KENNETH BRANAGH: Hi, everybody, and thank you for watching.
My name's Ken Branagh, and I directed the film that you're about to see,
and I'm joined by distinguished screenwriter Michael Green,
who wrote the screenplay for the film you're about to see.
Do you feel, Michael, like I do, when you watch this logo,
that there's something about it that takes you right back to childhood?
GREEN: I love it. I love that it's still 20th,
even though they're in the 21st.
It's just, "Let's go to a century we know went okay." (CHUCKLES)
BRANAGH: Yeah. I enjoyed this logo from our fearless leader,
the great master, Sir Ridley Scott.
GREEN: lenjoy it because it looks like the sketches
he just doodles while you're talking to him,
-if he likes what you're talking about. - BRANAGH: Yeah.
- He is secretly a world-class artist. - BRANAGH: He sure is.
GREEN: If he wasn't directing films seen by the world,
he'd have paintings in the Louvre.
BRANAGH: And he's sort of restless in that way, isn't he?
- He's always creating. - GREEN: Yes, yes.
BRANAGH: Now we come to Jerusalem,
and I'm gonna speak for a second about the world of 65mm.
We chose to shoot this movie on film in this large format,
which I believe, like others,
immerses you in the story viscerally with these colors
and takes you to a, kind of, a fancy and foreign and exotic location
that Agatha Christie so favored and, indeed, in many cases, had visited.
But, Michael, why did you decide to start the screenplay in Jerusalem?
GREEN: Couple of reasons. One of the many fun things about Orient Express
as one of her books, and my favorite of her books,
is that it's one of her travel books.
It's one of the ones that uses exotic locations as part of the escape velocity
to engage you in the story.
- The book starts in Aleppo, I believe. - BRANAGH: Correct. In Syria, yeah.
GREEN: We also knew that we had a chance to reintroduce the character.
And, you know, the last time this was adapted for the big screen,
Hercule Poirot was still on everyone's lips.
Americans knew him and read him and we didn't wanna make that assumption.
We wanted to give him an introduction.
- Like this one right here. - BRANAGH: (CHUCKLES) Exactly.
GREEN: Reading up on it,
the idea of the two eggs is not in the book.
It's actually not even referenced in the books at all.
It was in a Hercule Poirot biography she had written for the Sunday Gazette,
where she had had a number of his little quirks and specificities.
BRANAGH: But his little originalities, as you recall,
of which the most famous one is about to appear.
GREEN: There it is. BRANAGH: And the facial furniture,
that is Hercule Poirot's mustache,
also needed it so big that I knew that we wanted to have two shots,
one including this profile was critical to me,
to see the double swirl of the double handlebar.
This mustache was designed by
a distinguished makeup and hair designer, Carol Hemming,
and the product of many, many months' work to justify what,
as you know from the books, people would mention as the single
-most impactful impression. - GREEN: The most memorable. Yes.
BRANAGH: Captain Hastings is his partner in many other stories,
of the 30 odd stories, novels...
33 novels, I think, and 50 short stories,
would say that the first impression
that most people had of Poirot, that he was a joke because of this mustache.
And we, I think, risked that possibility here,
but we knew that
Hercule Poirot is more than the sum of other people's reactions,
including the weirdness here, which was a great stroke of yours, Michael,
to suggest early on that it's not so much with this new Poirot
that he is prissy and precious
about getting his hands or, indeed, feet dirty.
It's something else, which is balance.
GREEN: It's beyond fastidiousness,
that there is just an order missing in the world that he's gonna bring back.
I'm not done talking about the mustache.
I think we have to talk about it for a little while... (CHUCKLES)
One of my favorite things about when I first saw the first images you sent me
about what the mustache might look like is,
Agatha Christie always describes Hercule Poirot's facial appendages
in the plural as "mustaches, "
and I went, "There it is. That is a multiple.
"That is a multiplicity of mustache. " (LAUGHING)
BRANAGH: And you definitely had to feel
that somehow it was setting itself up as a part of him.
When I started with Carol to wear versions of it,
it made you lean fon/vard.
It made you feel that the mustache itself
was like the prow of the ship that is Poirot,
or the front of the classic car.
And for me, it really anchored it down into his background
as a policeman and, indeed, as a man of the military,
something that early drafts of the script had some more focus on.
But that it represented a more robust
and son' of physically able or capable Poirot,
one who at least, in my view, wasn't so much that...
And we talked about this right at the beginning,
that we wanted him to be more of an action man,
not, I think, for its own sake,
but because this son' of bloodhound Poirot
would, once on the scent of the crime,
dismiss anything in his way,
including, potentially, things he had to run over
or jump or kick or do something to.
But we've just here established the moment, which was,
when I first read the screenplay, the most delicious diversion.
When I, like many other people watching this film for the first time,
thought, "Why has he just stuck his cane..."
- GREEN: (LAUGHS) What is that about? -lnto, in this case,
a small hole in the massive,
epic Wailing Wall that starts this sort of amphitheater moment,
and it was really a lean-in moment for me,
and little did I know it was gonna pay off as it would.
- Where did that come from? - GREEN: It wasjust...
We were trying to get a little microcosm of how his mind works.
He sets traps, he's always seeing many, many steps ahead,
and you wanna represent the brain that is ahead of your own,
to tell the audience that whenever you're watching him, you have to guess,
"ls he just as silly as he'd like us to think he is,
"or does he have something up his sleeve?" And when it's Hercule Poirot,
it's almost always somethings up the sleeve.
BRANAGH: Yeah, with this son' of diversion,
he sets the play up, the show.
In this case, it's a very public performance, which,
for those interested in such things,
our Jerusalem here was, in fact, filmed in Malta.
The great island. A kingdom of historical note.
And we were able to create that great piece of the Wailing Wall
by, indeed, building and placing panels on an existing wall
in a very, very pleasing
sort of natural amphitheater inside Malta itself.
It gave us the heat of the east in the light,
and it allowed us a kind of scale with the numbers of crowd, etcetera...
GREEN: And also the openness in the sunlight...
- BRANAGH: Yeah, exactly. -...we knew we would be craving later.
So this is all the...
The color and light and heat that we 're depriving the audience of later.
BRANAGH: But we don't deprive them of that very nice trip up there, which...
When that happened, I really thought, "Gosh, I 'm in. "
GREEN: That's one of my favorite stunts I've ever seen.
It's both brutal and amusing at the same time.
BRANAGH: It's so economic, which is something of
a keynote for this Poirot.
But then here, I felt that this was the yin and yang established,
a cross... A little of what we might have expected
from the flourish and flamboyance of what went before
in this son' of, what some might call the show-off of Poirot,
and then, as it were, on his own and a little away from the crowds,
this more melancholic individual
who expresses this sense that
that, if you'd like to call it, "the brilliance" that he just exhibited
comes at a price,
-and the price is loneliness and... - GREEN: There's a weight.
There's a loneliness, there's a weight and that weight keeps being added to
by every case he encounters,
and though he has seen quite a bit, there's a lot more to see
and it hurts him. lmean, he declares here that he needs a rest.
And it's not because he isn't intellectually curious.
I think it's a moral rest he wants.
BRANAGH: Yeah, and it's a search for rest
that travels through all of the books,
even though this idea that
there's right, there's wrong, there's nothing in between
gives him some sort of absolute position, he thinks,
but it's what sets up what's gonna be
the challenge to that position through the rest of the story.
And here, again for people who are interested,
this is shot in real Malta, on a real balcony
-with real sea behind and real boats. - GREEN: Yes.
BRANAGH: (LAUGHING) And yet it looks like a comp.
GREEN: It looks like a comp. It's the most beautiful comp.
-/t's the reality comp. - BRANAGH: Yeah.
GREEN: You know what? It's one of those things
you can usually tell when there's a comp,
but this just has a level of grandeur to it.
BRANAGH: Yeah. lt just amused me that, I don't literally mean that,
-but it's just so... - GREEN: I know.
BRANAGH: It's so perfectly blue and saturated that it had that...
GREEN: Ijust love that you end that scene
with a slight bit of insult to him, in that even
at his most melancholic, it's just that he can't help himself.
- Yeah, if the tie is not straight... - GREEN: It's just gonna...
BRANAGH: It pains him. It pains him. GREEN: Yeah.
But at the same time, when he meets someone wonderful,
he's able to recognize that and be relieved.
BRANAGHI Yeah, and I like...
This is the beginning, of course, of our challenge, which we had to meet,
of, "How do we introduce our audience to all of these characters?"
In this case, Colonel Arbuthnot and Mary Debenham played by,
in the first case, Leslie Odom Jr., and here, the beautiful Daisy Ridley,
and...
And establish them well enough,
knowing that there'll be a gallery of such folk
and allow a connection with Poirot that is personal
and also give us, as we do in this scene, a chance to see that
people both expect of Poirot
this bloodhound, tenacious detective deductive ability,
which he rather amusingly points out.
(CHUCKLES) This case could be, perhaps, exhibited by many people
-who chose to look in the direction... - Just happened to see her ticket.
- BRANAGH: (LAUGHING) Funnily enough. - Yes.
BRANAGH: Once again, they're being in real Malta
and real sea, on a real boat here.
It was a fantastic way to feel the sort of breath of a story,
which, as you mentioned, is going to become very, very claustrophobic.
It's a departure from the novel,
although we're about to arrive where the novel takes us,
but there's a sort of elemental quality to what I 'd call the...
What we aspired to, the timeless 65mm landscapes.
It's big sea, it's big sky, it's deserts.
It's graphic colors, like that big piece of sky in the horizontal,
big piece of blue, big piece of sculptural landscape,
and then these two statuesque figures in the middle.
It's quite... For the intensity and color of it,
-it's quite graphic. - GREEN: It's a beautiful composition.
I also love that it's the...
In hearing this conversation, he's leaving this Old Testament land,
where right and wrong are incredibly clear
and quite literally taking a voyage into murkier seas,
where he lands on the other side is the beginning of the story
that's gonna challenge his very clear sense of morality stated
on the other side of the shore.
BRANAGH: And one thing we do here is also, as that very thing happens,
Patrick Doyle's musical score shows itself as an absolute essential
accompaniment to the evocation of the larger world,
the golden age of travel, that now takes us into
an Istanbul where, here in the kitchen of our favorite restaurant,
we see, which I loved what you did in this regard with Poirot,
a man who, if previously associated with a superiority or a snobbishness,
here, is a man who will say, early on in a film
that comes from the Hills of Beverly and Hollywood,
he says, "Mohammed, my friend."
- He was also... - GREEN: You're an artist, yeah.
BRANAGH: He's... That you're an artist.
That...
Poirot embracing, as it were, what you might call "the backstage world,"
humble breads, the work of the artisan, about which he has no condescensional...
GREEN: He's not impressed with people in their class
and their very expensive attempts to impress him.
What he is impressed with is perfection achieved,
and it doesn't matter where he finds it, whether it's art, whether it's bread.
Anyone who, you know...
A pianist hitting the perfect chord is what's gonna move him
way more than any riches.
BRANAGH: And one of the things you did here, and I enjoyed playing,
was having a Poirot who one might describe
it's partly the mustache, the military background,
but where, relative to what we were just discussing
and here in the hurly-burly of backstage in the kitchen amid the smells
and the grease and the hiss of the cooking and everything,
is a more worldly fellow who's ready to,
not exactly turn a blind eye,
but have an indulgent gaze on a much younger Bouc
than we have in the book. It's played here by Tom Bateman.
GREEN: Played hilariously by Tom Bateman.
BRANAGH: Yeah, beautifully and with great charm and lightness,
even as the man from the ministry approaches,
but I like Poirot again in...
As great detective minds must be,
a sort of contact with a seedier or sleazier side of the world.
He knows humanity...
GREEN: Yeah, it was a change you brought to it, I think.
Going into this, it was that he asked for the best restaurant
because he wanted to be impressed
and you'd switched it very cleverly, lthink, to
he's going back to a favorite place because he knows when you're here,
if you miss a moment of Mohammed's breads,
then you haven't really been to Istanbul.
BRANAGHI AISO, here, I think
Agatha Christie does it and you seized on it here,
that Poirot, for only a few moments,
can taste the luxury or the indulgence of a holiday.
Once again in the form of Gerard Horan, excellent actors, Mr. A ynesworth,
the call from London comes
and that other crime, the Kassner case,
draws him back so now he must get back to London.
And that feeling of that which he cannot resist,
but which is also a son' of ache,
a kind of constant, restless demand on this gift of his,
sends him for a journey on the Orient Express
where, once again, you're hoping,
"Well, maybe those couple of days will be a parenthesis of calm. "
- But not if we meet all of these people. - GREEN: No.
Bouc pitches that it's gonna be this wonderful vacation on rails,
and then we meet person after person
who is going to make that very, very difficult.
In this scene, it's hard to decide whether to talk about
the gorgeous set that was built for this
or the remarkable people entering into it.
BRANAGH: It was so much fun to work out how to introduce Manuel Garcia-Rulfo,
who plays your invented character of Biniamino Marquez,
or Penélope Cruz, who, again, we play with a character
stolen from another book, Pilar Estra vados.
GREEN: One of the best names in any Christie book.
BRANAGH: And in fact, in her originating position
which is in Poirot's Christmas, I think,
she has yet another name.
GREEN: Yes, it's actually the false name comes true.
BRANAGH: I enjoyed the idea
of the Christie aficionados maybe possibly heading that way.
Well, if you are one of those and you're listening and watching,
I hope you did enjoy it.
We then, of course, meet the rest of our characters, including here,
Sergei Polunin, who frightens off Johnny Depp as Ratchett,
and in him we have the CountAndrenyi,
as a man of volatile and restless temperament but a great dancer,
and of course, Sergei, you may know, is a brilliant, brilliant young dancer,
married, in this case, to Lucy Boynton, who enters as a classic femme fatale,
turns into a close-up with a veil.
GREEN: The veil is one of my favorite pieces in the entire film.
BRANAGH: And they all look terrific, but of course,
along the way, we've also met Derek Jacobi as Masterman
and Josh Gad.
Here we needed to bring people, of course,
into contact with the star of the movie,
one might say, it's certainly the star of the title.
And here with Man/van Kenzari, who plays Pierre Michel,
we see the front of the train,
and then this is one continuous Steadicam shot.
There's Josh Gad. There's Johnny Depp behind him.
So now we 're still, we 're on a tracking vehicle,
but we're on a Steadicam on the tracking vehicle.
Here's Penélope Cruz coming past, and as we pan over,
of course there is Poirot and Tom Bateman as Bouc.
All of these extras have been rehearsed from 8:00 in the morning
as we've practiced this shot over and over,
and they all have to deal with the moving tracking vehicle
on which the camera sits
and not look at the camera and not bump into the scenery.
Quite a lot of plot being conveyed as we talk.
We will meet at the ticket office here.
Once again, Daisy Ridley.
The camera continues, all of this dramatizing the idea of,
"ls he gonna have a berth on the train?"
Because the mysterious Mr...
- Smith, is it? - GREEN: Harris.
- Mr. Harris in the original movie. - GREEN: The false name, yes.
BRANAGH: May or may not be here.
The half hour's past, that means that they can, in fact, let Poirot on.
And so, still without cutting, here we are bringing Poirot,
who belies, once again, concern about order in terms of numbers.
Being in an odd-numbered compartment is not good for him.
- GREEN: The shot still going. -lt's still going.
And here comes, yes, you're right,
it's Michelle Pfeiffer, in an outrageously pink coat.
So now we 're traveling back down the train
which is peopled by all the magicians
who provide the champagne and the white linen
and the pianist who plays something of Pat Doyle's soon-to-recur theme.
And all the way beautifully done in a very, as they all are,
terrifically pitched performance by Michelle.
The husband-hunter who is Mrs. Hubbard passes,
Derek Jacobi's spitting-on-the-iron Masterman,
and Penélope Cruz, now on the train as cautious Pilar.
And then through the preparations for dinner
and into our flambéing kitchen, which was all happening.
And there's Leslie Odom, who was on the platform before
and now we meet once again.
There's Lucy Boynton.
And now there's Manuel and then, he's been there all this time, folks.
Yes, it is. It is Johnny Depp, who's been on the train all that time.
-(GREEN LAUGHING) - He was there for the full three minutes
while we ran up and down the station and...
ls he there? Yes, he is, showbiz's Josh Gad.
GREEN: And we... The cut is coming into him.
Every time I watch this shot, no matter how many times it's screening,
it's like watching live figure skating
where I 'm terrified that someone's gonna fall,
-but every time they stick the landing. - BRANAGH: Oh, my goodness me. Well...
- Those skaters fell, including me... - GREEN: It's gorgeous.
lt was a beautiful, beautifully constructed shot.
BRANAGH: It's a nice arc and, of course, it's all in the writing to get us...
GREEN: Oh, God. He just said it's all in the writing,
when you just saw a four-minute take with the entire film
represented in it. Amazing.
BRANAGH: The musical movement that just says now we must give another kind of
phase to this... This overture, if you like.
This travel overture, which is bringing all these people together.
-/ bet you can't recognize who that is. -(GREEN CHUCKLES)
Yes, it's Dame Judi Dench and Olivia Colman.
I love this shot
because it has all that depth. This is our built
Istanbul station. At Longcross Studios in Surrey, and of course,
that's the man who beautifully takes every moment that he's onscreen,
Willem Dafoe.
And...
And allows us to join up again with Judi Dench,
and this inten/veaving of people's arrival onto the train
was such a joy to try and work out.
It's a bit of maths as well as a sort of intuitive feel
of, somehow for the audience, trying to pour a bit of champagne.
At this point, you're lifting the mood, the mood of expectation.
GREEN: You're still excited to be there. "I can't wait for this train to go off
-"so we can be with them." - BRANAGH: Exactly.
And as you'll remember, one of the first things you and I did
was do a scout on the Orient Express.
- GREEN: Yes. - And describe, if you will,
how did you feel before that train arrived?
GREEN: It was one of the silliest things I've ever gotten to do.
Silly in a purely joyful way, where it's getting an email from you
and saying, "We're thinking of scouting the actual train. Would you like to go?"
As if there's any possible answer other than, you know,
"Let me get my dining jacket. " (CH UCKLES)
And we checked it out.
At first, it was just the giddiness of understanding
how lovely a trip like that can be,
that there was once a time where this was considered travel
that you might dress up for and enjoy.
Then it became very, very practical where we started actually going,
"What do these scenes feel like? When can it be claustrophobic?
"When can we work against claustrophobia?
"Did even the angles of some of our suppositions make sense?"
BRANAGH: And this is, of course, this is also Johnny here in...
With the face of a movie star.
I love this look. It's a great, great look.
And starts the departure process,
which, once again, Patrick Doyle's score starts to soar with.
Because we often talked about the area that is Istanbul,
that emergence from the gateway to the East...
GREEN: Where it's always sunrise or sunset.
BRANAGH: Yeah, exactly.
And where you feel the event of the train leaving or departing
involves the whole city,
and you start this feeling of the miles under your feet.
All that glamour, all of those people, all of that swirl
will now, from that massive place, start to head into these more remote places,
still magnificent, but the people...
GREEN: But the world is starting to cool.
We go from the extreme heat and there's the ice coming.
- Yeah. - BRANAGH: And then suddenly...
Suddenly, away from all of that, is the life of the train.
And the life of the train, in this case,
includes the arrival of Derek Jacobi's brilliant Masterman,
who meets Johnny Depp,
who is in receipt of the first of a series of threatening letters.
GREEN: You've mentioned Patrick Doyle, who you worked with quite a bit before,
I think he... We owe him such a debt in this.
The soaring music also...
He repurposes some of the same themes for elation but also for tension.
And I'm always thrilled to see how he's able to just bend familiar notes
in a slightly different way to create a completely different mood.
BRANAGH: One of the things I enjoy about this interaction
between Johnny Depp and Michelle Pfeiffer
is the glamour and the connectivity between the story,
the train, two pretty amazing-looking people
who meet in a barbed exchange
that feels, as I always felt about this picture,
-that it belongs in a movie-movie. -(GREEN LAUGHS)
- Big wide screen entertainment... - GREEN: Larger than life.
BRANAGH: ...with movie stars looking fantastic,
playing characters with some bite and edge.
Each son' of giving as good as they get
and feeling as though the...
As it were, the conflict that clearly will be
at the center of a picture like this for all its spectacle, etcetera,
is there, and also that you feel
that they will play it and take those moments of characterful tension,
and it's the beginning of saying, you know,
all will not be well on this train.
GREEN: And there are moments here played by Michelle Pfeiffer,
both in when she first sees Ratchett and when he steps off,
where the hints of things to come, the reveals to come,
are buried in such subtle performances that I marvel every time
that she's able to play a character
who's playing a character who is playing a character.
BRANAGH: Yeah. And in this case, playing a character who is on a train carriage
which was being rocked by hydraulic gimbals underneath, making it...
As you'll remember, one of the things
that really struck us on the real train, any train,
is that it's very hard to walk as it shunts and buckles and...
- You're constantly knocking around. - BRANAGH: Exactly.
So, this was a feat of engineering
by our brilliant production designer Jim Clay,
who found a way to recreate the entire Orient Express
and deliver it to,
in this case, New Zea/and,
in other cases, Switzerland and France.
As you know, Malta at the beginning that gave us our Jerusalem,
but also Longcross Studios in Surrey,
where we had a mile of track outside,
where we had LED screens outside that played some of the moving footage we got
from plate photography in New Zea/and
and allowed this delicious silliness.
Finally, two regular eggs.
GREEN: And the mustache guard. BRANAGH: And the mustache guard,
which Alexandra B yrne, our costume designer, was creating
as one of her many, many triumphs here.
GREEN: As many incredible movie stars during this film,
Alex Byrne is someone who I was absolutely giddy to meet.
I 'd been a fan of her work for so long,
and every piece of wardrobe here is something I want to wear.
I wanna dress as Daisy Ridley
-for Halloween every year. -(BRANAGH LAUGHS)
BRANAGH: We really shouldn't talk about that, Michael, because that's...
-/t's so disturbing to me, but... -(GREEN LAUGHS)
GREEN: At least Willem Dafoe's coat. I love it.
BRANAGH: Alexandra Byrne, of course, is an Oscar winner
who I've worked with over the past 30 years,
both in the theater and on films.
And her trademark is the kind of detail
that gives you that scarf that Penélope Cruz is wearing,
and Penélope, I think, one of the world's greatest beauties,
here eschews that glamour for the religious zeal of Pilar Estravados
and brings that severity that we 're going to find unsettling
because it has quite the drive behind it, as they all do already, I think.
You've established and Agatha Christie
gave us the understanding of how to do it,
that already each one of these people seems to have a secret,
whether it's Willem Dafoe getting on the blame,
patting something in his pocket...
GREEN: You're wondering what are these people...
Are they what they present themselves as?
And then, of course, we always have Mr. Bouc,
who seems to enjoy life more than anyone ever has.
BRANAGH: Yeah. One of the things you do with his character, however,
is to see this son' of
louche in some ways, but also innocent in some ways,
youthful, life-loving, life-living individual
start a journey which is gonna perhaps rob him of some of that innocence.
GREEN: Yes. I think we described him in the script as,
-"He would flirt with a drain pipe." -(BRANAGH LAUGHS)
And he certainly brought it out.
I may have stolen one of those menus as a personal memento.
BRANAGH: I can't believe you're saying that.
-l'm gonna report you to the Fox... - GREEN: To the Fox authorities.
- BRANAGH: ...menu-stealing police. -(GREEN LAUGHS)
As many may know, I've worked with Judi Dench for over 30 years now,
-and she was... - GREEN: That's just bragging.
BRANAGH: She was den mother in this world.
Let's say, I've worked for her.
I've certainly been bullied by her for the last 30 years.
She was the first person to be cast in this film,
and her double act with Olivia Colman was a wonder to behold.
- They were trouble. Yeah. - GREEN: Two astonishing actors.
I remember that was when the first...
You told me the first person we 'd had on, "I think Judi wants to do it,"
and I just said... Thought, "lf this is where we 're starting..."
Working with Kenneth Branagh and Judi Dench in this film.
BRANAGH: It was a good moment.
You know what I like about that interchange with Bouc,
and one of the things that's a feature of the script
is the ability to go from
those moments of mystery to a personal moment for Poirot like that,
where we start to hint at, "What is that past? ls there a broken heart?
"Could he indeed fall prey to any of the attractions
"of somebody as beautiful as Miss Pfeiffer there, on this train?
"Does that render him vulnerable or weak?"
But instead, we don't get time to think about it
because an apparently racist Willem Dafoe...
GREEN: People making themselves conspicuous.
BRANAGH: Yes. Exactly.
So, he's either...
Well, is he giving a performance of Professor Gerhard Hardman,
or is there something more sinister
and insidious to this provocative stance
over the presence of Leslie Odom's Colonel Arbuthnot?
GREEN: Which, of course, would be entirely believable in the time.
BRANAGH: This kind of shot where we 're able to play with Daisy and Willem
and then track back down the corridor and find Johnny at the end
was one of the pleasures of the event
that was putting all of those people in the same place, at the same time.
GREEN: The celebration of the sealed room.
BRANAGH: Yeah. And on a son' of separate level of just seeing...
Well, you might say that many movie stars, but just terrific actors.
But we also knew that it would find itself,
as Agatha Christie does with many of her stories,
in involving those one-on-one scenes.
Here, it's a core and pivotal scene in the movie, isn't it?
GREEN: Yes. It's also one that does take
several pages from Agatha Christie herself. It is...
The book is masterfully structured.
And this is one that really kicks off the story.
It tells you that there is a specific danger.
It points out whose back we should be watching.
It, of course, starts with an addition of your own that I adore, which is
laughing giddily at Dickens,
which she references him reading all the time,
but never with quite the zeal you bring to it,
which makes me laugh every single time.
BRANAGH: We, for those interested in such things,
that cake was very carefully chosen knowing that...
- GREEN: (CHUCKLES) The fragilité? - The fragilité.
Because it was very like myself.
And Mr. Depp, who I would say is absolutely unafraid of the world
most actors live in awe of, which is eating on screen.
Because this particular scene, for instance,
was shot over a day and a half.
There were many, many versions of it in many different shot sizes,
and lots and lots of, I say this shamefacedly in front of the writer,
but there was lots of improvisation.
- Obviously... - Which I am thrilled to take credit for.
- It is very... - Most of them were your words, Michael,
but they were sort of arranged in a slightly different way.
lmean, you know, you...
GREEN: Oh, I am thrilled With this.
This is one of the best notes I've ever gotten on a script,
which was when you were gonna sit down with him over cake, you said,
"Can we specify the type of cake?"
And I got to spend a good couple hours on the Internet rabbit hole
deciding what were popular cakes at the time
that would both look good and be appealing to eat.
I came across fragilité, and there it is.
- BRANAGH: And... -l'm so very happy for these...
BRANAGH: And one that had that endurance factor
for people who are gonna be sitting opposite eating...
GREEN: I just knew we needed you to have favorite things he would wanna scoop.
It needed to be a layered cake of son'.
But it is remarkably improvised.
Johnny brings some incredibly funny tiny moments that establish
a character that we are unnerved by.
We know there is something deeply unsettling and dislikable about the man,
but at the same time, I enjoy disliking him.
BRANAGH: I watched him in awe, I must say.
For me, there was a master class
to be had as an actor and director,
watching actors of tremendous technical accomplishment
and clear charisma and fine talent, in this case,
really embracing a character who many would find so unlikable,
and perhaps many actors would not wish to play, for the kind of...
The way in which they may feel the audience is put off,
and that's not just a question of being vain, it's just,
he's a dark character, we find out quite how dark later on in the movie.
But to have somebody of Johnny's stature come in and so generously play
this darker character, and see him enjoying playing it,
and across the day and a half of improvisation,
to really feel his freedom in front of a camera
was quite intoxicating to watch and to play with.
There's nothing you could do in improvising that would throw him,
and what we talked about before, which was with your excellent dialogue,
that nevertheless, underneath it and this world,
of what you might call the formal and rather elegant meta-world
that is Agatha Christie, we wanted underneath it,
the performances to have an improvisatory feeling,
a spontaneity that cut across anything that felt like heritage filmmaking.
It depended on performance and he does a great job with this.
GREEN: Absolutely. There are whole speeches here
where he actually is letter-perfect
with the script, and yet it is still entirely improvised in his delivery,
finding cadences, tones and personal moments where the words become
so superfluous because of what he does to it.
It's really remarkable to see.
BRANAGH: And he also leaves that impression in the movie,
which is so necessary for a picture that revolves around
what this character did, and who he is,
that is weighty and grave, and it spreads its resonance
out into the larger picture, the formidable character that is this one,
whether we regard him as weaselly or shifty,
he has that gun, he has that assumption of power,
he has that danger, and so he's starting.
This is the process,
this is the scene where the intensity of the glamorous spectacle
is starting to ratchet a little more tightly.
I didn't mean to use the word ”ratchet" then,
but it is literally...
GREEN: I also love something in your performance there that,
even though he's being offered a very handsome job,
that Poirot senses immorality and has to excuse himself from it.
That he won 't willingly walk into
the company of something that he considers dark or gray or sinister.
He picks a side.
BRANAGH: It's another assertion of moral absolutism
that is gonna be challenged as the movie goes on,
but allows the audience to feel, "No, this is a man who knows who he is."
Who he is contains eccentricities and weirdnesses, you might say,
but he certainly knows who he is relative to people
like Ratchett and his offer.
- Sorry, you go on. - GREEN: Oh, no, it's...
Structural/y, here's an interesting moment in the film
where things are happening that are very, very personal
and take time for character,
when it will be revealed later on that
this is actually a crux of plot time.
What is happening offscreen here is actually going to be
the thing that will be divined throughout the film.
BRANAGH: One of the things that we wanted to do
with this element of the story,
which is the way in which the train is delayed
in the original novel by a snow flurry
that slows the train down and stops it.
We decided... lsuppose I decided, really, and forced on you
the idea that the approach to what would be that...
That stopping of the train could and should perhaps be more dangerous,
the train higher in the mountains,
and the actual way in which it was stopped,
and the place in which it was stopped was more dangerous...
GREEN: Yes, that was a remarkable invention on your part.
Even before your involvement,
talking with Fox about what this film would be,
everyone involved wanted to make sure that we honored as much as possible
the wonderful fundamentals of the book,
but we could add more tension to everything.
And so, a snow flurry could become an avalanche,
that a plain could become high up in the Alps,
and then of course, you bring in this beautiful image of the viaduct,
which we'll find ourselves on very, very shortly.
Again, things seem like nuisance but are really deeply centered on plot.
BRANAGHI Sure, and I think this is...
I feel when I watch the movie, I hope that those of you watching at home,
in seeing the movie without us Wittering on,
is the sense that everything probably means something.
- GREEN: Yes. - Every color, every...
GREEN: That's something we take from Christie,
that whenever there is a fact presented in the first third of the book,
you are meant to either notice it and try to remember it,
or you're meant to be distracted by it.
They're all very tactical on her pan'.
BRANAGH: And talking of distraction,
the scale of this carnage as the train is derailed
was, indeed, also meant to distract and have the audience
perhaps not take in quite as they might, exactly what's going on
as they are invited in this big screen format,
and with this terrific sound job
by our supervising sound editor James Mather and his team
to be viscerally involved with that great shocking stop,
which is then punctuated by the fallen Poirot popping his head out
and bringing us back into the world of humor,
which is this dynamic inside Christie itself,
in that she is ready, and wittily ready,
to go to something amusing after something dramatic.
We tried to maintain that.
GREEN: She seemed endlessly amused by Poirot as a character.
She was misquoted at some point as saying that
she didn't like him as a character
and did not understand why he was a favorite.
But upon further investigation,
I was very pleased to find out that was not true,
that she actually was always very proud of the man.
BRANAGH: She said she admired his compassion,
his ability to understand human frailty,
and his kindness.
I personally enjoyed playing that kindness,
and I also enjoyed as a director, here in this shot, for those interested,
this is real cast in real railway carriage,
but the first pan' of that, I think, very moody morning-after shot
was digitally created by George Murphy, our visual effects supervisor,
and his very fine team.
But the ability to sew together the digital world that we created,
the physical mountain that we did indeed build...
GREEN: Yes, it should... He's saying digital,
but what needs to be noted is that that viaduct with a train atop it
was very, very real, there was a two, three-story structure
where the center mass of that image you saw
was actual and the first 40, 50 feet of mountain were there,
they were digitally extended on top and on bottom.
Even the bottom with the ice was partly there,
so this is a tremendous victory for practical filmmaking,
which one does not get to enjoy nearly as often as one wants.
BRANAGH: And even the railway station,
where we saw the beginnings of the rescue of the train
-was also something we built... - GREEN: The Brod Station.
BRANAGH: The rail alongside it was something we built.
This was another one of those moments
where we were able to put all the passengers together in one carriage,
and it was very exciting and fun.
This was a group that really got on,
the rapport and chemical connection between
all of these people was significant and unusual in my experience.
And they worked together very well as a team,
handing everybody their moment,
like this beautiful moment, in my view, for Penelope Cruz
that weights a kind of expectation of a certain kind.
GREEN: It's a moment to talk about our cinematographer Haris.
Our close-ups are as beautiful as our wide shots,
and it's something I admire every time I see it.
I mean, just these choices here,
this bold telling of a massive piece of the narrative
in this dollhouse shot,
which you've described as an homage to a favorite film.
BRANAGH: Indeed, Dial M for Murder was where
I first put to Haris Zambarloukos,
who I've worked with now for the last decade,
one of a handful of cinematographers
I've had great experiences with over my life in film.
In Dial M for Murder, a third of the way through,
when the Ray Mil/and character, who is planning to murder his wife,
sets up the idea of how the murder will occur
to the man he's blackmailing in order to do it,
Hitchcock switches to this sort of bird's eye view
and the result is to make what was a human story
shot in the horizontal and in the proscenium style,
suddenly as this is rather forensic, rather inhuman, rather mathematical.
And in this case, lsuppose what I wanted to experiment with,
which Christie does in her way,
and you certainly do, Michael, in the screenplay in various ways,
is the playfulness of not revealing that body.
Many people have said to me in the movies when they've watched it,
that they literally want to push this camera,
this frame that you're seeing up,
so that they see what Leslie Odom sees...
GREEN: I saw people actually lean fon/vard as if they could look over it.
BRANAGH: Well, because I guess they want to know
and with a new telling of the story...
Well, is it indeed the Johnny Depp character?
How was he killed? What does it look like?
ls it horrific, or is it different...
GREEN: But you're putting the audience in the mind of Poirot,
which is there's very little information at this point.
BRANAGHI Yeah.
GREEN: And we're gonna parse it out very carefully.
BRANAGH: And we're also putting the audience in the same place
as those characters we just left, we 'll return to in a minute.
They'll understand that Bouc was called, the doctor was called,
something's happening, but they don't know.
Eventually we'll know that little did we know that
-they don't know, etcetera. - GREEN: Of course.
BRANAGH: But staying here, and then also enjoying just the fun of...
This kind of angle is also the angle of puzzles as well, isn't it?
It's the putting together of a board game of possibilities,
and I liked that.
And then to switch here, Haris Zambarloukos,
one of the favorite things and most brilliant uses
of his cinematography is in reflective shots.
So here we have the reflected mountains, we have that preoccupied Poirot
that I found a real delight to play,
and then you see here this rather naked fear from Tom Bateman's Bouc
that underpins all this.
This is trying to bring the man who needs a holiday, a rest,
a spiritual longing back into the...
The arena of blood and death and violence.
GREEN: And Poirot's resistant 'cause I think he knows at this point
that if he does put himself into this,
that it's going to be hard, that it's going to hurt,
that there's something ugly here. He has a sense for that.
And it's not resistant because he just wants to sit and read,
but because exposing your soul
to the ugliness in other people's souls hurts him.
BRANAGH: But the key things that motivate him
are the idea that someone like
Marquez or Arbuthnot might be summarily charged
merely because of the color of their skin or their race.
And a key line here, I think from Poirot is...
Every day, we meet people the world could do better without...
yet we do not kill them.
We must be better than the beasts.
BRANAGH: "We must be better than the beasts, "I loved saying that,
and I loved a movie that was talking about,
"Well, is that important, to be better than the beasts,
"to be civilized, to resist turning into an atavistic individual,
"to return to primitivism?"
You'd think that it's impossible, look where we 're sitting,
it's an elegant beautiful world of cocktails...
GREEN: The highest of culture against the most base instinct.
BRANAGH: And in here, and amongst that group of elegant people
is someone who viciously stabbed another individual 12 times.
GREEN: And we don't yet know why,
but we know it's gonna be for a very personal,
very ugly, very venal reason.
B RANAG H : And in the brilliant simplicity,
which is the touch of a great artist,
Agatha Christie puts that situation now
in a world where they are physically trapped.
So now that question, "Who did this appalling thing?"
is in the context of these people being unable to easily leave a train carriage
which is trapped in a place that is cold, high, inaccessible,
and subject to the rigorous scrutiny of this fella.
GREEN: And here's one of my favorite employments
of an actual Agatha Christie quote.
(LAUGHING) "I'm probably the greatest detective in the world."
Taking it from her and using it
for, lthink, the biggest laugh in the entire film.
BRANAGH: And a huge pleasure to play,
and one of things that I think is so impressive
in what you did, Michael, was, in having set up that account of Poirot,
starting the movie with a denouement, basically, in Jerusalem,
we now know that, that kind of, whatever you'd call it,
formidable deductive ability
is at work with these people who did not expect to be stuck on a train
with the Belgian rival to Sherlock Holmes.
GREEN: Whoever did dare kill someone didn't know what they were in for.
The other thing, I just have to say,
lifted directly from the book,
sometimes the best thing to do is copy verbatim,
is, "The killer's with us on the train now,"
-that line taken. - BRANAGH: Yeah.
GREEN: And I loved watching you find different ways of playing that.
That is the entire film in one line.
BRANAGH: Yes, "The killer's with us on the train."
And that train and the roof of that train is something
- I did definitively walk on. - GREEN: Yes, you did.
BRANAGH: I was there and it was high.
GREEN: And off the other end was quite a drop.
BRANAGH: It was. It was.
So of course, in theory, because you're supposed to be leading from the front,
I did a lot of deep breathing
-and tried to be very nonchalant. -(GREEN LAUGHS)
"lt's fine. I've got a wire on, it's all fun."
But it's funny, once you get that high.
GREEN: It's a proper terrifying stunt.
BRANAGH: Yeah, and terrifying to most people,
but to this 56-year-old actor, it was a little bit...
GREEN: I watched you do it and I got vertigo for you.
BRANAGH: It was definitely the pan' of us wanting to suggest that
Poirot is fearless when in pursuit of the quarry.
And also that just from this dynamic,
so here we are, we choose to stay,
have Josh Gad's brilliant performance
here as MacQueen, trapped in the corridor,
a corridor that's slightly wider than the one on the real Orient Express
to accommodate our heavier and larger...
GREEN: If there's anyone who's a true rat in a maze, it's him in this scene.
BRANAGH: Yeah, yeah.
To go to this kind of claustrophobic intensity,
sweaty kind of investigative thing from the great roof sweep,
the idea was always explore every bit outside, inside this train,
and then be able to close in on the claustrophobic element,
but not make it a permanent feature,
occasionally allow people to feel, "Oh, there's a little bit of air here,"
but not here, where...
Again, I 'd say performance style is exemplified
by the fumbling naturalism that I think
Josh does very beautifully here,
'cause it makes you very nervous for who MacQueen is and what he might have done.
GREEN: I know, for an incredibly funny man,
who everything he says when you talk to him makes you laugh,
the only time I've ever...
I see him here and I 'm terrified in his presence,
and I 'm terrified for him.
Just a complete transformation.
It could be that the application of a mustache to his face
-changes everything about him. -(BRANAGH LAUGHS)
BRANAGH: It's also a scene where we talked about
big close-ups on 65mm, these are massive forensic close-ups.
They become a monumental sculptural complement to the big landscape shots.
And I think in a movie where you're trying to work out
whether people are telling a lie or not,
to be able to have the detail that 65mm brings
and the subtlety of performance here
is a very particular flavor for the audience.
GREEN: What I get is, it's how Poirot sees them.
There is almost a hyperreality to it,
that we 're getting a microscopic view on a face and catching every lie,
if there are any.
BRANAGH: Yeah, it was a very interesting scene to play,
and I found across the course of the story,
perhaps obviously enough, the mood of the day
and the quality of the atmosphere
was born out of the subject matter
as we started to get...
We're miles away now from sweeping landscape shots,
-and now it's... - GREEN: We're starting to get tinier...
BRANAGH: Physically dirtier and smaller and sweatier...
It's a very nice piece that, when you have him say,
"We need to talk to the victim."
Coming back here
and just hopefully offering the audience up a chance to say,
"Who do you think? Who do you reckon?"
GREEN: Yeah. "Do you think it's him? Do we have it already?"
BRANAGH: Yeah, exactly, they're all, and...
GREEN: Especially when MacQueen's exit line is horrifically racist,
which is kind of a weaponizing of something
that was dropped very casually in the novel,
where people really make sweeping assumptions
about other characters based on where in Europe they happen to be from
and what they assume that means about them.
BRANAGH: This was a day, as was the one in which
we shot the discovery of the body,
in which certain worried colleagues said to me,
"So, Ken, when are we gonna do the coverage on this?"
-(GREEN LAUGHS) -/ said, "What do you mean?"
"Well, like the clues,
"should we do the pipe cleaner, should we go in on the wound?
"Should we go close on the coffee cup? There's the watch and everything."
lsaid, "Well, those would be the very brilliantly done CSI shots,"
that are legendary now in terms of having a camera travel through
a fiber of a piece of carpet, etcetera.
But here, I wanted to offer up in this big screen format
all the things, they're still there in the picture.
So the watch is still there, the wounds are still there,
Johnny Depp's face is still there, although upside down like a hung man.
- Like the fallen man, I like that. - GREEN: Bleeding out.
It's Poirot in a nutshell.
He's not a forensics investigator, there are those who rely on that,
as he's about to say in an upcoming scene,
that he doesn't enjoy the science of it,
that it's about the psychology of it.
So we're seeing the world entirely at once,
in the God's eye view, quite literally,
of every fact you need to see is right there.
It's just the question of whether your mind can interpret it fully,
and to understand what it means.
So it's the psychology of Poirot.
BRANAGH: I also think that it's good that
the audience get the view Poirot gets, don't they?
Physically we mounted the camera
on a crane that was on a massive platform
as high as the sides of the recreated train.
And it was technically a very ambitious shot to do
for all its apparent simplicity.
And across the whole of the range
of the technical and creative crafts on this picture,
we had amazing focus pullers and amazing camera operators,
terrific, terrific team of people
who technically rose to the challenge of all of these things, so...
GREEN: And I love that you found this moment to bring it outside.
This was something we talked about a lot in the script,
it was something that you just discovered on the day
and then moved things around.
This was gonna take place in
one of the rooms we were going to see far too much,
and then you had this idea of,
"Let's take it outside and use one of the lamps, "
as opposed to... The hatbox trick.
BRANAGH: The hatbox trick inside.
GREEN: Taken into a much more interesting direction for me.
BRANAGH: Well, it certainly gets it outside, doesn't it?
And it also introduces you to an environment
where we may find our list of suspects suddenly congregating.
Plus you get the great visual of the train and the mountainside behind
the beached whale that is the train.
But of course, now we're getting to the key of things,
which is Poirot's understanding that,
with the assumption of what these letters on that charred note mean.
GREEN: And in telling people there is a notorious case that happened,
that this is suddenly going to revolve around,
-that there is a famous case. - BRANAGH: And so it is.
And here we discover through the language we've been using
when it comes to flashbacks, black and white,
to say in broad terms for the logic of storytelling,
for the visuals and the audience's first-time experience
that black and white means it happened in the past,
and it allows us to use a graphic style that comes from
a noirish treatment of such stories.
The interior of the Armstrong house, for instance, may be very obviously,
but still rapturously and enjoyably for me,
evoking the Gregg Toland style of Citizen Kane.
That's where our inspiration was anyway,
and certainly in the bigger scenes where...
GREEN: Things shot from underground, looking up.
BRANAGH: Yes, yeah, big wide, close on wide lenses
with blooming foreground figures,
but also as we get back into this environment,
that feeling of the interiors from Kane.
And also, in a movie-movie, the existence of film being important.
GREEN: God, I just had a flashback of trying to construct a letter
that had missing letters that meant something on both sides of it.
So that you could have just enough to figure it out
and then fill it out later.
I held her as best as I could.
BRANAGH: How much did you enjoy that practical business
of a contemporary screenwriter dealing with the mechanics
of a classic whodunit writer?
GREEN: It's fun 'cause I've never written anything procedural before,
and the most fun of this is the character writing,
knowing that you're gonna take one of your favorite characters
and put him toe-to-toe with these remarkable actors
playing remarkable characters,
and just letting them be eccentrics and enjoy their specificity,
and how he would adapt moment to moment.
But then there is the fun of just the puzzle,
the making sure that your math is checked,
and that your data points are put in the most advantageous place.
That you can get a lot of help with
because people are always there to tell you whether it's clear,
whether it makes sense.
And of course, you have the workings of the master to work from.
The novel is notorious for a reason.
So a lot of fun, is the short answer to that question.
BRANAGH: Good.
It was nice of you to acknowledge some of the other people who helped us out,
like our excellent script supervisor, Sylvia, who was...
- She was remarkable, I've never... Yeah. - BRANAGH: ...sharp.
GREEN: She was someone who, on every draft, came to me and said,
"Here's what you got right, here's what you need to help... "
and would come with such smart solutions
for not only how to fix clear mistakes in the script
that were clear only once she saw them,
but clever solutions that just made everything more elegant and more filmic.
She's one of the most gifted minds
of her type I've ever worked with.
BRANAGH: This scene with Michelle Pfeiffer
was the first one that she shot,
and like all actors, she bravely accepted the challenge
of doing an important scene on day one,
where I said it would be wonderful to capture
whatever that first-da y excitement is,
and she went for it.
She carries her Hubbard, the woman she says, indeed, in this scene,
"I'm aware you think I'm a silly woman."
She carried that dizzy, silly quality,
which we were to judge whether it was authentic or not, with real élan.
She went for it, she prepared, she was here for months beforehand
looking at clothes and wigs, etcetera,
but she, on the day, came at it
with a practice of a thoroughbred artist ready to go.
And from take one, on day one,
she brought that kind of energy and thought
she'd worked hard on it,
and then had fun with it.
It's the kind of thing that, for instance,
in another context, in a scene like this between myself and Derek Jacobi,
he's a man whose performance onstage in Shakespeare's Hamlet
I saw when I was 15 years old and it son' of changed my life.
He'd just been an enormous success
in a classic BBC television series called I, Claudius,
in which he played the titular emperor.
GREEN: This is the... Every year I go back to that from time to time
and I can't believe I got to work with him on a film.
BRANAGH: Well, I still I can't believe I got to work with him in a film.
He also joined me on my last 70mm adventure,
which was in Shakespeare's Hamlet, in which he played Claudius.
In this scene, Johnny Depp said to me aften/vards,
"Please apologize, I've done so, but please apologize to him."
lsaid, "Who?" He said, "Derek Jacobi."
lsaid, "Why?" He said, "'Cause I had to shout at him,
"I don't wanna shout at Derek Jacobi."
lsaid, "Honest to God, I think he knows you're pretending."
He said, "Please tell him 'cause I worship that man."
- Yeah. - GREEN: That's very funny.
I should mention that Derek Jacobi's Hamlet to you
was what your Hamlet was to me as a young man seeing that
and being very, very inspired by it
and finally feeling like I understood what the play was there to tell me.
BRANAGH: Well, I appreciate that,
and it certainly was the case for myself and Derek.
And that son' of handover,
as you're pan' of passing on to the next group of people,
an iteration of some great work
that does need an interpretive regeneration
is pan' of really what brings me to a story like this.
I think there are plenty of people who won 't have seen the '74 film,
or necessarily read the book,
for whom maybe we can bring our own
excitement and enthusiasm about the story to bear.
And here, I think it combines with
the historical relationship we've had as artists,
means there's a shorthand between Derek and I, a trust,
that allows him, lthink, to feel very, very comfortable in front of the camera
to give a performance of such intimacy and reality.
GREEN: He's very vulnerable in it
for a character who really has trouble with vulnerability.
BRANAGH: Yeah. GREEN: It's quite moving.
And I love this connection between you two here
where Poirot, who has so much a job to do,
and is staring at a man who is quite possibly a suspect,
but still cannot help his sympathies.
BRANAGH: Yeah. Well, it's in a very nice line about,
"I'm sorry about the toothache."
This was an improvised line of mine, Michael, about...
GREEN: Which I am very glad to take credit for. (LAUGHS)
BRANAGH: "/ love the little cakes."
Not the most inspired improvised line, but it was fun.
There's something about Poirot's deliciousness.
Penélope Cruz, the beautiful and the fantastically talented,
-and herself a formidable director. - GREEN: Yes.
BRANAGH: She's done a couple of shorts that are excellent
and she's as smart as a nut, as you might imagine.
She's a joy, knee-tremblingly beautiful gal,
but the most resistant to doing an important scene like that on day one.
She didn't wanna do that, she had to be...
GREEN: She's excellent in it.
BRANAGH: Iknovv, but in the end, she did with wholehearted enthusiasm.
As did Manuel here, who is...
GREEN: He gets such a great laugh on this line
that I never realized was funny
-until he said il'. (LAUGHS) - BRANAGHI Yeah.
GREEN: He does. BRANAGH: He doesn't lie anymore.
GREEN: "/ don't lie anymore."
BRANAGH: That in a thriller where people are supposed to be
lying or telling the truth or some version of it,
is a very upfront way of addressing the elephant in the room.
Here are some canted angles, some Dutch angles, as we say,
which are really Deutsche angles
'cause they come from German expressionism.
GREEN: ls that the origin of it? BRANAGH: Yes, that's the origin of it.
Which is... The two or three generations of change
is something that I enjoy enormously.
I remember getting a lot of grief, myself and Haris Zambarloukos,
'cause we used many of them in our film of Thor.
And for me, it was about expressing the panels in comic books,
which were often very dramatic.
But I know some people feel it's a bit of an affectation.
I do it from an instinctive point of view
ifl think that it's telling a different version of the story.
lmean, for instance, here, we 're a little higher,
and we have all the graphics behind Penélope
of those white tablecloths and the repetition of that.
So there's no need to do it, in that case.
And also, we've got that amazing face to look at.
But sometimes, to play with the audience's sense in a thriller
of what may or may not be the truth,
it's useful to sometimes consider distorting the point of view.
GREEN: You're challenging us as to
whether we should trust the person or not,
that their words may be un-incriminating,
but there is something about their tone,
or suspicions are aroused based on where you decide to point the camera,
and this sequence really plays that way
because you take three characters that we've enjoyed,
her dourness earlier we enjoyed,
but now I come out of this really wondering
whetherl can believe a word of it.
BRANAGH: llove what she does with her eyes here. So simple,
and it's the kind you read the body language for that extra flicker.
And with Manuel here, you also have such kindness in those eyes.
But we 're so close that we 're really inside there
checking out those retinas.
"Are you're telling the truth? 'Cause you seem so friendly and so warm."
GREEN: And he really does embody
something that we wanted to get in there,
which is the immigrant American who came to America
and just is proud to wear the flag pin because the country served him so well.
And yet he's still always burdened by people's assumptions
because he is from another country,
that because he is Cuban,
people are going to assume negative things about him
and that that carries into this,
that he knows suspicion 's coming his way,
that no matter how successful you are, someone might still judge you for it.
And he really plays that beautifully.
BRANAGH: And Penélope Cruz's odd blinks in that sequence,
with a kind of 40-yard stare,
and contrasted with Manuel's warmth
and Willem Dafoe's confident Germanic assertion of innocence
and, indeed, superiority.
It was a great device of yours.
It was on the page, so I can't take credit for
the idea that at this stage, instead of the one-by-one single interviews
that you then chose to make a different kind of recipe
with those three characters
before we return to what appears to be the implacable fon/vard movement here.
But once again, as Daisy Ridley's character points out,
it's both a detective choice and a director choice.
She says you put people in different environments
in order to exploit them as best you see fit.
GREEN: What I love about her take on that is she's possibly the one
who's most shrewd here,
that she's starting to unpack the detective 's detective methods.
And I think, as a result, Poirot, andl certainly see it in your performance,
he quite enjoys her.
I love the dynamic here. It's like he's so hoping it's not her,
and she makes herself so incriminating here.
And I feel Poirot's disappointment, because she's really enjoyable,
and I think he enjoys her character and her intelligence
as someone who understands his own as a result.
BRANAGH: Ihave the sense thatAgatha Christie
puts quite a bit of herself in this character,
that the independent spirit of Mary Debenham is,
for me, easily imagined in the real accounts of Agatha Christie's travel
in the early '20s when, for instance,
she traveled with her first husband Archie around the world.
He was on a trade mission as a junior British official,
including a stop in Hawaii, where she became the first female to surf upright.
- Which seems to be... - GREEN: She was an adventurer.
BRANAG H: ...a fairly extraordinary thing from a woman who,
latterly, is perceived by the world
as a becardiganed, bepearled dame of the British Empire.
GREEN: With her second husband, who was an archaeologist,
she spent a good... In her non-writing months of the year,
the other eight, she would go with him on archaeological digs
and was quite a photographer,
photographing all of his works and finds.
But, yes, she describes Mary Debenham as coolly intelligent.
She understands completely how people perceived her
as stuffy and unemotional when, of course,
she had a very, very rich interior life as brought forth in the novels.
BRANAGH: This was also a first scene for Daisy Ridley.
The set that you see, the environment was a built set.
Those men were in front of that real tunnel.
GREEN: This is three stories up on the platform.
BRANAGH: Yeah, sure it is, at Longcross Studios.
And for us, completely transporting, as far as I was concerned,
I was in the Dinaric Alps of the former Yugoslavia.
GREEN: Every time we were up there,
it felt not only like you were completely transported,
but that it was freezing.
Even though it was all false snow,
you suddenly felt like you needed an extra set of scarves and mittens.
BRANAGH: Yeah, it was really a wonderful tribute to Jim Clay's work.
Across the crafts, Jim Clay, Haris Zambarloukos in cinematography,
- Alexandra Byrne in costume. - GREEN: All brilliant.
BRANAGH: Mick Audsley did a wonderful job as film editor here
because he found a classical editing style inside all of that
that allowed us to have pace and variety,
but had that sort of elegance that pictorially we wanted to ground.
And maybe with a combination of those things
never better seen here,
than in a double carriage, which is in purples and browns with a striking
painting behind Judi Dench.
She was in a fabulous gown and...
GREEN: That painting is wonderfully evocative
of where everyone wishes they were right at this moment...
- BRANAGH: Yes, exactly. -. . . rather than being grilled.
BRANAGH: Yeah, I'd love to be on that boat
and for this to be easier.
We have here this ability, that all the actors share,
and Judi Dench particularly exemplifies, to simply play
under the gaze of that 65mm camera.
Both her Russian hauteur and then her human pain,
as she unfolds the nature of her relationship to the Armstrong family,
who Poirot has now ascertained to be at the center of this case.
GREEN: Another well-placed Haris mirror. There's several angles in which
he always finds another way 'cause you know Poirot is the...
There it is, another one of them. It's the different angles of his keen eye.
BRANAGH: Frankly, sometimes delays on a Haris Zambarloukos set
are to do with fixing mirrors. He loved doing everything in camera.
Or in this case, it was sometimes to do with two dogs,
two beautiful and well-behaved dogs, I have to say,
but it is true what they say about children and animals,
frankly, if you are a film director.
They do take a little bit longer.
I tell you what really takes a long time there, Michael...
GREEN: ls learning German?
BRANAGH: ls learning German when you don't speak it.
Although it seemed very clever of you to write down...
GREEN: Oh, much easier to put into Google translate. (LAUGHS)
BRANAGHI Subtitle.
I have to say we had a terrific dialect coach, Marina Tyndall.
- Very, very talented. - She was wonderful 'cause she also
worked with each of your actors on finding the specificity
of where they would be from and how to modulate
to be as authentic as they are, really remarkable.
BRANAGH: Very detailed approach. Her and her colleague,
Helen, were excellent with us.
And Marina was behind the months
of French instruction and Belgian accent comparison.
GREEN: She would secretly come to me behind your back and tell me which words
were a particular challenge that we might,
"Could you possibly find an alternate for this one?"
because you were really surgical about making sure that
it was all something that would fit right in your mouth
and that was one of the most extraordinary
rewrite experiences I've ever got to be a pan' of.
Just reading with you as you were picking
what type of Belgian accent you were going to be using.
And you say, "No, no, I wanna keep this line.
"I love, you know, the intent of line or the humor in the line,
-"but I can't say that letter." (LAUGHS) - BRANAGH: Exactly.
Often I would learn it phonetically on the page
and with tapes and things.
But then the ultimate goal is to sort of...
I found I did... Because he was a character,
not all characters are, who, for me,
the performer, was really good company.
I liked to be around the sort of tone and taste of his heart and soul.
That kindness that Agatha Christie mentioned,
I think had a good rub-off,
although some of the bleed produced the neat freak in me at home,
so I don't know that
it was always helpful to be quite so as obsessive-compulsive
as the man who we now find to be,
really, it seems, with the scent very much in his nose.
GREEN: Yeah, this is Poirot, top of the game.
This is Poirot when the dominoes are falling,
he's able to construct one thought to another,
as the day follows the night.
He knows that if the kimono's in his,
then this pass key and the conductors uniform is going to be in hers.
And he's right and then that scent, quite literal bloodhound scent,
is going to put him right to MacQueen, who right now
is the most likely suspect for reasons he is
putting together in front of our eyes.
BRANAGH: And now we get to move the camera a little more
and wherever we can take the opportunity to go,
"This is it, this is it." This is that he is now
on the scent, he's found that person
and we get a chance to be outside and, yes, indeed to meet
if not action Poirot,
-determined, physical Poirot. - GREEN: He's a very competent Poirot.
He's not a Poirot... Like he might detest moving his body
and breaking a sweat,
but he is absolutely capable of doing it.
BRANAGH: And we know that actually this sequence was a much longer one.
We had a great stunt supervisor, Jimmy O'Donnell,
who came up with a great chase across the ice
which Josh Gad, I have to say, for those of you who
know him primarily for his comedy,
his singing, and in this case, his drama, know that he's also
Josh "Action" Gad, but we've cut it out, I'm afraid.
But for now, it's still provided quite a shot in the arm, in terms of action.
GREEN: lthink, too, 'cause it was always that balance we talked about
at every stage of things between tension and action
and understanding that a Poirot mystery wanted high tension
in moments of real uncertainty of whether you were safe or not,
the characters you were fond of were safe or not.
But never wanting to go to a place that jumped genres.
And I loved that sequence as it came out
that there's a legitimate danger not of just of losing your suspect,
but of being taken down by him.
The maths do not tally...
because you have been stealing from him.
It is full of the...
What is the English word?
GREEN: And then of course it goes to high comedy here,
one of my favorites was, "Full of the fudge,"
which is one of those great moments like,
you put something in the script
that lights a fuse and then the actor just explodes
the TNT With a line like that.
I'm so glad you got to be as funny as you are, which is very.
BRANAGH: Well, we definitely see here a kind of potential
for a kind of righteous anger in Poirot
that is based on what he's finding across this investigation,
which is the repetition of lies and the accumulation of lies
across all sorts of characters to which he has this moral effrontery.
GREEN: Yeah, he doesn't delight in picking apart lies
and finding them and going, "Look how clever I am,"
it's more constant disappointment
that someone he would have much preferred to like
is lying to him and that starts earlier with Mary Debenham, you see it,
you see it here, although he always suspected MacQueen.
And then of course, he's about to start grilling Dr. Arbuthnot
and find that he, too, though very trustworthy
on the surface with all the right answers,
his narrative breaks down when he starts questioning him
about Mary and their relationship.
BRANAGH: And you feel with Poirot, or at least I felt
and tried to allow to occur,
what a friend of mine once said with a sigh,
he said, "God, I find the human condition so disappointing."
And I think there's some quality evoked in your screenplay
for Poirot that I, at least, find myself responding to.
He doesn't give up on it.
He doesn't son' of feel sorry for it himself
or particularly assume some special sensitivity
that other people do not have.
But it is his reaction sometimes, which essentially is balanced by...
It's a desire, he wants to see the best in people.
But the best is complex and it requires everybody
on their best game
and perhaps everybody like him,
but of course, everybody can't be like him
because othen/vise we'd all be rearranging eggs.
GREEN: (LAUGHS) That is the tragedy of Poirot's life,
is that the world doesn't look the way he needs it to look.
BRANAGH: He has little originality,
so not fully functional in the real world
where people have different kinds of flaws.
GREEN: No, you can barely get it together at breakfast,
-not certainly once lunch rolls around. - BRANAGH: Exactly.
GREEN: And that's why he's always threatening to quit everything
and go raise vegetable marrows.
The constant refrain is, "I 'm gonna quit, no more crime,
"and I'm gonna be a farmer and just vegetable marrows all daylong."
BRANAGH: And no more intellectual human moral mess.
He doesn't want to be putting any more feet in that donkey poo.
GREEN: He wants to be in actual mud.
He is very happy with true din' and donkey poo.
But not the human mess.
BRANAGH: And consistency and simplicity
and certainty and knowledge.
Not all of these variables.
Man says one thing then runs away, tells one lie, changes it.
And now of course, he's going to, as it were, drill down
into MacQueen's story.
Provides a lovely opportunity for
another fine bit of acting amongst this ensemble here,
as Josh Gad's revelation that there is a connection to the Armstrong case.
It's one of the places in the movie
where everyone could, one offered up
the power of performance here.
The story, of course, working powerfully
as Christie reveals through Poirot yet one layer of the onion.
GREEN: I'd like to compliment one of your very bold camera choices here
as director and as actor, where this stays in a single shot
fora very long time, giving it entirely to the actor MacQueen,
giving it to Josh Gad, and allowing everything to play on his face.
You could turn back on yourself, you could hand it to Bouc.
But instead this is very much his moment
which he carries, he absolutely does, but that is a choice
made by a director and by a star
to hand things off and the entire thing becomes stronger for it.
I remember seeing that in as early as the first cut
and just thinking how grateful once again I was
that you were both in front and behind the camera on this.
BRANAGH: Well, this felt very much as though,
as a strength in the movie,
this character, the power of Josh's performance
and this singularity of cut would be helpful
because, as we know, one of the surprising
and clever things that you did... And "clever" is a very good word
when it comes to Christie, you have to be clever
'cause God knows she is.
And one of the things you fox us with here
is something that I think genuinely,
certainly when I read it, threw me
and I thought, "What's happening here?
"This is definitely a departure."
GREEN: You mean with this next piece here, yes.
In the adaptation of it,
we wanted to honor as much as possible what we could.
And I think we do. The difference between the novel and the film
primarily is that in the novel, Poirot knows
the solution pretty much by the middle.
And then he's just enjoying piecing it together bit by bit.
And so there's a bit of the preposterousness
of continuing talking to everyone
just to get all the details of it, or it's more formalities for him.
And that works beautifully in the novel.
But here, we wanted to keep audience
and Poirot, by extension, the extension of the audience,
on their feet trying to figure out what happened.
So he thinks he has MacQueen there.
It seems very clear because of that
undeniable personal connection to the case, that makes him
absolutely a suspect and then,
while we were sitting there looking at him,
someone attacks Mrs. Hubbard and clearly that means that
the killer is still out there and that we're not done here.
Not knowing the length of the film,
not having that little bar on your DVR
telling you how much there is to go is actually a great part of the fun
because we could have ended there and said, "Okay."
-lnstead, he becomes a red herring. - BRANAGH: Yeah.
GREEN: And here is Poirot being very hurt by that personally
because he thought he had it. It did make sense a moment ago,
and now this new development of Mrs. Hubbard's stabbing
weighs on him because he didn't have it.
And so her accusing him and saying, "I thought you were a genius.
"Why isn't this done?"
He looks at her and thinks she's right, "I'm failing in this moment."
And that bothers him tremendously.
BRANAGH: One of the boldest things that Christie does,
but maybe it's also a factor of numbers, is that we, having met the Andrenyis
right at the beginning of the story, we've left them now for a long time.
G REEN: Their diplomatic immunity makes them immune to suspicion
or at least conversation and coverage.
BRANAGH: Well, it's partly, of course, because
Madam Andrenyi, played beautifully here by Lucy Boynton,
who made just a tremendous couple with Sergei Polunin.
That character decides to withdraw, to retreat.
They do not go to dinner.
The Count Andrenyi occasionally shows up in the group with the others,
but she, under the influence of drugs,
chooses to stay in her room.
So there's a legitimacy for why she is gone.
And I suppose it's simple, and at this stage
of a story that has contained, really, a large number of characters,
more than maybe modern film thriller writers would do,
-by way of suspects. -(GREEN CHUCKLES)
And suddenly perhaps does it send you immediately back to,
”Of course, I 'd forgotten about this."
GREEN: "Yeah, we hadn't even considered that."
BRANAGH: "Or is it, as I suspect it is, pan' of now the double bluff?
"Oh, but now they want us to think this
"because we haven't seen them for a while."
GREEN: That is the joy of Christie,
is that when you have many plates spinning in the air,
it is both bug and feature.
You have so many people that you get to keep bouncing
all of your suspicions from one to another
and you don't know whether it's, "Did we safely tuck them away
"because they were the true culprit?
"Or are they now just another feint before we come back to something?"
BRANAGH: Yeah. And when you do that, of course,
when you do come back to something,
if you can do a couple of things, which is
give us the new plot material that may emerge
from said interview.
But also, in this case, give us
what you might call the genuine pain of this character.
So Lucy Boynton suddenly reveals in a way that
sends a bit of a shiver down your spine.
-"I'm afraid of everything. " - GREEN: Mmm-hmm.
BRANAGH: There's a son' of weight of sadness and melancholy here
that also makes you feel at the same time
even if you believe well,
you know, she's out of action.
She's too under the influence to do anything.
She's revealing a son' of muted passion
that could also be as dangerous as that same swiftness of movement
that means... The very first time we met Penelope Cruz.
She whipped around and grabbed a...
Stopped a pickpocket with a sort of violence that's surprising.
So this depth of feeling that you touch, or that brood that Sergei has,
which we know to underpin
-a potentially violent disposition. - There's potential for a murder there,
or with her, that there's the potential for blind rage,
that she would do something in the blackout of everything.
But she's clearly someone affected by something.
Which is gonna make her very suspect very quickly.
BRANAGH: Yeah, that heaviness, that weight of the secret is there,
but of course, and very nicely you do it,
in a moment,
we have the Countess Andrenyi
just betray with a single word
the possibility of connection with yet one more liar on the train.
And here, a scene I enjoyed playing very much partly because,
as you alluded to in the approach,
we wanted here to find Poirot who is working it out...
GREEN: In real time. BRANAGH: Yes, in real time.
Not passionate thought recollected in tranquility.
Or a man who demonstrates the cleverness of me.
But instead somebody who...
Also as we see him working it out,
you see, carries some quality of offense.
lmean, it hurts him, he's insulted.
GREEN: He doesn't like what his brain is able to find.
I do love that music cue of Patrick's when
-the word "governess" comes through. - BRANAGH: Yes.
GREEN: That moment of connection, and it was just one of those discoveries,
I saw it in the dailies, of the way you found
that moment and just realized that this thing was taking on
a life beyond anything you could imagine in script level.
It's about the moments when the actors come together
and just the chaos of those combinations of these three people in that room
until just an absolutely indelible moment is formed.
BRANAGH: Here is a moment, indelible, where Willem Dafoe,
out of things for a while,
takes a beautiful cinematic pause.
He's so sweet, when he came to see the movie,
he said, "Thanks for holding on to me there."
-(GREEN LAUGHS) - Because it's a nice piece of timing.
You know, "Who was it? It was somebody you knew," beat, beat, beat...
GREEN: And it's a deliberate choice. He gave it to you
and you found it and you recognized the virtue of patience.
BRANAGH: Also, as an actor,
he gives you what the audience wants at that stage,
-which I think after the drama... - GREEN: The relief.
...they want something to laugh at or laugh with.
And also it's a slightly hysterical laughter of,
"My God, there's another one. There's another one."
GREEN: "Again we're gonna do this?"
But then he exonerates himself
by apologizing for his horrible comments earlier.
BRANAGH: Yes. GREEN: Which, you know, was,
again, commentary on so much of the actual casual racism that comes out
in these conversations in the period.
And then referring to himself as "half a Heeb, "
just his casualness about it all.
BRANAGH: We like again Haris Zambarloukos,
and in that case in the hands of Luke Redgrave, with the "B" camera there.
Beautiful complement to Roger Pearce 's "A" camera.
The triple image of Willem Dafoe through the glass
at a moment where...
Well, he had an accent a second ago.
Now he's telling a different kind of lie.
GREEN: But he's lying again, so it's the three-faced man.
And it bears mention,
Luke Redgrave, as your "B" camera operator who found that shot,
has an auspicious connection to the original film, doesn't he?
Indeed, because his aunt,
Vanessa Redgrave, played Mary Debenham in the 1974 film.
GREEN: So he had a particularly interesting first day
because of the family legacy of it all.
But even here, just again the three-face
in the moment that he's uncovered in that lie.
I do remember getting help from
a very industrious assistant, Andreas Michel Santano,
when lsaid, "I need you to help me find a gun
"that Poirot can know the difference between so he can parse out
"the exact years this man has been a policeman or not, "
and he found it for me and it was one of the most incredible things
that I remember being on the set for,
when your props master came to me with the gun
and I took a picture of it
with the line that was still
in the sides for the day and sent it to him and said,
"Just so you think your hours grinding were for naught."
-(BRANAGH LAUGHS) - There it was.
BRANAGH: The luxury casting alongside that well and detailed
expression of deductive power
through your assistant and the prop master
is also matched by...
When people ask me about the nature of the casting,
lsay, "Well, when you have someone like Willem Dafoe
"who comes in at that stage of the game
"and just, as it were, he shoots, he scores, you know."
It's a home run with a character
and Willem handled it beautifully.
We should talk about this character of Katherine.
The books have Poirot,
for a while, distracted by
a character called Vera Rossakoff,
who is a Russian countess.
lbelieve in a line you had in one version of the script,
you refer to her by saying, "She had one green eye.
"She had one blue eye, I could not look at her.
-"/ could not look away. " -(GREEN LAUGHS)
And that was in fora while, actually.
GREEN: Yes.
BRANAGH: And for a while, to be perfectly honest,
we also had this picture
contain images of former military companions of Poirot.
GREEN: They were two aspects of his past that were very much of interest to us.
That military beginning that suggests that he'd seen some darkness
in his youth both as a policeman, but in World War I,
which was a particularly brutal war
that he would have fought in, in incredible times and awful times.
And also romance. If he had ever had his toes in those dangerous waters
and come out and said for a man who is
quite literally obsessed with order
and finding balance in things,
war and romance would be awfully anathema.
BRANAGH: Yes, yes. GREEN: So we dug those things out.
BRANAGH: The most disorder, and we landed on Katherine.
And I believe were we lucky enough to pursue the adventures of Poirot
m Egypt--
GREEN: We know those stories we want to tell.
BRANAGH: Yeah. We think there's gold in them thar hills.
GREEN: I also thought it played very well against Mrs. Hubbard,
as played by Michelle Pfeiffer.
Her flirtations with Poirot
seem more deliberate to throw him off
because she can sense that there is something in him.
There's a romantic soul that is unnerved by having it engaged.
And it's one of the things that can throw the great mind.
BRANAGH: I was unnerved sitting on these milk pails because...
- GREEN: So close to the edge? - So close to the edge.
And this shot proved live and in camera
that we built that viaduct, we put that train up there.
And it was a long way up. And it's nice, it's real wind, outside
on a real winter's day
just outside London where Daisy Ridley's hair is being thrown.
And I like in this scene
there's a sort of sadness about Poirot's burgeoning belief that...
Or is it a belief, or is it a conversational gambit...
GREEN: He hopes so much it's not her, because I think he quite likes her.
BRANAGHI I think he does.
GREEN: She is right now the most suspicious,
and that's going to be awfully disappointing for him.
BRANAGH: The link to the romance with the Hubbard flirtation,
Katherine in the picture, and to the women generally, I think,
was pan' of the Poirot that seemed to me
was partly colored by a gallantry, a civility, a courtliness,
a son' of chivalric kind of regard for women.
Not necessarily realistic or, again, functioning very well,
but an admiration of all that is glorious and beautiful in a woman
without prurient sexual overtones, a knightly kind of quality
is some sort of base camp characteristic of how he deals with the opposite sex.
- Which is also a blind spot for him. - BRANAGH: Yes.
'Cause it makes you vulnerable.
GREEN: And when you try to impose your own views on a world
that doesn't conform to them, you have blind spots.
Here we have one of them.
And of course, the surprise of someone who she may have been working with.
BRANAGH: When we first previewed the film,
it was a great pleasure of mine
having insisted in the sound mix that we turn the volume up for that gunshot.
- GREEN: It made me jump every time. -(BRANAGH LAUGHS)
BRANAGH: And it also marked in audio fashion,
a moment in the life of the audience's experience where
they really go, "Oh, no! No! We missed out on the...
"How could the handsome, compassionate, witty. .. "
GREEN: "Who sings like an angel."
BRANAGH: "Yes. Leslie Odom Jr. How could he possibly have done this?"
And, look, he's looking pretty mean with that gun.
Here's another moment I really enjoyed.
Leslie Odom came in, was a wonderfully open actor
of great sensitivity and grace
and played this big scene, I think it was his first day.
And there it was, a wide shot that moves through into this massive close-up
in 70mm or 65mm,
the other 5mm being the soundtrack of our celluloid large format.
But he really held his nerve, and I think
you felt this depth of passion,
not only for the protection and the reputation
of his friend, the late Colonel Armstrong,
but also underneath that, the real romantic passion for Mary Debenham.
GREEN: Yes, you feel like there's a protection going on
that what he's saying might be to protect her.
There's still something to the story.
But the intensity is clear.
It's also one of these moments that for
those who remember the novel very, very well,
they are now wondering, are we changing the ending?
And to a degree, we are
because we 're putting a flag in the ground and saying,
"This is going to make their culpability very hard to come back from.
-"They both admitted to something." - BRANAGH: Mmm-hmm. Mmm-hmm.
- GREEN: But the film is not over yet. - It is not over yet.
GREEN: If it was 90 minutes long,
there are many fans who would come screaming for our heads.
BRANAGH: Absolutely.
But they might've come screaming for our heads
if we'd allowed the fight between myself and Leslie Odom
to go on at the length we shot it,
-which was significantly longer. -(GREEN LAUGHS)
But we knew that we wanted instead
to enter back into the world of the epic stage
with that massive wide shot of the train and the frozen lake underneath,
to give that breath of air, as with this shot to the beginning of the denouement.
And here an evocation
of Leonardo da Vinci's The Last Supper painting,
which sits on the wall of a chapel in Milan,
which I had the pleasure of seeing a couple of years ago.
And the image, as it's done for
millions of people over centuries, stayed with me. To see it live,
was to see something very powerful, just in terms of graphic human drama.
And to see it in this way was to, in a way, be an equivalent to something
you, Michael, had in previous drafts of the script,
a way of seeing the world as Poirot saw it, which was not directly or literally.
It showed us a kind of expansive, lateral thinking,
almost surreal quality, that in one version of it,
had you lay people out on the snow.
In our translation of it here, the idea was that somehow he'd seen it
in these biblical terms. So now, here is the Last Supper.
- Judas was there somewhere. - GREEN: Exactly.
It's not just that it takes it outside
and puts them in a tableau that's appealing to look at visually,
which it certainly is,
but in that famous image, there is one person to blame.
And at this point, we are led to believe,
and Poirot would prefer to believe,
because that at least makes the world less awful,
that there is one crack in the wall,
there is one broken soul capable of murder,
and we are absolutely expecting to have that single person unmasked.
So I thought that was a masterstroke on your part
to evoke that image.
And just the idea of bringing it outside and using this tunnel,
building it out and giving them that space.
- It also evokes courtroom drama. - BRANAGH: For sure.
GREEN: Rather than being stuck once again
in the dining car with many, many people looking and Poirot prowling,
he is presenting and it is adversarial. It's us versus them.
It's me versus this group of potential killers.
BRANAGH: Well, me and the train versus this group.
The graphics of it, they lay out all the pieces,
one train massively behind.
GREEN: And that icon just there the whole time.
I mean, one of the best things about this particular book
is that it has the train.
You can just put that train in an image
and we know exactly which movie we 're talking about.
So anytime we have that over your shoulder,
the weight of it makes me happy.
BRANAGH: It's really quite the challenge, I think,
although it may not seem like heavy-lifting.
But it's quite the challenge, I think, for all the listeners here.
I saw a documentary about the '74 film
in which the beautiful Jacqueline Bisset with whom I had the chance to work,
and she's a lovely woman, was asked,
"What was it like filming the denouement sequence?"
- To which she replied, "Excruciating. " -(GREEN LAUGHS)
So I was interested to hear why she said, "We had to do it again and again."
GREEN: Well, I hope it wasn't excruciating for our actors this time.
BRANAGH: I'm very happy to say, to go on to say that that was not the case here.
Well, it was partly 'cause we broke it up wherever we could.
GREEN: The first things we filmed was your side of it.
BRANAGH: But what I would say is that it's a hard thing
for them to listen without, as it were, doing too much,
without son' of acting everything.
And I think the ability to listen was something that, in this case,
I wanted not to overshoot.
So we did not do tons of coverage
on the actors' side of this, on the suspects' side of it,
'cause I wanted it to be as fresh as possible.
And there were only a couple of occasions
where I did the whole sequence as Poirot
on camera with them
because I didn't want, in Jacqueline's words, for it to be excruciating either.
GREEN: You wanted them to come back for the sequel.
BRANAGH: But also I wanted it to feel fresh
and that it wasn't somehow a torture to hear the repetition.
She said they were trapped by design in a carriage,
and Albert Finney's wonderful Poirot strolled up and down,
but they were all sat around,
and it had the good and the bad of that impact.
Here, we started with the religious image,
but now it feels as though we 're going to the jury,
the 12 good men and women and true
for their, as it were, confessional moment.
And I personally enjoy so much the sense in which, as it were,
the layers of this onion have been peeled away
and now the scales drop and we see the insides of these people.
There are subtle adjustments in their performances,
but that look from Manuel, I think, is a simple but beautiful thing.
GREEN: Poirot just exposing them to their essences.
Every secret is put fon/vard.
In the adaptation of it, I think, probably the hardest part,
the most work was just taking what is
pages and pages of what works beautifully in a novel
and trying to get it into...
I remember being very proud that
I 'd brought his speech down to 12 pages at a point,
and then you and I working to bring it down even further.
I've never been so grateful for things
to be cut in the editing room and for it to work,
because it's such a stronger scene
for sticking with its most muscular portions.
And again, you're being very generous
that you stayed with the pieces that reflected back
on the cast you were facing.
BRANAGH: Well, the human dimension is at the heart of things.
And that applied to, just generally, people might be interested to know
that across those flashback sequences, all of the performances were peopled
by actors who had worked in the theater company
that we spent many years touring all over the place,
and we recently did a whole season in
London's West End at the Garrick Theatre.
So for instance, the character of Susanne was played by Hayat Kamille,
who is a terrific actress, who in shon' measure
as Susanne, the sister of Pierre Michel,
makes, in a very small amount of screen time,
a terrific and moving impression.
But also Phil Dunster and Miranda Raison
as Colonel John Armstrong and Sonia Armstrong,
also from our various productions of Romeo and Juliet and The Winter's Tale,
by Shakespeare also,
made great contributions in small measure,
and it was a great luxury to have them as well as people like this.
Ms. Michelle Pfeiffer who can chill and thrill the bones
to take off that wig,
and in so doing, son' of letting her insides pour out
as Linda Arden is revealed.
GREEN: You just feel all the rage
and all the willingness to kill in that moment.
It's quite a transformation from the flibbertigibbet,
from the silly woman who could distract you with her chatter
to realizing it was all the act.
BRANAGH: lt felt like the tolling of a bell when she does that.
It feels like it just goes deep.
I, personally, again loved seeing
a formidable performer take that opportunity, too
and know how to do it onscreen,
which is with simplicity, but underneath it, a kind of
commitment that the audience can sort of intuit.
GREEN: Yeah.
BRANAGH: Here's the answer.
- It's coming. - GREEN: Platformed with "Who does it?"
And "I'll tell you. " (LAUGHS)
BRANAGH: And I had the great pleasure of being in audiences where I've watched
or seen the body language of people,
who said, "No!"
GREEN: In our premiere in London,
I heard people behind me gasping. It was so rewarding.
BRANAGH: Yeah. Yeah.
GREEN: And also that Patrick Doyle cue coming in, when you cut to the shot
of them all staring and you realize that this was a single broken heart.
And these pieces, which, lhope, reward repeat viewing where you realize,
this combined with this, combined with this is what it took.
And it's also in the edit of this.
You chose to not tell a lot,
which is a huge compliment to the audience, that they can now
continue participating in this
because the math all checks out.
GREEN: Sylvia Parker did not let us get away with anything.
All of the math checks out in the film, but not every piece is handed.
There are still some things where we go, "Oh, and that must have been...
"And that must have been..."
And that's the fun participatory viewing.
BRANAGH: But at the center of it is what's about to be revealed.
- GREEN: Yes. - The act itself.
Which needed numbers
and it was needed in the snatched time they had
-because the detective lies next door. - GREEN: Mmm-hmm.
BRANAGH: It's the capacity in each of these civilized people
to let the poison of deep grief
which has blighted their lives,
be expunged or cathartically,
therapeutically removed by this awful violent act.
It has a son' of terrible sadness
that might, for some people, feel a terrible beauty
or justice.
A notion that we 're going to discuss in a moment as we return to...
GREEN: It's unpleasant.
And I find it so fascinating in the actors' choices
of whose knife blows strike home and whose are shallow.
It is a surprise who is the toughest and who struck the killing blow.
They all participate.
But then, there is, you know,
there are the surgical ones, there are the rageful ones,
there are the ones that just can't bear to...
The knife tip doesn't go deep,
and then there are the ones who just drive it in and...
BRANAGH: And now they leave like rats.
GREEN: Yeah. BRANAGH: Now they leave like rats.
The sinking ship, gone.
Power of numbers, diminished.
Now, guilt unleashed.
ls it closure or is it a life blighted by the horrific memory
of what they did? The taking of a life for a life,
an eye for an eye.
GREEN: And she still is able to...
Mrs. Hubbard is able to find the cool head... Linda Arden.
BRANAGH: And say, "/t's nothing."
GREEN: And she knows, in her head, "I have several things I need to do
-"to clean this." - BRANAGH: Yeah.
GREEN: She may make mistakes, she may not.
But in the most emotional distress
she has ever experienced, she is still able to keep it through.
- Ultimately, the leader of it. - BRANAGH: Mmm-hmm.
It was my plan!
BRANAGH: And now we see with fire, the son' of passionate defense,
the beginnings of the reordering of lives
after the act of killing.
So in her case, it's to suggest that the others be exonerated
because she was the architect of the plan.
But we're already beginning to understand,
particularly as Poirot monitors it, that it is not that simple.
There was right, there was wrong.
Now there is you. But you is very problematic,
not just you, Linda Arden,
but all of you, the 12 of you.
And I was fascinated when we previewed this film.
Halfway through son' of post-production,
it was clear that our audiences wished for it to be complex.
They did not unilaterally say, "Yes! Revenge! Job done! It's all fine."
The taking of a life for a life,
if taken to some logical extension,
might suggest that no person would be standing.
At what point do you draw a line under violent acts and say
at some point, it must end, and although the loss of the innocent
is at the center of it,
it's finally that little girl or the Armstrong family...
What is assuaged by
this brutal act?
Other than the removal of, clearly,
an appallingly unpleasant individual who did a terrible thing.
But where does it leave us? This section of the piece allows
your screenplay to ask and for our audience to really consider and feel,
not just think about, "What next? What is justice?"
GREEN: How can one weigh that morality?
And the question we talked about is, can a murder save a life?
That these are lives that may not be able to continue.
Certainly, Helena.
- And Poirot constructs his... - BRANAGH: Provocation.
GREEN: Yeah, his little test.
Which leads you to believe
that he knew where this conversation was going to go from the beginning.
Or not. You can interpret it either way.
But that he wanted to know if these are killers.
It would have been so much easier for him
if one of them had grabbed the gun or made a jump for him.
Because then he'd say, "Okay,
"these are rats, these are rats scurrying."
And it's easy to punish that.
But now what he's seeing are victims.
And that's complicated.
I hope if we have succeeded in our tasks here,
people leave this not sure what he should do,
or if what he does in the end is right.
BRANAGH: And he, certainly, isn't sure.
GREEN: This he's going to carry with him.
BRANAGH: The man on the balcony, at the beginning of the story,
and he brings into play here the idea of conscience.
"The law of man is not enough," says Pilar Estra vados.
But the "law of man" part, I might argue, is all that we have
to separate us from the beasts,
and we must be better than the beasts.
And so when people have asked me, on occasion,
"What is the... " "Everybody knows the plot of this story."
I defy that.
I absolutely, I dispute that that's the case.
If people are anything like me, an avid reader of crime fiction,
but someone who happily understands who did it
when the author would like me to find out who did it,
and then, even with due respect to the author,
-forgets that answer 10 minutes later. - GREEN: Yes. (LAUGHS)
BRANAGH: I think there are quite a few of us like that.
- So I don't know if the people can... - GREEN: It's the journey, remember.
BRANAGH: ldon't know if people do remember,
but I would say that what we try
to offer here, I suppose, if the surprise twist
was anything, perhaps it was this moral twist,
this invitation to consider what is justice,
as that magnificent train finally escapes the bridge.
GREEN: There is an image you conjured that we thought about for a long time
that stayed with me even though it didn't stay in the film, which was
that as we pull away, the entire viaduct just collapses.
And emotionally, that is how I felt every time I saw this,
that whatever was behind us is broken,
that the world Poirot has left behind
is broken because he can never look at it.
Whatever his next cases are,
they're going to be colored by the lens of memory on this particular one.
It is never going to be simple for him again.
I love these bits of acting here.
The playing cards in the most dire moment,
that need to just pass time because it's all too horrible.
BRANAGH: Yes, what else can you do? What else is there?
GREEN: And the hand touching a hand of just reassurance.
We know that they have been through something together,
and my sympathy goes to them.
BRANAGH: And that they may now be walking to their death.
- Or on a train to their death. - GREEN: And they accept it.
BRANAGH: It's Yugoslavia, it's 1934, you've murdered, you're hung.
GREEN: And they accept it because they all know they've done
something terrible that they needed to do.
But because they are not killers by their nature,
they are willing to accept their consequences.
BRANAGH: This was our real train and our real one mile of track,
with our real station built at Longcross Studios, outside London.
And so, that long Steadicam shot that brought the train and the characters
onto the train now has its mirror,
in a long Steadicam shot that starts in that same carriage
in which we met
- Josh Gad... - GREEN: We walk all the way out.
BRANAGH: ...is now, we walk all the way out.
But the train that was full of champagne and linen flying and crystal glass
and expectation and invitation and glamour
is now almost hearse-like and quiet in the snow.
GREEN: It's such an elegant bookend,
bookends the way you bring us on the train
and the way Poirot must leave it,
completely changed.
The color has been taken out of his view of it.
- And the glamour is gone. - BRANAGH: The bookend also features
a response, finally, to the letter that
he was not able to write to Colonel Armstrong
when asked for help in finding the Armstrong baby.
And yet, with Poirot's sense of completion and obsession,
the letter must be written even if only in his head...
GREEN: And one must answer the correspondence.
BRANAGH: Yes, indeed, unusually, although
he is not disposed to be judge and jury, he is detective.
He will lay things out. He searches for the truth.
But it is others, perhaps it's for them to judge.
But in this case, in this isolated case,
in this unusual, perhaps unique situation,
he has to consider a different kind of possibility.
So the man that we met at the beginning of the film,
who felt the weight of a position
that said there is right, there is wrong,
there is nothing in between,
has now to accept that that
romantic soul, that sensitivity, that disposition
to wish for human beings to be better than the beasts,
and yet to confront the evidence that often they are not,
including, in this case, where 12 beasts attacked
a defenseless human being in a compartment on a train.
GREEN: Though he may be a beast himself, may not have deserved it.
There's something you found here
when we discussed what this final speech should be by him,
that he must learn to live with the imbalance,
and it's an invocation of things he said earlier on the balcony.
And even in the very funny moment of stepping in the donkey poop.
You know, it's the imbalance of things,
things that were amusing in a part of his private rituals,
his own internal religion of how he's going to face the world,
now become very, very serious,
that are now going to be soul-changing for him.
I love when you brought that line up. I found it very elegant.
BRANAGH: Carrying the burden of this seems like a very heavy possibility
until this young man, Tom Hanson,
lets us know that there has been a murder,
-as he puts it, "on the bloody Nile." -(GREEN LAUGHS)
Now, this was your line, Michael.
- GREEN: Yes. - I had nothing to do with...
- GREEN: No, I take it with pride. -. . . trying for a sequel here.
GREEN: It's my tip of the hat to Mr. Nolan in his first Batman film,
where he tells us, ”Of course. Of course this is just the beginning
"of something you're going to enjoy forever."
But also, it's to say that Poirot is not broken,
he is merely bent for the moment,
and he is going to marshal his resolve,
and that's what he's here for.
You can say all you want that you want to retire
and grow vegetable marrows,
but you will not. You're here to detect crime
and make the world a little better bit by bit.
BRANAGH: And we see that response to the tie, the line, the invitation,
the next exotic place. And we also see a man alone,
with the train leaving.
In real terms, that real train was on a real track,
with all of those real actors inside and this shot was all in camera.
And another one rehearsed for many, many hours,
in which we left that compartment and walked from one end of the train
to the other, eventually, using some cuts in the piece,
but the body of the shot was a single one,
in which all moving parts were working in real time.
And the development of Poirot's heart and soul
were also moving in a kind of tender real time.
And Pat Doyle's lovely minor and dissonant chord at the end.
GREEN: It's melancholic. He's been through something
and he has survived it, but he is changed.
- Yeah. - We then, of course, went on to produce
a song with Pat
using the beautiful theme from the Armstrong family.
GREEN: Lyrics by someone tangentially involved with the film.
BRANAGH: Yes, exactly.
Yours truly, daring to pick up the lyricist's pen,
really with a very strong kind of desire to feel
a kind of, if not conclusion, a son' of a coda,
in this case, musical
and through this rather plaintive simple lyric for Mrs. Hubbard,
and the expression of the pain that is the loss of Daisy.
You might say, "Well, why did they do all of this?"
Because of what she feels and expresses in the song,
which you have in the screenplay, which she has in her performance.
But which felt could, at the end of this particular story,
just have an expression in an air, if you like,
that was inspired by
the kinds of Celtic melodies
of something as universally recognizable
as Danny Boy where, really, it's about loss.
It's a plaintive song of grief about loss that's saying
super-simple things. "We miss you. "We won 't forget you. "
GREEN: And to me, it means that Ihope that Linda Arden, Mrs. Hubbard,
is able to live out her life,
that she doesn't need to die
or just to recede to the point of insignificance.
But rather, though she has endured an unspeakable tragedy,
there are at least days ahead of her where she can continue to feel
and exist, so I like that.
BRANAGH: Well, I enjoyed very much, and it's worth saying here,
tipping our hat to our distinguished producers,
Mr. Kinberg and Mr. Gordon and Mr. Schaefer and Ms. Hofflund,
who all contributed enormously to the...
GREEN: Mr. Prichard of the Christie estate.
BRANAGH: Very much so, yes, both her grandson and great-grandson,
Mathew and James, had a terrific role to play.
It always amazes me...
As it were, where were you the day the end credits
for The Abyss started?
Because that was the moment when James Cameron's amazing film
first introduced the notion of end credits that were six minutes long.
(GREEN LAUGHS)
And now it's almost standard that that's the case.
If you recall, in the Golden Age of Hollywood,
there would be a card at the front of the movie
which might have set, music,
makeup supervisor,
and then "Produced by," "Directed by."
At this point in the movie, there would simply be a card saying,
"The End."
GREEN: (LAUGHS) That's right. And you'd be done.
Few names I want to point out,
first there is the "C" cameraman, Michael Green, who is not me.
That is a separate Michael Green,
of considerable talent.
Rob Ashford, who is a wonderful director,
who you worked with in a very interesting fashion.
BRANAGHI AIOng With Jimmy Yuill,
Rob was my associate and at every point in the run-up
to the movie, and through a lot of the work on set,
essentially directed and found a way to wrangle my Poirot.
Jimmy Yuill, who has been a performance consultant
on the last couple of movies I've made, also had,
as Rob had, a son' of honesty and directness
that meant that I was protected in the performance department.
GREEN: While you're doing so many things all at once,
that there's someone watching that you can conspire and confabulate with
privately about your own performance, which is remarkable in the film.
So it was amazing seeing you work with him that way.
With all the names in the credits, all of whom contributed so much,
there's our benefactors at Fox,
who don't get title cards in these things,
but do deserve merit.
BRANAGH: We should give them a big shout-out.
So starting at the tippy top, Stacey Snider, as chairman,
who waved the flag for this project,
which you had worked so assiduously with Steve Asbell.
GREEN: Yes. The first day when I met Steve Asbell,
who is a friend to writers everywhere,
and Emma Watts.
All of them, from day one, first discussions of this knew
that they wanted to make this type of film.
And then when I came in and said, "Let's make the right film,
”let's honor the book. Let's just make it beautiful
"and as best we can." They were the ones championing that.
That is what they wanted. It's a film they're very proud of,
and there was never a point where there were any bad guys
at the studio saying, "Let's do a disservice."
BRANAGH: Quite the opposite. And Emma Watts, particularly,
I think, had the real guts
in terms of shepherding this through, producorially with the rest of her team.
And I have to say
that my experience at Fox was excellent and some great people...
Ted Gagliano as head of post-production and did a wonderful job,
including ensuring that the delivery of the 70mm prints
went as well as it did.
Chris Aronson, who is head of distribution and who,
like the rest of that team of excellent coworkers
from Tommy Marr to Pam Levine, Heather Phillips,
Natalie Bjelajac, Katherine Willing,
Andrew Cripps, Kieran Breen.
A team across the Fox company that got behind this movie so well,
that's through previews,
through the delivery of it. Joe, who produced the amazing campaign
in terms of trailers and visuals.
Eric did a great digital campaign.
There was not a weak link in the group that helped put together...
GREEN: This is the studio that when you said, "Let's shoot it on film... "
BRANAGH: "Yeah, shoot it on film and then let's shoot it on 65mm. "
And then who said, "Let's release at least some prints in that way. "
And celebrated the baking in of that originating format to glories.
GREEN: Which audiences have enjoyed. People have sought out those theaters.
- BRANAGH: Yeah, they have. Yeah. - That really is something to see.
BRANAGH: Hats off...
Of course, in our musical flourish,
it's time once again to say, "So very well done," to Patrick Doyle.
It's one of his great scores amongst many.
Maggie Rodford, who produced it,
James, who conducted it,
and of course, the team
that produced all the beautiful musicianship with which it was captured.
Those parts of making this picture were a real delight.
But none more so, I won 't spare your blushes, Michael,
than working with your good self, who I thought,
produced a terrific screenplay which we tried not to mess up.
It's been an extreme pleasure to work with you across the making of
- Murder on the Orient Express. - GREEN: I can say the same.
I got to work with someone whose work I admired for so long,
and it was silly enjoyable.
I hope we get to do it again on the bloody Nile.
BRANAGH: Ditto. Ladies and gentlemen, that was Murder on the Orient Express.
Thank you for watching.