people get in touch. And that means a great deal to me. I didn't want people to do me a favor by being in the film."
(Thanks to Ngoc)
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Where I Seem to Find the Happiness I Seek
New York Times
June 4, 2000
Wendy Wasserstein
Standing in front of 200 earnest female faces and a smattering of sympathetic men at a recent Harvard Hillel conference on "superwomen," I realized my customary ironic autobiographical anecdotes were falling flat. This audience expected substance, a concrete point of view on "having it all" -- plus relevant thought on the future of feminism, not to mention Judaism. And I was offering my best stories about my mother.
But five minutes into what I feared could become a debacle, a movie musical began. My nephew Ben, a freshman, strode into the room with six young men, all in black tie. As they climbed the steps to the back row of the lecture hall, I pictured them breaking into an updated version of the Cole Porter classic "Anything Goes!" I was especially pleased that in my movie-musical fantasy, a Yale man was providing the melody and lyrics for a Harvard musical.
The mere thought of them elegantly tapping up the stairs amidst the young women peering at me completely lifted my spirits. Of course, my nephew and his associates were only stopping by on their way to the freshman prom, an event my own generation would have vehemently protested. But once I pictured my nephew singing and dancing, I relaxed and quite enjoyed the conference. In fact, I even worked out what I thought was a very nice little exit for the tuxedo-clad six. A woman asks towards the end of my talk, "Where do you think men are going?" I answer, "To the prom!" Then the boys break into a refrain from "Varsity Drag" and get the entire room up singing and dancing. All that's missing is June Allyson.
Although most likely you wouldn't cast June Allyson as a Harvard Hillel superwoman.
For me, the great movie musicals defined romance and American exuberance. But while in recent, more "edgy" decades, these Technicolor feasts were dismissed as kitschy, campy or just ridiculously sentimental, a resurgence seems to be in the air. The Lars von Trier film that won the Golden Palm at Cannes is a musical, and so are the forthcoming films from Baz Luhrmann and the Coen Brothers. Jerome Robbins's choreography for "West Side Story" has been revived as a retro-hip Gap ad. And Kenneth Branagh, the director of "Henry V," "Much Ado About Nothing" and "Hamlet," offers a new, musicalized Shakespeare.
My musical apparition featuring my nephew and company is not far from the spirit of Mr. Branagh's version of "Love's Labour's Lost," opening Friday. The three young gentlemen-scholars who take an oath with the King of Navarre to seek the purity of intellectual pursuit and renounce women are constantly breaking into Cole Porter, George Gershwin and Irving Berlin standards. When the Princess of France and her three lovely ladies-in-waiting propitiously camp out by their Academy, the King and his court can only express their excitement by singing and dancing. Personally, I believe no situation is either so tense or so romantic that it can't be just slightly heightened by a good old-fashioned movie-musical number. I have always secretly hoped that economic summit meetings erupted behind closed doors into "Big Spender" and that Margaret Thatcher crooned "Begin the Beguine" as she told the cabinet her plans for the Falklands. Wouldn't any commuter's trip to Darien be immeasurably enhanced by a chorus of eager returning spouses harmonizing "I Married an Angel" a cappella? Finally, the playwright Christopher Durang and I have always thought that the tragedy "Medea" would be much improved if she forgot about revenge and sang and danced, "Forget your troubles, c'mon get happy," with the Greek chorus instead. Think Ann Miller tap dancing on a drum.
Watching "Love's Labour's Lost," I thought perhaps Mr. Branagh shares with me a desire to musicalize even the classics simply because movie musicals are among the top 10 reasons to live. In fact, "The Band Wagon," the movie musical by Betty Comden and Adolph Green about the transformation of a Broadway show from a pretentious version of "Faust" into a delightful musical soufflé, is definitely in the top five.
In "The Band Wagon," Fred Astaire plays a Broadway song-and-dance man who is making a comeback. He is, however, partnered with Cyd Charisse, a formally trained ballerina. Their relationship on stage and off is -- to say the least -- tortured, until he takes her for a carriage ride in Central Park after a particularly dreadful run-through. They stop at the most ideal version of a fountain and suddenly all their artistic and personal disputes fade away as they dance together in graceful harmony. When they sit back in the carriage on the final note of "Dancing in the Dark," the New York skyline is shimmering behind them and all is suddenly, romantically, perfect in the world.
Kenneth Branagh in "Love's Labour's Lost" seems to assume that the majority of the movie audience is already familiar with standards such as "I Won't Dance," "The Way You Look Tonight" and "Cheek to Cheek." In fact, many of the numbers in Mr. Branagh's film are homages to the great Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie musicals. However, the most striking difference between the Branagh film and the movies it tries to emulate, according to quotations from the choreographer Stuart Hopps in the production notes, is that the new film is "actor-led as opposed to dancer-led."
The "Cheek to Cheek" sequence in "Love's Labour's Lost" has the young scholars literally flying upward on cables as soon as the opening lyric, "Heaven, I'm in heaven," is heard. Both the words and the musical-comedy style are being "sent up," literally. Personally, I'm still a sucker for Mr. Astaire, ascending to heaven on his feet. Even the great ballet choreographer George Balanchine was a Fred Astaire fan. "The male dancer I like to watch is an American," he once said, "Fred Astaire. He is the most interesting, the most inventive, the most elegant dancer of our times."
"Love's Labour's Lost" doesn't tip its hat only to Fred and Ginger. There's a sly nod to every kind of movie-musical extravaganza, from a splashy Esther Williams-style water ballet with a bevy of bathing beauties to a rousing rendition of "There's No Business Like Show Business" led by Nathan Lane, one of the few remaining crossover film and stage musical-comedy stars.
But except for the film's final, bittersweet "They Can't Take That Away From Me," the numbers in this musical "Love's Labour's Lost" are always performed with an arched eyebrow. And when the eyebrow becomes too arched, we can't help but suspend our suspension of disbelief and wonder why anyone's singing to begin with.
In a classic movie musical like "Singin' in the Rain," Gene Kelly is never self-conscious. He simply can't wait to get wet and sing and dance his heart out. Even in a more ironic situation, as when Fred sings "The Way You Look Tonight" to Ginger while she has cold cream all over her face, there is a naïve sweetness. Not surprisingly, Adrian Lester, the song-and-dance man who was the lead in Sam Mendes's London stage production of "Company" and who plays the scholar Dumaine in "Love's Labour's Lost," captures in a contemporary way some of Kelly's energy and Astaire's elegance. Still, dancing tongue-in-cheek is hardly as difficult or inspiring as cheek-to-cheek.
I hope Kenneth Branagh's musicalized version of "Love's Labour's Lost" will introduce a new generation of moviegoers to one of the best romantic comedies and some of the best songs ever written. But I would wish that after all the Harvard superwomen had seen this film, they would rush to the nearest video store to rent the real thing. Just as you can't know the genius of Jerome Robbins's choreography if you've only seen it in a Gap ad, you can't know the possibilities of a filmed dance number without at least one viewing of Fred Astaire literally dancing up the walls.
I am still afraid I can't predict if the Harvard women will or won't have it all. But I do know that if I'm watching Fred and Ginger dancing in "The Gay Divorcée," I have it all.
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For the Love's Labour's Lost page, click here.
For the story of Love's Labour's Lost, click here.
For the Making of Love's Labour's Lost page, click here. Includes interviews, articles and essays.
For more essays and commentary on Love's Labour's Lost, click here.
For the studio production notes for Love's Labour's Lost, click here.
For Trust Kenneth Branagh - - Belfast Telegraph amd Guardian interviews, click here. Interviews and photos: Kenneth Branagh talks about work, and about bringing Love's Labour's Lost to the screen.
For a pair of personal interviews conducted by The London Times following the completion of Love's Labour's Lost click here.
For the studio production notes for Love's Labour's Lost, click here.
For reviews of Love's Labour's Lost, click here.
For the official website of Love's Labour's Lost click here.
For Branagh's thoughts on the film (from the LLL official website), click here.
For Love's Labour's Lost and more in the Guardian interview with Kenneth Branagh at the National Film Theatre's 1999 Branagh retrospective, click here.
For an interview with composer Patrick Doyle on the music in Love's Labour's Lost and more, click here.
For the official Spanish LLL site, click here.
For the official Italian LLL site, click here.
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