By Iain Blair
Kenneth Branagh’s multi-Oscar-nominated Belfast, is a love letter to his hometown. Written and directed by Branagh, it revolves around Buddy, a 9-year-old boy whose world is turned upside down by political and sectarian violence in the 1960s. His stable and loving community and everything he thought he understood about life are changed forever, but joy, music and the formative magic of the movies remain. The film stars Caitríona Balfe, Judi Dench, Jamie Dornan, Ciarán Hinds, and introduces Jude Hill as Buddy.
The Oscars showed Branagh a lot of love this year — he was nominated for Best Directing, Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, and the film got 7 nominations total.
Kenneth Branagh on set
Behind the camera are many regular Branagh collaborators, including production designer Jim Clay; director of photography Haris Zambarloukos, BSC; and editor Úna Ní Dhonghaíle, ACE. The music is by Belfast-born legend Van Morrison.
I recently talked with Branagh —whose eclectic credits include Thor, Murder on the Orient Express, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, and many Shakespeare adaptations — about making the Oscar-buzzy film and his love of post. After our chat with Branagh, we have a sidebar with DP Zambarloukos, who talks about that black-and-white look.
This is your 19th film as a director. Fair to say it’s a return to your indie roots after some of the huge productions you’ve helmed?
I’d say so, and it felt very comfortable, as it was made during the time of COVID and was far more bespoke because of that. All our crew numbers and so on were radically reduced, and all our working methods were affected, including post.
The film is visually gorgeous. Did you always plan to shoot this in black-and-white?
Yes, and it was an intuitive decision that tonally matched my growing up in Belfast. There were gray, rainy northern skies, and color smashed into my life and imagination through the movies. Also, black-and-white was how I watched television. There was no color back then, so I saw many great color movies in black-and-white, and for me it lends a poetic dimension. It gives the memory film a sense of period and gravitas, and it gives an Irish film a sense of poetry.
This is your seventh collaboration with DP Haris Zambarloukos. What did he bring to the project?
He operated for the first time, because of COVID, and that was great because it gave us that hand-held care of the cinematographer. I also think he was very happy to get back into all the details of the framing, even though we’ve worked with brilliant operators in the past on some very big films. But here, the hand-crafted nature of it felt key. Finding the frame was critical, as we were often going to be static, and the action was going to take place within a frozen frame — it all needed Haris’ particularly soulful, sensitive and poetic approach to storytelling.
How much did you shoot in Belfast itself?
Very little, as so much of the city has changed in the past 50 years, and some of the streets I wanted to shoot in were torn down and no longer the same. COVID also made it very difficult to shoot there, so we ended up building the streets and parts of the city in the parking lot of an exhibition center at Farnborough Airport, outside London. We also shot at a converted school near there and made a couple of guerilla-style trips to Belfast to get the rest of the footage. It worked out better that way, as shooting on location would have been very hard, especially doing all the riot scenes.
Where did you post?
For the edit I worked on an Avid at home, and Úna worked from Dublin. Then we recorded all the sound and music at Twickenham Studios and Goldcrest in London, and we did the mix at Shepperton Studios, so we had a lot of our regular post team.
Do you like the post process?
I love it. It’s the place where I understood, right from my first film, that it could make a good performance bad, a good one great and a bad one much better. The power of change in post is just amazing to me; anything is possible if you have the imagination. The way you juxtapose the images you’ve collected – and the way a scene from the third act might work better in the first act — is huge in post. That fluidity was a revelation to me, and you can have these tremendous eureka moments in post that can be beautiful and so inspiring.
Can you talk about editing with Úna Ní Dhongaíle, who cut your All Is True as well as The Crown?
It was tough because of COVID and having to work remotely, but there were certain advantages. For instance, on the Avid, I was able to search through hundreds of hours of news footage of the time to find the half-dozen pieces that would be critical to the movie.
Then there was also the opening color montage of Belfast. We had a plethora of material, and I really enjoyed doing all the librarian research and footwork. It was a big help to Úna in that way. Every day we’d look at what she’d cut and what I responded to, and because we’d done two films together before, that rapport and trust made working remotely a very positive experience.
What were the big editing challenges?
Finding the soundscape, I think, and finding a way to make the riot at the start as explosive as it needed to be. Finding a way, when we didn’t have action pieces and coverage, to let the single-setup still frame find a pace that was impactful. And sometimes that was as big of an editing challenge as all the flashy, fast-cutting scenes in the riot sequence or the shoplifting sequence.
Can you talk about the sound and music?
It’s always crucial for me. A big challenge was to resist using temp music early on, and instead let the film speak to you and let the sound come out organically, which ultimately happened with Van Morrison and his songs and music. It’s a really detailed soundscape that collected every ice cream van and ship’s horn and train whistle that we could possibly locate in Belfast or create ourselves.
I enjoyed the whole process so much and loved working closely with our sound supervisors, Simon Chase and James Mather, and our mixer, Niv Adiri. Úna is also so sensitive when it comes to sound. I was more involved in the post audio than ever before, and I learned so much and loved it.
What was involved in the VFX?
Matt Glen was our VFX artist and supervisor. We’ve done several projects together, and he’s just so good at his job and so creative. He created a lot of extensions of our build sets and filled in a lot of gaps in our 360-degree shots and gave us the streets and Belfast skies. He allowed us to make some skies more dramatic, comped in a sense of a larger world, like shots on the bus, and did a lot of work that is totally invisible, which is what you want in a film like this. While I like to do as much in-camera as possible, when you get to post and realize how much you can add with VFX — and take away something in a shot you never wanted in the background — it becomes this amazing tool, and I love that part of the process too.
Where did you do the grading and color?
At Goldcrest in London with colorist Rob Pizzey, who’s also worked with me on various films. I’m involved every step of the process. We have a great shorthand, and he knows my taste, which keeps changing. The big thing was dealing with the look of the black-and-white, which we wanted to be very liquid and glamorous — the sort of black-and-white you felt you could walk into.
We did a Dolby Vision version where it’s at its most delicious, and we explored the whole tonal range of the contrast, but we didn’t mess about with grain or add any. We kept it clean to have this “Hollywood black-and-white,” as I call it, as opposed to a European black-and-white. Ours is much richer, and it was a choice informed by my love of noir films and not wanting a washed-out look. I love the look we got.
Finally, Did you always conceive of it as a child’s POV of war and trauma?
Yes. That was my limited experience and one way of understanding a slice of life in that part of Belfast in that time without taking on the whole issue of what went on in Ireland, which seemed impossible. I absolutely wanted to narrow the focus and look at it from a kid’s viewpoint — someone who is trying to survive and cope when the world is turned upside down. What was harmonious before is now subject to tribalism and a polarizing tension. And it’s all seen through the eyes of a kid who knows nothing more than his love affair with a girl, football, the movies and his family.
Director of Photography Haris Zambarloukos
DP Haris Zambarloukos (left) and Kenneth Branagh
Haris, can you talk about the look of the film, shooting B&W and finding the right period look and aspect ratio.
We wanted to make a film without the use of traditional film lighting, something that would feel authentic to the atmosphere of the settings. We looked at Magnum photographers of the time, like Philip Jones Griffiths, and wanted a feel that was like a Life magazine center spread. So we built our sets with real, practical lighting. We used careful positioning of windows and spaces to maximize available light and chose our camera package to design our look architecturally and in a naturalistic way. That’s why we chose the 1:1.85 aspect ratio, to be more like a photograph rather than a wide-screen film.
DP Haris Zambarloukos
People ask why black-and-white? Well, Belfast is not an entirely black-and-white film; it has color, and it has color and black-and-white combined in some shots. Belfast as a film was born out of the desire to tell a story that stripped away the unnecessary and that concentrated on the vital elements of the human condition that we wanted to explore. We wanted an effortless portraiture that drew the audience in and allowed the story to come out naturally.
Color focuses on how people look, but black-and-white has the power to portray how people feel. It has the unique ability to transcend and is simultaneously imaginative and naturalistic, lucid and dreamlike, of the moment and of the past. It seems to portray both the within and the exterior. If a film’s ultimate aim is to explore the human condition, then portraiture is the landscape of the human condition, and it reveals its most beautiful colors in black-and-white.
Color focuses on how people look, but black and white has the power to portray how people feel. It has the unique ability to transcend and is simultaneously imaginative and naturalistic, lucid and dreamlike, of the moment and of the past. It seems to portray both the within and the exterior. If a film’s ultimate aim is to explore the human condition, then portraiture is the landscape of the human condition, and it reveals its most beautiful colors in black and white.
How did you make all your camera and lens choices?
We wanted to be as immersive as possible and chose a medium-format compact digital camera: the Alexa mini LF and 65mm film lenses (Panavision System 65 and Sphero), a unique combination of the very latest camera and one-of-a-kind vintage lenses. You get to see every freckle on our young protagonist’s face. They are the same lenses we used on our 65mm film projects (Orient and Nile) and the same lenses used on Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Compositionally, we wanted to be lucid and intimate, to see it from a particular POV of a child.
Kenneth Branagh and our writer Iain Blair
I assume you worked with colorist Rob Pizzey in prep on LUTs?
We created a LUT with Rob and [CTO] Laurent Treherne at Goldcrest, and Callum Just and Jo Barker from Digital Orchard fed that through to our dailies. It was a filmic LUT that still gave us plenty of space to be creative in the grade.
Tell us about the DI. What was involved?
Regarding the final grade, we worked remotely, which was new to me, but Ken, Rob and I have worked so frequently together that we are aware of each other’s tastes, and Rob and I have a clear way of interpreting Ken’s observations. Ken is always very present at grading and has a very accurate idea about what he likes visually. It’s always spot-on, so this was a joy to grade. We went for a very rich look in the end, a glossy, noirish black-and-white. Ken calls it Guinness blacks, and I call it wine dark.
Industry insider Iain Blair has been interviewing the biggest directors in Hollywood and around the world for years. He is a regular contributor to Variety and has written for such outlets as Reuters, The Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and the Boston Globe.
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