[In the following essay, Branagh describes his approach to filming Much Ado about Nothing. Branagh discusses his focus on character, comments on the film's casting and his adaptation of the text, and notes that most of the cuts he made were for the purpose of eliminating plot repetition.]

Why make a new film of Much Ado About Nothing? In this century, Shakespeare's play has been produced as a feature film on four occasions. The first was an American silent version in 1926; an East German version was made in 1963, and two Russian films appeared in 1956 and 1973. There have also been television versions, often of notable stage productions like Franco Zeffirelli's in 1967 and Joseph Papp's in 1973. But why no modern cinema version?

Certainly the movie world's financers have always evinced suspicion about the commercial possibilities of Shakespeare on film. Yet ‘popular’ plays like Romeo and Juliet or Hamlet have not only worked spectacularly in film versions by Zeffirelli and Sir Laurence Olivier but have proved commercial enough to be repeated on film many times. There are sixty movie versions of Hamlet.

It seems odd that Much Ado About Nothing has not fallen into this category. Since Shakespeare wrote the play, in the mid to latter part of 1598, it has been an enduring success. The 1600 edition tells us that by then it had been ‘sundrie times publikely acted.’ The play was certainly a crowd pleaser and puller. The poet Leonard Digges observed,

Let but Beatrice
And Benedick be seen, lo, in a trice
The cockpit, galleries, boxes, all are full.

The role of Dogberry was an enormous success for the first great clown of Shakespeare's company, Will Kempe. Down the centuries since, the leading roles have attracted many notable actors: David Garrick, Henry Irving, Ellen Terry, and, in our own time, John Gielgud, Peggy Ashcroft, and Maggie Smith. But does this play rest too completely on the ‘kind of merry war twixt Signior Benedick and her’ [Beatrice]? And can the expression of this conflict, in puns, courtly wit, verbal conceits, translate into the medium of film? Can its identity-defining wordplay be dramatic in a screenplay?

Well, yes, I believe it can, but more than that, I believe a film of Much Ado allows us to see in unique focus the breadth of a play that goes much further than the celebration of one gloriously witty couple. Beatrice and Benedick are, after all, the subplot.

The challenge for a new film of Much Ado is not to resist Beatrice and Benedick's dominance but, through the choices made by the camera, to bring to vivid life all the other characters. To take on the play as a whole and realize fully-fleshed lives, for characters like the Friar, the Watch, and Leonato's household in a realistic background and an evocative landscape. Against this detail the Beatrice and Benedick sequences do not sit merely as star turns. Perhaps most importantly, there is room in a movie to give a different kind of space to the Claudio/Hero plot.

My first thoughts about a film version occurred in 1988. At that time I had not yet directed my first feature film (Shakespeare's Henry V), but I found that often after seeing a play, filmic images suggested by the play would haunt me. The ‘movie’ would start to run in my imagination. All the more vividly, perhaps, because at that stage I had no real idea that I would ever have the opportunity to make the movies in my mind translate to celluloid.

The opening images for this film of Much Ado About Nothing came to me during an actual stage performance of the play when I have to confess my concentration wandered. I was playing Benedick in a beautiful production directed by Dame Judi Dench on a U.K. tour. One night during Balthasar's song ‘Sigh No More, Ladies,’ the title sequence of this film played over and over in my mind: heat haze and dust, grapes and horseflesh, and a nod to The Magnificent Seven. The men's sexy arrival, the atmosphere of rural Messina, the vigour and sensuality of the women, possessed me in the weeks, months, and years that followed. This long-term marination process was vital in convincing me that a film of Much Ado could work. Opening the story for the cinema, I thought, should not mean drowning the words and characters in endless vistas and ‘production value.’ Yet the play seemed to beg to live outside, in a vivid, lush countryside. Making the right stylistic connection between word and picture took me four years and three more films to achieve.

During that time I'd become even more convinced of the necessity of doing the film. There were many reasons. The experience of putting Shakespeare on screen as in Henry V had been an extraordinary lesson. A continuous and consistent stream of mail from around the world confirmed the huge appetite for affordable, truly modern accounts of this man's work. Our Henry V had encouraged many (including vast numbers of children) to develop their own, healthily critical view of Shakespeare. This, in a medium with which they were already familiar and to which they had far greater access than to the theatre.

Many of those who wrote had enjoyed the apparent ‘naturalness’ of the acting (which I think is depressing testament to the usual expectation of incomprehensible booming and fruity-voiced declamation). My continued desire in Much Ado was for an absolute clarity that would enable a modern audience to respond to Shakespeare on film, in the same way that they would respond to any other movie. Our concern was to do this without losing his unique poetry.

Ironically, three-quarters of Much Ado is in prose. But if there is such a thing as ‘poetic prose,’ then Shakespeare achieves it in this play. It has a double effect. It can give us the poetic melancholy of Beatrice's ‘No, sure, my lord, my mother cried. But then there was a star danced and under that was I born.’ But at the same time much of the dialogue has a realistic, conversational tone that renders it most easy on the ear.

The prose wooing scene between Henry and Katherine at the end of Henry V prompted many viewers to say that we had made up the dialogue. When we played Much Ado in the theatre, this charge was made regularly by backstage visitors. The accusation was not true, but it did say much about the realistic quality of the play. It hinted also at the style our Renaissance Theatre Company had begun to develop, a style on which the acting in the films of Henry V and Much Ado would be based.

During our theatre company's short life we have tackled several of Shakespeare's comedies. In each case the productions have, in broad terms, sought out the particular quality that has spoken most loudly to the directors and actors involved. In the case of Twelfth Night it was the bitter melancholy of the piece that attracted us. That sense of irony and regret, shot through the comedy, made our rendition closer to Chekhov than is perhaps usual. With As You Like It, the sheer joy of its pastoral lyricism was emphasised; the acting was playful and delicate. Much Ado About Nothing seemed much more robust in tone, rougher and sexier than our Forest of Arden in As You Like It. Its hot-tempered Italianate qualities distinguish it from the more obvious ‘Englishness’ of the other plays.

But in the case of each of these stage productions, our intent was to disarm the audience with the ‘reality’ of the playing. Our troupe was young and often inexperienced. But the actors were cast for their talent and for the freshness they brought to the roles. Like me, many of the actors were coming to the plays for the first time. They were relatively free of actory mannerisms and the baggage of strutting and bellowing that accompanies the least effective Shakespearean performances.

Ours was a style that wished to be in tune with our audience. We were touring around the United Kingdom and Ireland to places and audiences that were also relatively unfamiliar with these plays. Our great joy was to set and tell the story with the utmost clarity and simplicity and let the particular directorial inflexion, or interpretation, be seen through the characterisations. In effect, we assumed that no one had seen the play before. We wanted audiences to react to the story as if it were in the here and now and important to them. We did not want them to feel they were in some cultural church.

We made the same attempt in film. The goal was utter reality of characterisation. Shakespeare accomplishes this as a matter of course. The difficulty for actors lies in not putting things in between themselves and this reality—a funny voice, a walk, an unconscious treatment of the character that suggests he or she is from another planet. The film medium resists such artifice completely. The camera in a film of Much Ado would ruthlessly sniff out any artificial ‘witty’ acting—flutey voiced young gallants with false laughs and thighs made for slapping.

Indeed, I required absolutely the opposite. This film would be based on character. In the absence of an eventful plot (the irony of the title is not lost on us), it is the detail of humanity amongst the participants that helps make Much Ado one of Shakespeare's most accessible works.

The film presented a rare opportunity to utilise the skills of marvellous film actors who would embrace this naturalistic challenge. I was determined, however, not to cast only British actors. I wanted a combination of elements that would exploit the novelty of doing Shakespeare on film. Unlike the plays performed on our theatrical tours, this film would be seen mostly by people coming fresh to Shakespeare in movie form. I wanted something of that atmosphere on the set.

In crude terms, the challenge was to find experienced Shakespearean actors who were unpracticed on screen and team them with highly experienced film actors who were much less familiar with Shakespeare. Different accents, different looks. An excitement borne out of complementary styles and approaches would produce a Shakespeare film that belonged to the world. As a longtime admirer of American screen acting, I naturally wished to include some U.S. actors. In place of events, much of the action in this piece comes from the characters' emotional volatility. The best American film acting has always had this emotional fearlessness.

Making this work called for the appropriate casting chemistry and a formal rehearsal period prior to shooting. The casting of the British actors was relatively straightforward. Richard Briers, Emma Thompson, Brian Blessed et al., had spent much of the previous five years working with Renaissance and being part of the developing style I've tried to describe. I had no set number of American actors that I tried to cast. Indeed, I was also interested in one or two Italian and French actors. My aim was to be as international as possible. In the end the choices became simple. I asked film actors whom I admired and whose career choices had been adventurous enough to suggest they would not be intimidated. In all cases I explained that I did not want artificial ‘Shakespeare voices,’ that they must perform in their own accents, and that they must be prepared to study the text technically, as well as carry out their absolute obligation to be truthful.

The rehearsal process was designed to accommodate these tasks. One of the people in attendance was Russell Jackson of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-Upon-Avon. His special responsibility was to make each actor aware of when a character was speaking in verse and when in prose, and to make him aware, in either case, of the rhythm of the text. Russell pointed out places where particular words were repeated for effect, places where a character's vocabulary gave a clue to personality, and devices such as onomatopoeia and alliteration—in short, any appreciation of where the music of the language breathed, stopped, paused, etc. All this to ensure that the spontaneity, freshness, and naturalism that we were after were achieved with a bedrock of structural understanding. Realistic Shakespearean acting on film or on stage cannot be achieved fully without this understanding. Whatever the effect we strive for, we must remember at all times that we are speaking the words of a great dramatic poet. His poetry, of whatever kind, must be observed.

Also present at rehearsal was Hugh Cruttwell, former director and principal of the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. Hugh had two roles on the production. One was to ensure that in the midst of other responsibilities my performance as Benedick did not suffer. He was my other eye. A secondary function was to be a help to the actors in establishing their characters. These were arrived at in a variety of ways. I had solo sessions with each of the actors, and we held group discussions/improvisation sessions to explore the background to our world.

How long had the soldiers been away? What kind of war had it been? How violent? Which of our men had been killers? How often had they visited Leonato prior to this? How well did they all know one another? How old were they? How long did these soldiers expect to live?

And then, of course, we probed the detail of the relationships. This filling in of the ‘back story’ for each of the characters is one of the most necessary and interesting elements in preparing a characterisation, particularly for the screen. The audience won't know specifically my off-screen history for Benedick—his upbringing, his family, his likes and dislikes—but I hope that with this history firmly in my mind, they will at least intuit part of it, feel a depth to the character beyond what he says and does.

With Benedick and Beatrice, a shared understanding between the actors of their mutual history was essential. They are both described as ‘merry.’ Leonato says of Beatrice,

There's little of the melancholy element in her, my lord; she is never sad but when she sleeps, and not ever sad then; for I have heard my daughter say she hath often dreamt of unhappiness and waked herself with laughing.

Yet many productions interestingly choose to mine that part of Beatrice and Benedick's history which, if not tinged by melancholy, is at least spoken of with some regret by Beatrice, who when charged with losing the heart of Benedick replies,

Indeed, my lord, he lent it me awhile, and I gave him use for it, a double heart for his single one. Marry, once before he won it of me with false dice, therefore your grace may well say I have lost it.

Emma Thompson and I both wanted to suggest former lovers who had been genuinely hurt by their first encounter, which perhaps occurred at the tender age of Hero and Claudio in the play. (For our purposes we deliberately made the younger lovers around twenty years of age and Beatrice and Benedick a significant ten years or so older.) In our version, both characters are at that point where they might well develop into confirmed spinster and bachelor. Both are staunchly anti-marriage and very resistant to the way in which that institution mutes the personalities of such as themselves. But the foundation of the performance was the idea of two people who had broken each other's hearts and who had developed personalities that attempted to prevent the same thing ever happening again. Their wit, irony, and apparent lack of feeling covers only superficially two of the most romantic, generous, and emotional of Shakespeare's characters.

This emotional volatility was a key to the whole film. We wished to involve the audience's hearts as well as their minds and their laughter muscles.

Robert Sean Leonard (Claudio), Denzel Washington (Don Pedro), and Keanu Reeves (Don John) all wished to stress the full-blooded nature of their respective characters. These men are soldiers for whom time spent away from war is precious. Love is seized. The instantaneousness of Claudio's love for Hero, its intensity, is not unusual amongst men for whom death is an equal reality. Hence the swiftness and the delight with which Don Pedro takes up his young charge's case. There is a zeal to the Don's playfulness that is almost too intense. We enjoy his fun but at the same time cannot fail to be worryingly aware of Don John's malevolent, equally passionate presence. The atmosphere in the early part of the play recalls Juliet's reservations before her fateful date with Romeo.

I have no joy of this contract tonight.
It is too rash, too unadvised, too sudden;
Too like the lightning, which doth cease to be
Ere one can say it lightens.

There is much rashness in Much Ado. The speed of the plot allows people to abandon rationality in the face of often incredible events.

As in much of Shakespeare, a strong suspension of disbelief is necessary when it comes to the plot of Much Ado. Lewis Carroll is very funny about it in a letter to Ellen Terry:

My difficulty is this: Why in the world did not Hero (or at any rate Beatrice when speaking on her behalf) prove an ‘alibi’, in answer to the charge? It seems certain she did not sleep in her own room that night: for how could Margaret venture to open the window and talk from it, with her mistress asleep in the room? It would be sure to wake her. Besides, Borachio says, after promising that Margaret shall speak with him out of Hero's chamber-window, ‘I will so fashion the matter that Hero shall absent.’ (How he could possibly manage any such thing is another difficulty: but I pass over that.)

Well, then, granting that Hero slept in some other room that night, why didn't she say so? When Claudio asks her, ‘What man was he talked with you yesterday out at your window betwixt twelve and one?’ why doesn't she reply, ‘I talked with no man at that hour, my lord: Nor was I in my chamber yesternight, but in another, far from it remote.’ And this she could prove by the evidence of the housemaid, who must have known that she had occupied another room that night.

But even if Hero might be supposed to be so distracted as not to remember where she had slept the night before, or even whether she had slept anywhere, surely Beatrice has her wits about her? And when an arrangement was made, by which she was to lose, for that one night, her twelve-months' bedfellow, is it conceivable that she didn't know where Hero passed the night? Why didn't she reply

But, good my lord, sweet Hero slept not there:
She had another chamber for the nonce.
’Twas sure some counterfeit that did present
Her person at the window, aped her voice,
Her mien, her manners, and hath thus deceived
My good lord Pedro and this company.

That this whole story should be resolved by the comic intervention of a ludicrous constable lends to Much Ado a warmly bizarre quality that does much to amend the ugliness inherent in the wedding scene and in Claudio's behaviour afterwards. Michael Keaton and I were agreed that Dogberry should be not only a verbal but a physical malaprop. I suspect I am not alone in finding the character's play on words less funny today than the character himself—instantly recognisable, a universal type, beautifully pompous, and, in our version, dangerous too. A modern cinema audience, ready to scream at Dogberry for his inability to inform Leonato of the plot against Hero in time, needed to know exactly why he does not.

In our version this is quite clear. Dogberry combines an awe and envy of authority that renders him barely able to speak in the presence of someone like Leonato or Don Pedro. When he does speak, it is with the confused confidence of the psychopath. In our film Dogberry and Verges are charismatically, indomitably mad. The Watch, who are featured throughout the film, are awed and frightened by him. This element of danger allows the audience to feel uncertain about whether the plot will ever truly resolve itself. That unbalancing of expectations, a useful doubt about what would happen next, was something we actively sought.

For a film of Shakespeare should have no empty moments. As in Henry V, where we featured the faces of an otherwise anonymous English army that became known to us, in Much Ado Leonato's household are present throughout. Their reaction at the wedding becomes that much more powerful, their joy at the end that much more intense. In the theatre when there is a palpable sense of ‘company,’ the audience is aware of it in a very satisfying way. Our rehearsals did as much to promote this sense of one Messinian community as possible.

On the production side we made sure that the costumes and period setting did everything they could to release the audience's imagination. We consciously avoided setting this version in a specific time but instead went for a look that worked within itself, where clothes, props, architecture, all belonged to the same world. This imaginary world could have existed almost anytime between 1700 and 1900. It was distant enough to allow the language to work without the clash of period anachronisms and for a certain fairy tale quality to emerge. This fairy tale idea seemed to spring naturally out of the countryside in which we were working. We were in Tuscany, central Italy, a magical landscape of vines and olives that seems untouched by much of modern life. Lusher and more verdant than Sicily (Shakespeare's setting), it allowed us to create a visual idyll in which this cautionary tale might be told.

If there is a single moral to be taken from this story, it is one that I chose to find in the song that begins the film.

Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more.
Men were deceivers ever,
One foot in sea and one on shore,
To one thing constant never.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.
Sing no more ditties, sing no more,
Of dumps so dull and heavy;
The fraud of men was ever so,
Since summer first was leafy.
Then sigh not so, but let them go,
And be you blithe and bonny,
Converting all your sounds of woe
Into Hey nonny, nonny.

We hear the song three times in the film. Once in Beatrice's wry, ironic voice at the beginning, again at the centre of the film, in an idealised garden setting where it appeals to Claudio's high romanticism, and finally at the end where it becomes a hard-won confirmation of a certain reality in the relationships between men and women. The idea of seeing the words and hearing them spoken right at the beginning of the film was a determined attempt to show how they could be dramatic in themselves. It allows the audience to ‘tune in’ to the new language they are about to experience and to realise (I hope) that they will easily understand the simplicity, gravity, and beauty of the song lyrics.

Purists may be offended; the play does not begin in this way. But this decision does raise the issue of what one means exactly by ‘adapting’ Shakespeare. I think that in film terms, it means giving a strong sense of the interpretive line. In the comedies this is crucial. They must be inflected. They do not lay themselves out with the same strong narrative, historical frame that the history plays do. The very titles themselves invite us to be bold: Twelfth Night, or What You Will. As You Like It.

In the case of this screenplay (whose planned mise-en-scène was adhered to far more strictly than in any other film on which I've worked) there is a great deal of description. Particularly at the beginning much is made of atmosphere and characters' states of mind. This seemed necessary for a play like Much Ado, which has been set in every conceivable period and country, with young, old, and middle-aged casting of every permutation. We did cut lines and occasionally scenes where the plot (such as it is) was not advanced. We did transpose some scenes in order to create a movie pace (quite different from that of the theatre).

For example, in the very first scene, it seemed to me important to get to the men's arrival as soon as possible. We would shortly see them riding to Leonato's. Excessive description of what Benedick and Claudio were like therefore seemed unnecessary.

The Beatrice and Benedick gulling scenes were trimmed in such a way as to make one big scene of continuous action in the same garden. We wanted to lose any sense of the formal ending of one scene and beginning of another as in the play. This helped the believability of the two characters' falling for each other so swiftly. It also took acting pressure off the women in the second of the scenes. In the theatre this is often a difficult scene, as it has to in some way ‘top’ the boys' gulling scene. This is impossible, as the second scene's tone is quite different, less obviously funny.

The deception of Claudio was most important in this screen adaptation. In theatrical versions this character is often dismissed for his gullibility. Hero's alleged infidelity (her ‘talking’ to a man at a window) is described as happening offstage. It seemed that if we saw this occur on screen, it would add a new dimension to our understanding of Claudio. This proof of her disloyalty is one of a number of crucial events that take place on the night before the wedding. To extract maximum drama (and comedy) from this night, we made some transpositions. Don John's scene with Borachio where they plot the deception was moved from before the gulling scenes (as in the play) to afterwards, as if at the beginning of this one terrible night. This had the side effect of distributing Don John's appearances more evenly and satisfyingly through the film. We broke up the first Watch scene, bringing Dogberry into the story earlier and cutting after his first exit, allowing the dastardly events of this night to occur with greater film logic. Time passes while the deception occurs, and then we come back to the sleeping constabulary ready to arrest Borachio and Conrade.

In the Dogberry scenes we cut the unfunniest lines. (I realise this is an entirely subjective issue, but having played one of the great unfunny Shakespearean clowns—Touchstone in As You Like It—I speak from bitter experience.) The wedding morning scene between the women, where Beatrice's love-induced ‘cold’ is made much fun of by Margaret, was shot. But although beautifully acted it was cut on the grounds that the dramatic way in which the previous nighttime sequence had played made the audience alive with expectation for the events of the wedding itself. This scene with the girls seemed finally to frustrate.

Elsewhere the cuts mainly involved the repetition of plot. In the play, characters constantly restate the current shape of events and repeat what's just happened and what's about to happen. But nothing ‘difficult’ was changed. No words were altered for easier understanding. The adaptation was at the service of our attempt to find an essence in the piece, to find the spirit of the play itself.

This brings me back to my first question. Why film Much Ado About Nothing? And why now?

When I was training to be an actor at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art, this question of why? was something Hugh Cruttwell constantly urged me to consider. The how of creating a piece of art always comes second. It's the why that will get you to the truth of a character. Why does Benedick love Beatrice? Not how—that's easy. Answering why always takes forever when creating a character, but it's a necessary journey. An actor has to apply the same question to himself when creating a film, or when performing a play. With the luxury of a degree of choice, a proper answer has to go beyond ‘So I can earn a living’ or ‘It's a lovely part’ or ‘I like Italy.’ One has to ask why one is communicating this particular story at this particular time.

So, once again, why Much Ado About Nothing? Well, for me, because it speaks loudly and gloriously about love, one of humankind's permanent obsessions. The cruelty of it, the joy of it. The question of tolerance in love and the danger of judging others. The cost of the ambiguous maturity that people like Hero and Claudio enjoy. The loss of innocence; the power of lust; our obsession with sex and the flesh. The persistent presence of sheer, unmotivated evil in the world as provided by the Iago prototype Don John.

In short, the play presents a whole series of emotional and spiritual challenges that we—young, old, male, female—continue to face when we love. And all throughout this comic debate about everything and nothing, there is life-giving, wisdom-bearing humour and warmth. The piece is harsh and cruel as people can be. It is generous and kind as they can also be. It is uplifting but never sentimental. It ‘holds the mirror up to nature’ and allows us inside its wonderful warts-and-all world of human nature, to understand and perhaps even to forgive ourselves for some of our oft-repeated follies.

That's why I interpreted Much Ado About Nothing on film in 1993. The attempt to achieve all this and any degree of success is due to a massive team effort. My thanks to producers, production team, cast, and crew for making it all possible.