ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
Studio Production Notes for Love's Labour's Lost
A short version of Branagh’s comments in question and answer form can be found
at the film’s official site.
For more insight on the film, check the National Film Theatre’s interview with Branagh. More links at the bottom of this page.
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LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST is a sexy, glamorous, romantic comedy, directed by Kenneth Branagh and based on the William Shakespeare play as seen through the lens of classic 1930's Hollywood, with world famous songs by Cole Porter and Irving Berlin.
In 1939, the King of Navarre (Alessandro Nivola) and his three best friends (Kenneth Branagh, Matthew Lillard and Adrian Lester) swear and oath to give up women for three years so that they may be more focused and devoted to their study of philosophy. One of the terms of their pledge specifically prohibits women from their presence, but the arrival of the Princess of France (Alicia Silverstone) and her three beautiful attendants (Natasha McElhone, Emily Mortimer, Carmen Ejogo) on a diplomatic visit throws the plan into disarray. The men are unable to resist these sophisticated and glamorous women and each, unbeknownst to the others, pursues a secret seduction of his beloved. Eventually, the men discover the betrayal of their sacred pact and, after they recover from their initial shock and disappointment in themselves and each other, they begin to celebrate the magic of love.
The mood is broken by the news of the death of the Princess's father and the girls return to France. In the meantime, France has fallen to the Nazis. The women must leave as the men vow to keep their love true and reunite again soon.
ABOUT THE PRODUCTION
LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST is a fun, beautifully sweet comedy about love and romance in which four well-intentioned, but misguided young men discover the impossibility of denying the power of true love.
Producer/director Kenneth Branagh stars as Berowne and is joined by the international line-up includes Alicia Silverstone (Clueless, Blast from the Past, Batman and Robin) as the Princess of France, Alassandro Nivola (Face/Off, Best Laid Plans, Mansfield Park, Natasha McElhone (The Truman Show, Ronin), Adrian Lester (Primary Colors), Matthew Lillard (Scream), Emily Mortimer (Elizabeth, Notting Hill, Scream 3), Nathan Lane (Mousehunt, The Bird Cage), Timothy Spall (Hamlet, Secrets and Lies), Carmen Ejogo (I Want You), and Italian newcomer Stephania Rocca (The Talented Mr. Ripley).
Kenneth Branagh has always been drawn to Shakespeare and believes that the recent surge of Shakespearean adaptations in the past decade is due to film maker's successful willingness to take fresh new looks at these timeless plays which have encouraged people to see Shakespeare's work as very accessible. This inspired him to want to create a very original film based upon one of Shakespeare's lesser-known comedies, LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST. Shakespeare's plays, "are always illuminating about the human condition. The Shakespearean films of the forties, amongst them Orson Wells and Laurence Olivier, were very strongly likened to their theatrical roots. In the nineties there has been more abandon in the treatment of Shakespeare. The approach has become purely cinematic," notes Branagh. "Baz Luhrmann's 'Romeo and Juliet' presented the play in a very radical and ultimately successful way. And with 'Shakespeare in Love,' we had an illumination, albeit fictional, of the man's life that made him very human and friendly. Obstacles have been removed from our potential enjoyment of the plays. They now seem more audience friendly. Both directors and actors are less frightened of them and the audience seems ready to view these films as entertainment and not intelligence tests."
Branagh choose LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST as his creative adaptation in part because he loves the play and believes that it says beautiful things about love, but also because it is not well known. "There was an added advantage of knowing that the audience would not be sitting and waiting for the balcony scene or for Hamlet to get the skull out," continues Branagh. "It's very funny and exuberant with a wonderful, exhilarating enjoyment of romantic love. It's a young man's play without the cynicism about marriage and women that you find in, for example, 'Much Ado About Nothing."' It is a delight to see how silly men can become when they are overwhelmed with love.
LOVE'S LABOUR'S LOST is set in 1939, just prior to World War II, and the story is driven by the music of the day. Branagh explains this decision, "I liked the idea of setting the film at the end of that idyll between the wars when everyone was trying to make some sense of a rather chaotic world in which everything seems about to change. Also, at the end of the play, the men and women not only can't stay together because of the death of the French king, but also because a war is about to begin." The music helps define the era in which the film is set. But Branagh describes the music as being more integral to the plot, "the play responds very well to music. There are many references to music and dancing in it and the elegance, style and wit of the play seemed to me to sit well in a context not unlike the fictional world of the Hollywood musicals of the thirties and forties." In fact, some material from the play was cut and the songs were used to express the same sentiments expressed in Shakespeare's original work. "Writers like Cole Porter, Irving Berlin or George Gershwin whose lyrics are arguably as witty, in their own way, as Shakespeare was in his time and just as full of conceits and verbal trickery. Shakespeare was trying to convey how silly and stupid and agonizing it is to be in love." Explains Branagh, "and the songs we have chosen convey all of the same ideas about the vicissitudes of love." Branagh spent years selecting just the right songs that could set the perfect tone and work within the play, while not feel as though they were laid on top of the text.
All of the songs sung in the film are original recordings by the cast members. Therefore, the casting of this film was a major challenge for Branagh. The actors spent a tremendous amount of time on screen and therefore, Branagh notes that is was "very important to cast charismatic actors. I was looking for actors who would bring tremendous commitment and energy to their work because I knew that it would be very demanding work for them all. They had to deal with Shakespearean text and had to team to sing and dance. We only had three weeks of rehearsal." Branagh chose not to cast professional singers and dancers because he wanted to invest the singing and dancing with the kind of particular understanding of character which an actor can bring. According to Branagh, he was "happy to accept - even encourage- a certain rawness in the singing and dancing provided it came from a very clear sense of who the people were."
The film is incredibly romantic and glamorous. This was intended to create a "safe world," according to Branagh. "I wanted it to feet like a terrific holiday romance which is interrupted by the real world, by the news that the King of France has died and by the advent of World War II. Ultimately, I wanted the audience to enjoy a visual escapism that is also part of the fantasy of romantic love."
The feat of acting, directing, singing and dancing in this production was quite a feat for Branagh. He admits that if he had known how tiring the experience would be, he never would have done it!
The Making of a Musical
Kenneth Branagh started to think about making a film of Shakespeare's "Love's Labour's Lost' as a musical comedy, inspired by the classic Hollywood musical, a couple of years ago. "The idea came to me when I was in New York doing Woody Allen's 'Celebrity' in the winter of 1997. I had a lot of time on my own in New York, so I began scribbling away on bits of paper," describes Branagh. "I realized that there are endless references in the play to song and dance and it has a story which is the stuff of light romantic comedy, although with a heart-breaking twist. There's a lot of material in the play, which doesn't resonate so clearly today, but it seemed to me that some of this could be replaced by the wit and brilliance of the music of Cole Porter, Irving Berlin, Gershwin. The sheer poetry of the lyrics of these songs seemed like a perfect accompaniment to this sexy, touching love story."
An international cast with varying degrees of musical experience began a journey that Branagh referred to as a "musical comedy boot camp:" a grueling three-week rehearsal period followed by an intensive eight week shoot on three sound stages at London's Shepperton Studios. As producer David Barron says, "Nobody I knew had actually made a film like this, so we had to work it out for ourselves. We had no practical experience of shooting a musical number, but surprisingly, it was the numbers that turned out to be the quickest and easiest to film. In order to rehearse them and to allow the cast to become proficient at both the songs and the dances, these sequences had to be well structured and planned in minute detail."
The rehearsal process was, for many of the cast, similar to the experience of going back to drama school, with a non-stop round of voice classes, dancing lessons and text rehearsals. "It was like going to 'Fame,' the high school", says Matthew Lillard, "from singing to dancing with a 15 minute break for lunch."
Many of the creative team worked with Branagh in the past - Designer Tim Harvey, Academy-nominated Director of Photography Alex Thomson, Academy-nominated Composer Patrick Doyle and choreographer Stuart Hopps. New to the team was vocal consultant Ian Adam. Hopps and Adam took a cast that was largely inexperienced in singing and dancing and turned them into all-round performers.
All the cast chose to be involved in the project through sheer passion for the play and a desire to work--- very hard. As Branagh notes, "I needed to be convinced that they were ready to embrace this experience which wasn't going to be easy for any of us. We had an unusual company atmosphere that just isn't very achievable on film because normally you don't have the luxury of proper rehearsal time. The actors needed to feet safe about the possibility of messing up a dance routine during filming and ruining a shot. And actually when someone did mess up, the reaction was not anger, but sincere sympathy from the rest of the cast."
Branagh believes that "it would not have been possible to produce the film in the way we did unless I'd been in it. It would have been much harder to say to actors: 'OK, it's 8 o'clock and now I'd like you to dance for an hour, harder, harder, harder and now I'd like you to sing and do you mind doing a costume fitting during your lunch hour and then you've got the make-up thing and do you mind also talking to a group of journalists after that.' That would have been more difficult, if I couldn't say, 'I'll be doing it as well.' I had some understanding of the anxiety and fear that an actor can experience and I think it offered them a certain kind of comfort and relieved some of the pressure."
The making of "Love's Labour's Lost" was a collaborative experience, one which owed much to the timeless joy of the songs by composers of the stature of George and Ira Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Irving Berlin, great musicians and great lyricists who produced a string of classic hits in the inter-war period. For Branagh, their power lingers on. "These are great songs and have been enhancing people's lives for fifty, sixty years and they were doing it again for us. The way in which they affected the mood of the crew and the whole family of the film was tangible. There were a lot of smiles on people's faces during the shoot. These songs are a good deed in a naughty world."
Adaptation of the Play
Turning a Shakespearean play into a romantic musical comedy presented Branagh with a great challenge. "I wanted to see whether it was possible to find a musical structure that would feel like a real musical, so that when songs or dances occurred, the audience would feel that there was a reason for them. The numbers needed to advance the plot or to advance a knowledge of character and that's initially what took the time - the selection of the songs."
In adapting Shakespeare's play, Branagh has reshuffled some of the scenes, abbreviated a good deal of the text and streamlined the narrative but the structure of the play is essentially the same. "We've trimmed the play," he says, "We have cut much of the material that was of contemporary relevance in 1596, but which is harder to convey in cinema today."
According to Text Consultant Russell Jackson of the Royal Shakespeare institute, who has worked with Branagh on "Henry V," "Much Ado About Nothing" and "Hamlet," "the screenplay has about 25-30% of the play's words and we're doing by other means some of the things that are done with words in the play. For example, there's a scene where the men have all secretly written poems to their respective loved ones. Ken has replaced their poems with one song, 'I've Got A Crush On You."'
"Love's Labour's Lost" was written in the 1590s and the play was first published in 1598. Its ideas about men and women being made foolish but also, paradoxically, more wise by love turns up again in Shakespeare's better known plays "Twelfth Night" and "Much Ado About Nothing." As Jackson says, "It's a very sophisticated play and there's some evidence that it may have been played more than once at court. It's a play that has a lot of word games, plays on words. Very elegant verse, but there is also a degree of selfconsciousness."
Since the 1940s, there have been many theatrical productions of "Love's Labour's Lost," but prior to that, the play was rarely performed. There has often been a tendency to treat the play as a bitter-sweet comedy, an element that is retained in Branagh's version, but, continues Jackson, "there are also elements of pure slapstick with plenty of sight gags, as well as verbal gags."
Branagh notes, "there's a question mark at the end of the play over whether the men's labours in pursuit of love have in fact been lost or won." An interesting note: " There is evidence of a lost play, called 'Love's Labour's Won' which may have been a Shakespearean response to a feeling that the ending of the play is questionable dramatically."
The Music
There are ten songs in "Love's Labour's Lost," all sung by the cast, which were recorded early on in the rehearsal process, so that the actors could become accustomed to dancing to their own singing, creating a unity between words, music and movement.
Branagh's choice of classic standards from the 1930’s and 1940’s gave him some of the greatest lyricists in twentieth century music and the selection of songs was of primary importance to him. He also wanted to use song in an unexpected and original way. The Irving Berlin classic "Cheek to Cheek," which is filmed as a traditional top hat-and-tails number, springs from a moment of ecstatic expression from a lovesick Berowne: "And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods Make heaven drowsy with the harmony." Leading into the song's opening line, "Heaven, I'm in heaven..." Branagh explains: "The top hat and tails in a movie that's set in the thirties is a delicious and expected kind of image, but we wanted to surprise people with the way in which it emerged. Of all the ways in which we move from dialogue into song, this one has the most organic feel to it. Berowne is explaining the heavenly state that he feels, which he has reached as a result of falling in love and he's so ecstatic that he can't help himself bursting into song. And he sings, 'My heart beats so that I can hardly speak.' He's literally elevated into the heavens and then the camera tilts down and there they are in top hat and tails. It's a bit campy and a bit silly, but it's sort of saying 'I bet you were expecting a top hat and tails number, weren't you? Well, we're giving it to you now!... Branagh's concept of using song in this way is both witty and imaginative and adds to the modern appeal of the story. The cast agrees. Notes Nathan Lane: "I think he's done a brilliant job of placing the songs which all help to illuminate the play. We're not just stepping into any old musical number, because I do think that they enhance whatever the scene is about." According to Timothy Spall, "Ken is making Shakespeare funny and outrageous without losing the story. The audacity of putting these songs in is a wonderful thing - none of them jar and they are cheekily pertinent."
The cast had varying degrees of experience of singing; some are established musical performers like Adrian Lester and Nathan Lane, while others, like Emily Mortimer and Richard Briers, approached the singing with some trepidation. Vocal Director Ian Adam worked with all the actors during pre-production and the cast spent three days in a recording studio in London before shooting started, under the watchful supervision of Patrick Doyle who has worked as composer on all Branagh's Shakespeare films.
Doyle's aim was to ensure that the underscore should be fused with and be part of the feel of these wonderful songs. "I wanted the arrangements of these songs to be as cinematic as possible, so they are fairly sweeping where they can be. My principal objective with the arrangements was drama-led and the music always has to enhance the romantic side of the story. The songs almost become like arias and they have to reflect the various personalities and reflect the moment."
"For example, with 'The Way You Look Tonight' which Geraldine McEwan sings so beautifully, I had to change the pacing of the arrangement, make it slower, to get the right feeling of melancholy. With 'Let's Face the Music and Dance,' it was Ken's idea to have this sort of fantasy, which is very sexy and provocative and so the arrangement had to be as provocative with lots of brass and strings, almost with a jungle beat."
During the three-week rehearsal period, Ian Adam gave singing classes every morning, as well as working individually with the actors to create a voice that was natural for their character and in their own accent. Doyle says of Adam that "he instilled in the actors a great confidence through his vocal training and allowed them to be themselves in their singing." Staying true to the scene was more important than technical perfection and Doyle and Adam worked closely with the director and cast to find a way of interpreting these classics that would come effortlessly and organically.
The Dance
Choreographer Stuart Hopps recognised that "the most important challenge was to find dynamic and graceful movement that was within the range of the actors and yet was tricky enough to make it took interesting." Branagh wanted the movement to emerge from the dialogue and be used as an important acting tool. Says Hopps, "Ken was very clear that this had to be actor-led as opposed to dancer-led. So we weren't trying to reproduce what those great films did, but to do something that captured the flavor of it. A lot of the movement comes from the lyric and from the rhythm of the lyric or what the lyric is saying."
As Branagh explains: "What unifies all the numbers - which have to be very actor-friendly - is a movement language that comes out of the action. I'm not trying to copy any particular style from the Hollywood musicals, although the film has plenty of visual references to the films of great artists like Esther Williams, Fred and Ginger, Laurel and Hardy and even as modern a choreographer as Bob Fosse."
With a choreographer's eye, Hopps explains: "'Cheek to Cheek' is obviously the homage number to Fred and Ginger and I have also lifted one step that's in 'Top Hat' and given it to the Princess. I don't know if anyone else will notice, but I know it's there. Even the Charleston we do isn't a particularly Twenties Charleston, but it's wacky and different. A lot of the dance is very eccentric as opposed to rigidly following a particular line."
With only a three-week rehearsal period, Hopps and the cast worked incredibly hard to produce the dancing. "I think there was a genuine thrill throughout the cast and film crew when we had twenty five actors singing and dancing in unison for 'There's No Business Like Show Business'."
THE LOOK OF THE FILM - Design and Cinematography
Two of Branagh's core artistic team on many of his previous projects, Designer Tim Harvey and Director of Photography Alex Thomson, worked with him to create the unique look of the fantasy Navarre. Harvey was aiming "to capture those reckless, romantic years just before World War II, when the future was uncertain. I looked at a lot of films of that era and hoped that something of the feel and the mood comes through in the design rather than specifically borrowing a particular effect from any one film. I wanted to emphasize glamour and nostalgia."
Like nearly all Hollywood musicals, "Love's Labour's Lost" was shot almost entirely on sound stages. Three sound stages were used at Shepperton Studios to create the Park, the Quayside and the Quad with its Library and Dome. Harvey continues, "Many films are now shot mostly on location, but we wanted to eliminate reality in order to create a world of our own."
It was Branagh's choice to set the film in a fantasy Oxbridge and working from photographs taken in Oxford, Harvey and his team took inspiration from the colleges and quads although the punts in which the Princess arrives are actually from Cambridge.
Design began in October 1998 and construction in November. All the sets were built on sound stages apart from the airfield that was shot on location at North Weald in Essex. The intention was always to make everything look quite stylized: "Although we used lots of real detail, the whole effect was intended to look like a musical shot on sound stages. It's a sort of 'unrealism.'"
Harvey worked in conjunction with Costume Designer Anna Buruma to ensure that the bold colors of the clothes would contrast with the mute, autumnal colors of the production design. As he explains, "Anna's bright colors work in the foreground and my color works in the background."
The design had to take several practical requirements into consideration. The floors had to be constructed in particular ways, so that people could dance comfortably and with enough room to allow for camera tracks. Branagh explains: "Given our wide-screen format and given that it's an ensemble piece usually involving at least eight people and in order to watch them dancing in full length, the depth of the sets became crucial."
Director of Photography Alex Thomson wanted to tap into the high romance of the musical comedy genre and set out to create something "light, airy and bubbly in the way that it is lit, which meant that the film needed to be lit quite brightly." Shooting in cinemascope, in a wide screen format, "gives you the ability to use the frame and to let the characters dance within the frame. I really wanted to capture the glamour of the time, to photograph all those romantic looks."
For Thomson, "working in a studio is a joy. I love being in a studio because you have a more controlled environment rather than exteriors which are constantly changing." In some shots he used a glass diffusion on the tens "which they used to use in the old days and which was found in some drawers in Panavision." Many shots required one long shot to capture the bigger dance numbers and crane shots were often employed to enhance the scale of the numbers.
THE LOOK OF THE FILM - Costume and Make-Up
Taking their references from Hollywood and the high fashion of the 1930s, Costume Designer Anna Buruma and Hair and Make-up Designers Carol Hemming and Amanda, Knight worked closely together to capture the essence of that glamorous between-the-war period. Branagh's direction to Anna Buruma was to make the costumes look stylized, to capture the feel of the period without copying it and to make it slightly more contemporary for a modem audience.
"All the references I've looked at have not been of everyday people at all, but of high fashion and film which helped me to achieve a kind of stylization," says Buruma. "I looked at copies of Vogue from the 1930s and pictures from films - there are so many photographs of that period, of those kind of people that I took bits and ideas from many sources. I think I have gone predominantly American, certainly with the men I went for that American look." Clark Gable, Marlene Dietrich, Erroll Flynn, Cyd Charisse, Bing Crosby and Cary Grant - Buruma borrowed references from them all, with a nod to Humphrey Bogart in one scene, to the Marx Brothers in another and to Salvador Dali in creating the character of Don Armado. The Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers' classic musical Top Hat inspired the costumes in the "Cheek to Cheek" routine. "They throw the hats as soon as they go for the girls," says Buruma, "but whenever Fred's with Ginger, he's without a top hat so that's perfectly acceptable."
To reinforce the audience's understanding of which girl is with which boy, Branagh had the idea to "colour code the couples. It's not immediately obvious, but it's a very subtle thing. The tones and shades of the girls' dresses match with the boys - with a tie or a handkerchief or a flower in the lapel."
All the clothes for the female characters were originals, created for the film, apart from the outdoor hats and coats. Buruma had to consider how much the actors had to move in their costumes and early on choreographer Stuart Hopps showed her some of the dance routines so she could design with practical limitations in mind.
"We adapted the designs for the swimsuit from an American designer of the late 30s who had this very, very modern cut of swimsuit which I just happened upon and the bathing caps were made specialty for us. And you can't do the 1930s without having furs, I mean that's what gives the glamour, so we decided to go for fake fur which we were able to color."
With the comic characters, Buruma started with the actor playing the character and allowed the costume to develop from their ideas. For Geraldine McEwan's character Holofernia, references were taken from Margaret Rutherford; for Timothy Spall's character Don Armado, Salvador Dali was the inspiration. "With Nathan Lane," continues Buruma, "I felt that the costume really had to come from him, so I drew some ideas and found a lot of pictures and sent them to him and let him think about it and then when he came over, we had a long session at the costumier and recreated something quite colourful, with a feel of vaudeville about it."
Buruma worked very closely with Carol Hemming and Amanda Knight during both preproduction and the shoot to create a uniform look. The mandate for the hair and make-up designers was, as Hemming says, "to think of the old Hollywood movies and make the men and the women look gorgeous and glamorous. It's a fantasyland, so we were creating a fantasy somewhere between Hollywood and the rest of the world and it's fantasy mixed with the 1930s. Some of it seems to be American, some of it Hollywood, some of it English. We played with the period - towards the beginning of the 40s and even going back to the very late 20s, just picking up bits and pieces that would be interesting in this make-believe world. We took ideas from a lot of film star, artists and a lot of literary characters as well." The looks for the individual characters were adapted to suit the actor: "It's no good just transferring a reference on to someone, you've got to do something that suits them, makes them took their best."
The girls wore "lots of red - red lipstick, red nails with the moons on to give a hint of period," says Knight, "and eyelashes - immediately you put them on, they give a glamorous look and make an incredible difference."
CASTING
For "Love's Labour's Lost," Kenneth Branagh has brought together actors from England, America, Scotland and Italy with a variety of experience whose common attributes were courage and energy.
In choosing his cast, Branagh wanted "people who had an unquestionable appetite for the adventure of this film. I described it them all as 'musical comedy boot camp' in which they would have to work hard and quickly, but that it would be fun. It is an ensemble piece and it was vital to cast team players that would be able to help us to carry this through."
"When I met Alicia Silverstone," he recalls, "I was impressed by her enthusiasm for the role and her commitment to the work that it would involve. I was specifically looking, not for a big starry cast, but for actors with a huge capacity and appetite for singing and dancing and for Shakespeare. And, above all, the ability to work as a team." Alicia was very hungry for the part and has enormous energy and talent. "She also has the touch of a great light comedienne. Natascha McElhone is a very funny woman, very beautiful and very intelligent. Nathan Lane brings a natural sort of pizzazz and a sense of energy, pace and precision required for this sort of musical comedy, which was also shared by Timothy Spall. Alessandro Nivola, Adrian Lester, Emily Mortimer, Matthew Lillard, and Carmen Ejogo, all had different, but equally impressive strengths. We were all bonded in a barely masked terror about having to work very hard at the singing or dancing or Shakespearean language. It created an esprit de corps, a genuine support between the actors which made the whole experience hugely enjoyable."
Referring to his casting requirements for the very broad comic characters, Branagh continues, "I wanted to achieve a style that was quite theatrical in origin, but of great precision and energy. There seemed to be no room for casual naturalism in a musical and so we needed very experienced people and were lucky to have Geraldine McEwan and Richard Briers as well as Tim and Nathan. There needed to be terrific sharpness to the comedy, which extended to everything from the saying of the lines to orchestration of the physical movement, where maybe four or five people would all turn their heads at one time. Stefania Rocca has a gift of energy and size and it was good to have a Jaquenetta with a genuinely different sound."
(Thanks to Robyn)
For the Love's Labour's Lost page, click here.
For the story of Love's Labour's Lost page, 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 story of Love's Labour's Lost, click here.
For the studio production notes for Love's Labour's Lost, click here.
Click here for Trust Kenneth Branagh. Interviews with the Belfast Telegraph and The London Guardian are paired with photos and screen captures from Love's Labour's Lost.
For the Daily Telegiraffe review of Love's Labour's Lost, click here.
For other reviews of Love's Labour's Lost, click here.
For an interview with composer Patrick Doyle on the music in Love's Labour's Lost and more, click here. Scroll down. Keeeeeep scrolling. It's there.
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.
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