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Kenneth Branagh takes on Hitler in historical thriller

February 17, 2011

By Staff Reporter

“I had done quite a bit of research,” the 48-year-old actor told the Irish Echo in New York recently when questioned about the connection between the two fact-based projects that look at World War II from different perspectives.
“The Nazi Party was obsessed with recording their progress as they went,” said Branagh. “People knew [that] behind every door, someone was listening. The sense of the kind of incredible, scary bureaucracy of the Nazi Party was something I had previously touched on.”
“The Usual Suspects” scribe Christopher McQuarrie and that film’s director Bryan Singer reunited to make “Valkyrie,” a suspense drama inspired by the story of how people risked everything in an unsuccessful bid to assassinate the F_hrer and reorganize the government. Branagh plays Henning von Tresckow, one of the leaders of the Resistance, who tried to alter the course of history, along with Friedrich Olbricht (played by Bill Nighy,) Ludwig Beck (played by Terence Stamp,) Claus von Stauffenberg (played by Tom Cruise,) Werner von Haeften (played by Jamie Parker) and Erich Fellgiebel (played by Eddie Izzard.)
“When I met (Singer) about it, it didn’t take much to [recognize that he was] a passionately excited filmmaker who had a very detailed knowledge of the period and wanted to deliver a really entertaining film that tried to hit many targets at once,” Branagh explained during a recent press conference to promote the film. “His enthusiasm, his passion for it were what won all of us, because he is an engaging and infectiously enthusiastic artist.”
Asked what compelled his character to take on such a formidable foe as Hitler and, by extension, the Nazi Party, Branagh said, “He felt that the Nazi Party and the S.S. did not understand the old-fashioned nature of the Prussian military code: the code of honor.
“My sense is that he realized that circumstances and events had transgressed that. The German army still felt they could and should [fight the war in an honorable way],” he added.
The four-time Oscar nominee said he had no objection to playing a so-called “good German” in the film, even though he would have been on the other side of the war had he been born in an earlier era.
“There wasn’t a problem,” he said. “It’s [not] a bad thing to present the grey areas in the morality of the people who were involved in this conflict. And Bryan and Chris didn’t seek to present these characters, who have been in the German Army, as saintly or self-righteous in some sort of super-human way. It was a messy position [for the characters] to be in — difficult and dangerous. And so I think ‘good Germans’ is a sort of misnomer. It’s an absolutely understandable term to use, but these were people trying to do something in a difficult situation, not always easily, and it wasn’t a simple case of the black and white morality of it. I think a lot of compromises were made along the way simply to stay in the game [and] [having] a chance to do something about Hitler. The challenge of playing the character remained interestingly complex.”
In illustrating how the film’s costumes and sets helped him get into character, Branagh recalled feeling a bit overwhelmed when he shared a scene one day with Nighy in a gymnasium filled with hundreds of young actors dressed as uniformed soldiers.
“There was an enormous volume of noise,” said Branagh. “The ceilings were very high and the swastikas were up. I remember the double doors open and suddenly I was hit by [it all.] I saw [Nighy] at the end and I was in the uniform, as well. That felt pretty weird. And then he started walking towards me and I [felt] like there’s some kind of time capsule thing going on here . . . Also, the thing that really got me was the youth of all these kids. They all had their hair cut and all looked so fresh-faced and so full of energy.”
Branagh was reminded of newsreel footage of Nazi rallies.
“Suddenly, we were in somewhere that was on the kind of scale that I’d seen in the newsreels, that had that kind of absolute understanding of how you persuade people to be part of your club,” he said. “Give them a great uniform, put them in Wembley Stadium, massive flags, organize them well, be very structured and then you have a lunatic at the head of it who can hypnotize [them].”
“That was the scene where Bryan put together something on the day, live,” recalled the actor. “[It] was very thrilling and chilling. It certainly brought it very strongly alive.”
“Valkyrie” opens nationwide Christmas Day.

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