Kenneth Branagh talks Murder on the Orient Express

JOHNNY Depp’s star is on the wane, dogged by accusations of abuse and diva behaviour. So how did he nab a plum role in an epic crime thriller?

JOHNNY Depp is not the kind of heart-throb he used to be.

Long gone are the days when Depp would make the girls swoon, lusting over his devil-may-care attitude and soulful eyes. He has aged disgracefully and his off-screen antics, from accusations of spousal abuse and diva behaviour on set, have seen his stock plummet.

Which kind of makes him the perfect choice to play a morally bankrupt villain and victim in Murder on the Orient Express, a new adaptation from Kenneth Branagh of the classic Agatha Christie whodunit.

Audiences aware of Depp’s alleged extra-curricular behaviour will be more than happy to see his slimy character dispatched quickly and thoroughly.

Branagh, who directed and starred in the murder mystery, wouldn’t be drawn on whether audiences might bring their now-tarnished opinions of Depp — separate from the film and the character — to how they might receive Depp’s character of Ratchett.

Instead, Branagh told news.com.au he has admired Depp’s “adventure” in his choices, nominating Depp’s turns in Ed Wood, Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hollow as highlights.

“I always sensed in him this delight in different characters and in sometimes going to extreme places and being prepared to be disliked or considered in other ways.

“For him, it’s about the character itself and what he may learn from it. In a way, he’s much less exotic than we have seen him for a while.

Johnny Depp as Ratchett in a scene from Murder on the Orient Express.

“We did a lot of improvising in this movie, in his character and with Poirot — the combination of that commitment to be unafraid to play somebody who’s so extraordinarily bad alongside his supreme technical master of the film medium. It’s really awesome to have people like him and Michelle Pfeiffer and Willem Dafoe. Boy, do they know what to do in front of a camera — that creative ballsiness.”

Depp, Pfeiffer and Dafoe are just a few of the all-star cast Branagh has assembled for his ambitious film. The others include Judi Dench, Daisy Ridley, Penélope Cruz, Josh Gad, Leslie Odom Jr, Olivia Colman and himself.

Branagh, who’s one of the few people to have been nominated for acting, directing and writing Oscars, takes up the mantle of one of crime fiction’s most famous faces, the moustachioed Hercule Poirot, a detective whose previous onscreen incarnations have been portrayed David Suchet, Peter Ustinov and Albert Finney in Sidney Lumet’s 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express.

The story, for those unfamiliar, involves the death of a passenger on a luxury train that’s trapped by a snow event. The murderer could be any of the other passengers on board but, luckily, Poirot is on hand to solve the killing.

Kenneth Branagh tried out 11 prototypes of Hercule Poirot’s moustache before settling on this one.

Despite the 1930s setting, Branagh said he felt the classic story is still “very new”. That involved changing a few things for a modern audience, which includes a younger and more diverse cast of suspects.

“Agatha Christie Limited [who manages the author’s rights] allowed us to change the beginning, the end and some of the characters, which we did.

“We were able to emphasise certain elements of Poirot’s character that seemed as though a modern audience could relate to — he’s not so much the sort of dandy from before but rather this obsessive fellow with his meticulous concern about what size the eggs he likes to eat in the morning or whether he’s got an even number hotel room — that neat freak part of him that might resonate with people, as it certainly did with me.

“I was also drawn to the moral ambiguity of the story. We meet a character at the beginning that says ‘there is right, there is wrong, and nothing in between’ and there is a journey that suggests that maybe there is a lot in between. All that knotty moral positioning lies underneath a story that continues to be a page turner.”

Michelle Pfeiffer is having quite a comeback year with this and roles in Mother! and The Wizard of Lies.

Lumet’s version has stood as the most iconic adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express and Branagh’s film veers from the claustrophobia of that and of Christie’s novel by taking some of the action outside of the train carriages.

Part of the reason for those decisions is Branagh shot the film on rare 70mm, a higher resolution format and double the size of a standard film print. Branagh previously shot in 65mm on Hamlet (1996) while the only other true 70mm film in the last 35 years was Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight (2015).

Not wanting to waste the big image, some of the scenes are set in the snowy prison that traps the train while the ending has been transported to an open cave setting adjacent to the tracks in a mise-en-scene reminiscent of Da Vinci’s The Last Supper.

“We make everything a little more charged. So it’s not just a train trapped in a snowdrift but an avalanche that causes a much more imperilled location to be their home — they’re on a viaduct that could collapse — and the clock ticks a little more. The sense of entrapment in a much more dangerous environment is there and again.

“The big question in the movie is who’s lying and when and why. In the world of the 70mm big image, you see the landscape of the human face in the hands of actors skilled at hiding or revealing as these characters must do.”

Murder on the Orient Express is in cinemas from Thursday, November 9.

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