by Ray Greene
"I don't want to say the word," Kenneth Branagh announces in the lilting, Oxonian accent that is the by-product of an Irish upbringing, cross-pollinated with an English education. His round, newly-beardless face grows animated as he draws an emphatic line between his new screen treatment of one of the most-produced properties in cinematic history and everything preceding it. "This isn't a horror story," he says. "I've always thought of it as being a sort of gothic fairytale, with big monsters, and big shadows on the wall, and a cruel streak, like there are in fairytales. It's very full, very profound, at the same time as being just a corking yarn that you can scare people with."
The things that go bump in the night in Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's 176-year-old novel "Frankenstein" couldn't seem to be further away from TriStar's sun-splashed backlot, where Branagh has just arrived from the English home he shares with his wife and sometime co-star Emma Thompson. The sprawling Culver City production complex that housed MGM for more than five decades before becoming home to Sony Pictures seems downright deserted: Aside from a well-muscled watchman in a studio guardhouse, there are few signs of life on the lot, and in the corridors that link TriStar's offices, the long, polished hallways reverberate emptily with every lazy footfall.
TriStar has had an enviable production and releasing history, and the posters that dangle from the walls (for "The Natural," for "Bugsy," for "Sleepless in Seattle") bespeak a corporate philosophy which, as often as not, has tried to steer a well-targeted course between quality feature films and boxoffice appeal. It's no surprise, then, to find the 33-year-old Branagh-an actor-director most well-known for his Shakespearean adaptations "Henry V" and "Much Ado About Nothing"-ensconced at TriStar for the most ambitious project of his career. A fresh (and, to hear Branagh tell it, almost reverently faithful) reworking of a cinematic warhorse, "Mary Shelley's Frankenstein" is produced by Francis Coppola (who was originally slated to direct) and co-stars Branagh as the death-obsessed scientist of the title, with Robert De Niro ("a tremendously detailed, precise artist," says Branagh) as the monster Frankenstein creates. In his way, Branagh seems the living epitome of the kind of filmmaking TriStar aspires to-a creative figure with a track record when it comes to balancing boxoffice priorities against the interpretive chops needed to adapt the classics.
Some might find adapting "Frankenstein" a step down from the literary heights of Shakespeare, but Branagh-an almost determinedly self-effacing interview for a figure of his stature- has become a big fan of a book he admits he hadn't read when TriStar asked him to step into Coppola's directorial shoes. He is almost protective of Shelley's novel, and he seems to feel that the author's intention in writing it has been somewhat misrepresented by the literally hundreds of screen treatments her work has inspired.
"It's simple fact that she has many more interesting, varied and vividly expressed ideas than I have on these subjects," Branagh says. "I'm defeated by these subjects, but I'm fascinated by them as well. I keep trying to make stories about what the f-k is it all about, what meaning is there in life...? And all of those things are in `Frankenstein,' it's just a great big discussion about what it means to be a human being. So for me, it's like a little detective hunt to see what she meant. 'Cause I'm not an original creative artist, I'm an interpretive artist. That's what I am."
If prodded to look for them, Branagh finds some interesting parallels between Shelley's novel and the Bard, and with other models as well. "It's truly a classic, and I think that it is almost Shakespearean in its tragic power," says Branagh. "It has echoes of MacBeth, echoes of the Faust legend... Victor Frankenstein is a man who shakes hands with the devil, a man who decides to cross the line between what is known and what is unknown. Once he's crossed over, he finds that he can never go back."
At the time "Frankenstein" commenced production, Branagh had recently finished a stage run as Shakespeare's "Hamlet." In jumping from the melancholy Dane into his role as Victor Frankenstein, he says he found many similarities, and that Victor Frankenstein "seemed to be the other side of that particular coin... Hamlet's whole journey is a preparation for death, and dealing with death is what Hamlet obsesses over. But he's essentially not a man of action. Victor Frankenstein is similarly obsessed, but he is, dangerously, a man of action. A dangerously sane man, not a madman. There are rather also parallels to someone like Hitler. A dark visionary who can actually apply it. That terrifying thing, that terrifying combination, a plausible, charming, obsessively energetic man."
The premise of "Frankenstein" is familiar to anyone with more than a passing interest in literature, or in films and film history. In a defiant act of scientific hubris, Victor Frankenstein creates a man-made monster by re-instilling life in a human pastiche comprised of sewn-together body parts obtained through the robbing of graves. The Creature is superhumanly strong and almost unimaginably horrible to look at, which causes Frankenstein to abandon his creation without ever considering the possibility that it might house true (if rudimentary) human emotions-what might be called a vestigial soul. Rejected by its creator, shunned and outcast from society, the Creature (called Adam in the original, in a kind of profanation of the Biblical creation myth) decides to take out his rage and anguish on Victor Frankenstein by killing off his loved ones, one life at a time.
So popular has Shelley's novel proven as movie material that the novelist herself (along with her husband, the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron) has been dramatized cinematically at least twice in terms of her creation of the book: in Ken Russell's over-blown 1987 hallucinogen "Gothic" and, most notably, in the prologue to director James Whale's indelible 1935 masterwork "The Bride of Frankenstein"-the definitive highlight of what could be called the tale's "Boris Karloff Era." The flat-topped, neck-bolted make-up applied by Universal artisan Jack Pierce to Karloff's aquiline features is still the icon most people think of when they hear the name "Frankenstein," although in fact, Karloff's monster, like De Niro's, went nameless. More than six decades have passed since Whale mounted the first sound adaptation of Shelley's book, but Karloff's beautiful mimetic performance, commenced in Whale's 1931 "Frankenstein" and concluded in 1939's "Son of Frankenstein," is still the touchstone against which all subsequent "Frankenstein" films have been judged. "They're remarkable," Branagh says of the Whale/Karloff collaborations. "And no one's done quite the same thing subsequently. They are distinct. They're truly original in the way they look, and in the tone with which they're presented."
Like Chaplin's walk and King Kong's last stand at the top of the Empire State Building, a great deal of what Whale, Karloff and Pierce wrought has passed into the visual lexicon of moviedom. "I was aware of what fantastic and classic moments there were in popular cultural memory, both Karloff himself and that enormous sort of tower and the Frankenstein lab," Branagh says. "People, when they think of nutty scientists and things, think of those images."
From Colin Clive's manic screams of "It's alive! Alive!" as his creation first raises its arm off a laboratory slab, to the sputtering electricity of the Tesla coils and electric centrifuges which brought the Creature to tremulous life, the Whale "Frankenstein" films established the standard for audience expectations. This posed an interesting challenge for Branagh, especially in his rethinking of the creation scene: how to make an original cinematic statement that remained true to his concept of the book without disappointing "Frankenstein's" sizeable public?
Despite his devotion to Mary Shelley's original conception (he calls adapting "Frankenstein" essentially a process of "getting out Mary Shelley's goodies"), Branagh found the text of little help in devising a new approach to the birth of the Monster. "She's tremendously vague in the book about how he's brought to life," he says. "I mean, she has Victor Frankenstein quote various ancient alchemists and sort of apothecary types and mystics. He talks about sort of combining their work with the primitive [electro-chemical bio-research] of people like Luigi Galvani, and the guy who gave his name to the word `volt.' But the actual process, no, she skirts by it."
At the same time, Branagh felt he had something to live up to "in terms of cinematic history, definitely. And we wanted to make it as plausible as possible. We have about five [life-giving devices]. You know, acupuncture needles in key energy points as have been described by the Chinese for thousands and thousands of years, and amniotic fluid as a kind of biogenic agent. We threw electric eels into the mix 'cause then you've got a very sexual image. We have them in a huge kind of scrotum and they come down a huge tube into a great sort of womb and fertilize this embryonic creature...We've previewed the film a couple of times, and it just isn't an issue, people absolutely take it in, they're ready to buy it, maybe 'cause it's much more possible now. We're much closer to doing it with genetics, so it doesn't seem so crazy."
The Karloff "Frankenstein" movies gave Branagh a criterion he knew he'd be compared to, but they weren't the only films he tried to become aware of. As he did in preparing his Shakespeare features, Branagh devoted a lot of time to research, in this instance by following his deep draught of Shelley's original novel with a cinematic chaser. "I did see as many of the `Frankenstein' films as I could, because I think it defined what we didn't want to do. The story is a classic, which means you can do it in many different ways, and shine a different kind of light on it. There've been brilliant comedic versions like Mel Brooks's, which is a superb film I think; the two James Whale films are quite brilliant; some of the Hammer Films are excellent, and Peter Cushing-sometimes he's Baron Frankenstein, sometimes just Doctor Frankenstein-is very good in them."
Ultimately, though, Branagh wanted to make a "Frankenstein" that could stand on its own as a work of popular art, and it was Shelley's book, as well as the autobiographical undercurrents within it, which were his most significant sources of inspiration.
"The chief source to give it what I call the `psychological meat' was really Mary Shelley's own family... The events of her life just went straight into this tale, so that hiding beneath the piece of it that has been seized on by filmmakers, which is `mad scientist creates monster,' is this larger tapestry about families, and what's a good parental relationship. We choose to make the death of his mother-which was also in the book-a significant event in Victor's life, in which he resists the sort of arbitrary claiming by death of remarkable people.
"There are many parallels, conscious and unconscious, between what happened in [Mary Shelley's] life and what happened in the book," Branagh adds. "There's this pervading image of very difficult births, for example. Her own birth was at the expense of her mother's life some 11 painful days later, and something like four out of five of her own children died before growing to maturity... [Percy] Shelley was this phenomenal figure-a man who embodied the last point in history when a person could know everything, when he could be aware of literature and art and politics, and yet also be aware of medical and scientific advances because they were in their infancy. And one mind, a brilliant mind like Shelley's, could grasp all of that. He made an incredible impression on her, and his character also has a very strong impact on the book and on the character of Victor Frankenstein."
The other inspiration Branagh drew on, particularly to shape his own performance, was his own real-life role as the creative force trying to breathe life into the vast, technologically-produced behemoth that is a pricey studio film. "It was the basis of my research for the character," Branagh says with a laugh. "A crazed obsessive building a monster. A large-budget movie, full of huge sets and crazy designs with four or five hundred people working on it at various times, offers some intriguing points of comparison. There was a sort of manic focus that had to be applied."
But though Branagh sees certain professional similarities between Victor Frankenstein's obsession with his unholy life's-work and the intense focus which was required of him to direct and star in a film he freely admits cost more to produce than all of his previous directorial efforts combined, Branagh resists the drawing of any deeper analogies between his own creative drives and that of the character. He laughs it off when it is pointed out that his friend John Sessions could have been talking about Victor Frankenstein when he said of Branagh's early theatrical and cinematic achievements, "He doesn't want to be just well-known in the papers, he wants to be well-known in the history books." The less famous subtitle of Shelley's novel is "The Modern Prometheus;" in England, where Branagh has been a more controversial figure thanks to his early skirmishing with the National Theatre and his revisionist take on "Henry V," one snide critic called that film "the greatest act of hubris since Prometheus absconded with the rights to divine fire." While Branagh concedes there may be those who are hoping for his own trajectory to mirror Victor's tragic arc, not only is he willing to outwardly entertain the possibility of failure, he seems almost to view it as a risk inherent to anything involving the creative process.
"You know, I'm sure there are people who'd be amused, as well as people who actually might come to like my work much better, if this film was an enormous disaster," Branagh says. "It's a mad way of thinking, but people get suspicious if they think in some way, that somehow you have it all. As if every single one of us wasn't full of all the same anxieties and neuroses and all the rest of it. Even being conscious of the position of privilege that I'm in, that doesn't exclude me, I'm prey to all of those. If some great moment of crisis comes, it won't be of hubris, I'm not a hubristic person. But if that comes up, then I'll deal with it when it happens."
Making the Monster, in Mary Shelley's Own Words
It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.
How can I describe my emotions at this catastrophe, or how delineate the wretch whom with such infinite pains and care I had endeavored to form? His limbs were in proportion, and I had selected his features as beautiful. Beautiful!-Great God! His yellow skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath; his hair was of a lustrous black, and flowing; his teeth of a pearly whiteness; but these luxuriances only formed a more horrid contrast with his watery eyes, that seemed almost of the same colour as the dun white sockets in which they were set, his shrivelled complexion and straight black lips.
The different accidents of life are not so changeable as the feelings of human nature. I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardour that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart...
I see by your eagerness, and the wonder and hope which your eyes express, my friend, that you expect to be informed of the secret with which I am acquainted. That cannot be: listen patiently until the end of my story and you will easily perceive why I am reserved upon that subject. I will not lead you on, ardent and unguarded as I then was, to your destruction and infallible misery. Learn from me, if not by my precepts, at least by my example, how dangerous is the acquirement of knowledge, and how much happier that man is who believes his native town to be the world, than he who aspires to become greater than his nature will allow.
-Excerpted from "Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus" by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, 1818.
