Belfast: Kenneth Branagh, Jamie Dornan and Caitriona Balfe on their deeply personal film
Kenneth Branagh’s latest and best film is a celebration of his roots, and those of his stars Jamie Dornan and Caitríona Balfe.
‘Sydney. Do you know about it?” asks Pa, played by Jamie Dornan, of his two young sons in an early scene in Belfast, Kenneth Branagh’s latest directorial venture, set over a few tumultuous months in Northern Ireland in 1969 and based on his own childhood.
“Aye,” one of them responds. “They’ve got surfing, and weird football, and kangaroos on the barbecue.”
“Do you fancy that? It’s just down the side a wee bit,” Pa adds, wondering if his family might be willing to uproot their lives and relocate all the way down under.
Life is hard in Belfast, and Pa is looking for an escape. His wife, played by Caitríona Balfe, shoots him a withering glance. “It’s ten and a half thousand miles! We might as well be going to the moon if we went down there.”
Which is exactly what Branagh’s mother really did say, when his father broached the subject of the family packing up their home in Belfast and starting anew on the other side of the world when the filmmaker was a young boy. (“Sydney – just a wish a way,” suggests the brochure Pa proffers in the film.) “It was very meaningfully discussed,” Branagh shares, speaking over Zoom from London.
“But it just – I’m sorry to say this – seemed such a long way away … It was really so hard to imagine – you’d look on that map and you’d go, my god, how do you get there? It was so far away, and once you get there, you ain’t ever coming back. That’s what we felt in 1969.”
Branagh did eventually get to Australia: in 1987, to make the miniseries The Boy In The Bush, and again and again, filming projects including Rabbit-Proof Fence – “with the late, great David Gulpilil,” Branagh says – and on countless holidays.
“I like the humour, I like the food, I like the climate, I like the can-do attitude, I like the down-to-earthness, I like the ribbing,” Branagh cheerfully sums up.
“It’s a special place for me, and I feel frustrated that I haven’t been able to get out there this time. As soon as it’s possible, I certainly will. It’s a place I find very restorative.”
Dornan, who stars as Branagh’s father Pa, has only just left our shores, spending five months in South Australia filming his hit thriller series The Tourist.
“I took my whole family over,” Dornan says, on the phone from Los Angeles.
“The kids went to school in Adelaide and made some great friends that they keep in touch with all the time now. It was hard work – probably the hardest work I’ve ever done – but we definitely made the most of it.”
Outlander’s Caitríona Balfe, who has been Screen Actors Guild-nominated for her performance in Belfast as Branagh’s mother Ma, has taken holidays to Sydney and Byron Bay.
“I have three cousins in Australia, my sister did a year there, some of my best friends did a year there,” Balfe says. “We have this really close relationship, Irish and Australians.” Adds Dornan: “You know, Irish people have a history of emigration. Jesus, Australia is far away, but think how many made it to America … It shows that (in the film) they’re looking for some kind of way out that would keep the family safe.”
The Branagh family never made it to Australia. They chose England instead: leaving Belfast after the Troubles in 1969 and relocating to Reading.
Branagh lost his accent and gained a dramatic flair, started reading Shakespeare, and the rest is history. Belfast, Branagh’s latest and perhaps best film – certainly in years, maybe ever – is the story of the tense period leading up to that move, when Branagh’s Ma and Pa, alongside his grandparents played by Judi Dench and Ciarán Hinds, fought to keep the family together. (Every performance in the film is superb, but Branagh takes a moment to particularly praise the woman he calls Dench, in what is now their 12th collaboration over decades of friendship. “Dench is just Dench,” he smiles. “She’s like a radiant beacon of truth.”)
Filmed largely in black and white, Belfast is less a movie about a climactic national event and more about how, even in times of profound crisis, life goes on.
Games are played, tests are taken, films are watched, fry ups are cooked. “When it’s not always raining, there’ll be days like this,” croons Van Morrison on one of his songs – there are nine in total – that soundtrack the movie.
Belfast is the story of being nine years old, as Branagh’s avatar Buddy (Jude Hill, the most charming child actor ever committed to celluloid) is, the biggest fish in the smallest pond of a town, when all you care about is whether you’ll be able to sit next to the girl you like at school.
There is a cosy, familiar glow to the film, which explains why it is resonating with audiences around the world – winning the People’s Choice prize at the Toronto International Film Festival, clutches of nominations at the Critics Choice, Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globes. Its scale is comfortingly neat, and everything suffused with such tenderness as can only be held by a writer and director looking back on his own youth. Belfast has the ephemeral quality of a childhood memory, in which all your hijinx are high stakes, your home is everything and your mum and dad are movie stars.
That would be Dornan – Mr Fifty Shades of Grey himself – and Balfe, cast by Branagh in the most cinematic and misty-eyed of moves to play his parents.
“Writing it at a distance of 50 years, and through the eyes of a nine-year-old, I felt I was releasing quite a lot of what I felt about my parents at that time, which is that they were pretty glamorous,” Branagh grins.
“I guess they didn’t look quite like Jamie Dornan and Caitríona Balfe, but they had quite the fizz between them!” They were not people who, Branagh says, “got prematurely old” after having children and settling down. Instead, their relationship was “very lively, very physical”. Somebody was always throwing a party, Branagh recalls. “Any excuse to have an event – if there was a bottle of Guinness that was found somewhere, it was suddenly a bit of a hoolie … My mother couldn’t stop dancing, she loved it.”
Branagh’s camera often captures Balfe in motion, a regular Ginger Rogers of the neighbourhood, shimmering with life. (“My wife saw the film and said, ‘Jesus. Please photograph me like that,’” Branagh told New York magazine.)
“What a beautiful woman,” says Balfe. “She had so much fight and fire in her.”
Branagh shared memories of his parents with both Balfe and Dornan, “and any time he spoke about them, he did so in the most empathetic of terms,” she adds. “I think that’s what I loved so much about the script – yes, they were flawed, yes they didn’t always do the right thing, but he just has so much empathy for the journey they went through.”
Branagh understood, Balfe says, that his mother really struggled with the idea of untethering herself from the stability of her family unit in Belfast, the only home she had ever known.
“For her to imagine leaving that, or disrupting that, was such a big thing to overcome in her mind,” Balfe explains.
Home is at the heart of the film. Branagh began writing it in the first of England’s lockdowns; sheltering in place at his home in Surrey, he became obsessed with the sounds of his hometown.
“The film was partly about me sort of spiritually finding my way back home,” he shares. “Your Irishness is defined by this relationship to home … It’s a small island, you tend to travel, and it tends to break your heart. That’s what happened to us.”
Branagh left Belfast before he hit puberty; Dornan moved away at 20. “No matter how long I’m away, or wherever I end up and wherever I live, I will always refer to Belfast as home, I just do,” says Dornan. “There’s something about the place and the people that you just daren’t call it anything else but home.” Balfe left her hometown in Monaghan, Ireland – “depending on the traffic, it can be less than an hour and a half away from Belfast,” – when she was 17, before leaving the country entirely a year later. She didn’t know it then, but that would be the last time she lived in Ireland. “I feel like I’ve more or less lived out of a suitcase ever since,” the 42-year-old reflects. “I’ve never lived anywhere as long as I lived in Monaghan; when I speak about home, that’s where it is.”
Making Belfast helped Balfe reflect back on her childhood in surprising ways. “I wasn’t so naughty,” she smiles, referring to the scrapes that Buddy gets himself into. But she did use to “terrorise that poor woman” who ran their village store. “Just ‘cos we were kids and we thought we were funny,” Balfe recalls. “I remember we would all hop into the shop, and we would stand there hopping when we were trying to buy something and then hop back out, just silly little things. But all of those things are memories that I’ve completely forgotten about.” It was “lovely”, she says, to be reminded of her childhood so clearly on the set of Belfast every day.
Balfe is now based in Glasgow, where Outlander has filmed for several months at a time for the better part of a decade. Home, she says, is “less about place as it is about people. My home will always be where my husband and my son is.”
Balfe gave birth to her first child in August 2021, mere weeks before Belfast’s premiere at the Telluride Film Festival. Dornan is the father of three young daughters. “I’m so lucky to be a father,” Dornan says. “I understand massively that feeling of ‘I need to do right by these people, I need to do whatever it takes to keep them happy, keep them happy’. I have an innate understanding of what that is based on my own life experience.”
Both are naturals with the two child actors, especially Hill, a first-time performer and one of 300 boys who auditioned for the role. Dornan recalls one scene, set in the aftermath of a chaotic Christmas morning – “young Jude has fallen asleep and he’s got chocolate all over his mouth,” he says, chuckling – when Ma and Pa are having a private moment of reflection on the state of their relationship. Things are fraught: Pa has been caught swindling the tax man, riots are erupting on their doorstep, and the opportunity for another kind of life – maybe better, maybe not, but a different one, which is the only thing that matters – is slipping through their fingers. “I turn around (to Ma) and say thank you,” Dornan recounts.
“You raised them. It wasn’t me, it wasn’t us. It was you. It’s a lovely moment.”
Branagh filmed the scene in one shot, no coverage, meaning that the two boys are framed in the foreground with Balfe and Dornan in the background, with no inserted close-ups from different vantage points.
The moment unfolds in a single image, like watching a play. “Ken came up and said to me, listen, we’re actually not going to come in for coverage on this one, and I had a moment like, ‘Jesus Christ, really? It’s a big moment for my character to say that, and I don’t know if you can tell Ken, I was crying there, you might like to get in on that,’” Dornan jokes. “But actually I’m really thankful, it tells the story so much better.”
One shots are part of Branagh’s vision for Belfast: all the action is refracted through Buddy’s perspective. “Because the kids are in the shot, and that’s who we’re talking about, we ended up whispering to each other, sincerely trying not to wake them up,” Dornan recalls, “and so sincerely, Jude had actually fallen asleep. He was asleep and very lightly snoring through the take. And keeping the kids (in shot), keeps them present in the mind of the audience.” It is, Dornan says, one of his favourite scenes in the film.
The standout moment comes later though, when Pa gets down on his knees – “swaying about,” Dornan jokes – and sings the 1968 pop song Everlasting Love to Ma. There’s a wistful quality to it all, the kind of declaration so euphoric it might only be a dream, aided by the magic of Dornan’s vocals, which really are that good, and Balfe’s open and electric performance. (Dornan lip synced on set but laid down his track the next day in a single take. “And what is left in the actual production is both of our vocals, it starts more predominantly with me and once the dance moves in they drowned me out a little bit more,” he laughs.)
“There’s a beautiful shot of Caitríona with a look that is very full, as my mother would say,” Branagh reflects. In that moment, the filmmaker directed her to a poem by DH Lawence titled Look! We have come through! as inspiration for her character’s journey.
The next take, Branagh says, “I felt (she) was filled from the bottom of her toes to the top of her head … Very, very affecting, very deep.”
“It’s so romantic,” Balfe sighs, “and it’s heightened in its romance.” As she puts it, “only the coldest of hearts wouldn’t respond to that.” And practically levitating from the corner of the frame is Buddy, eyes aglow like he’s watching a scene from his favourite movie – which is exactly what he’s doing.
Branagh loves movies. He rattles off a list of films he’s seen recently, pandemic and all: Candyman and Antlers – “my wife loves horror,” he explains – The Power of the Dog, which is a “beautiful picture,” he raves, the soon-to-be released in Australia C’mon C’mon starring Joaquin Phoenix, the “terrific” Nightmare Alley. He’s looking forward to seeing West Side Story as soon as he can. “I watched the James Bond film in the 4DX seats,” Branagh says, grinning like a little boy. “I was thrown around, I had water thrown on me, I had exhaust fumes in my face. I’ve been running back to the cinema!”
In Belfast, the family all trundle off to see Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, which takes Buddy’s breath away. It was the same for a young Branagh going to these “churches for the creative arts”, by which he means movie theatres. “The wide-screen, the technicolor, the immersive nature of it all was really beguiling,” he muses. “I loved it being a family ritual. I remember getting ice cream back then; to this day I can’t go to the pictures without getting ice cream.”
Do we have ice creams at the cinema in Australia, Branagh wants to know, which is how I end up describing the particular ingenuity of a choctop to the filmmaker. Branagh is thrilled. “I haven’t heard of them. But that’s the first thing I’m having on my next visit.”
Belfast is in cinemas on February 3.
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