CraveOnline: I feel like Cinderella is a tricky story to begin with because even if you look at the original Disney animated film, she’s not the most active protagonist.
Kenneth Branagh: Oh for sure, yeah. Passive to a degree.
It’s been argued almost to a negative extent.
Sure.
“[Cinderella] had to be someone who gave us a sense of why she stayed, and that began by showing her early life, her relationship to her mother and father.”
Here it seems like you’re doing a very good job of keeping the core story alive while still giving her a lot more agency. Was that a mission statement?
[The] key to the whole thing was to sort of revolutionize from the inside. She had to be someone who gave us a sense of why she stayed, and that began by showing her early life, her relationship to her mother and father. Just the sense that this was a loving, functioning family in which certain characteristics were really understood and kind of imbibed, including literally the advice to have courage and be kind. And also allowing us to see a girl who is honoring her parents as times go on, staying there partly for that.
But she’s an intellectual. You first see her, growing up, reading a book. She’s reading Samuel Pepys. She quotes Cervantes. There’s Dickens and Shakespeare in the whole thing. We’re trying to say that a curious mind is in there, and she’s proactive.
There’s a sense of tragedy more in this one, because you feel more the sense that there’s a future that’s been taken away from her.
Yeah.
That doesn’t quite come across in the original, I think, because you just meet her in medias res.
Sure, and also the demise of [her] mother and father are a line, half a line in voice-over. Whereas we see her take these blows [in the remake]. She does it very well. I think that does add a tragic dimension. And also beautiful moments of character.
My favorite moment in the movie, for me, is when the man who comes to give her the news about her father’s passing is clearly upset at having to do it. She says, “Thank you, that must have been very difficult for you.”
Yeah…
You think, “Oh Jesus…!” [mimes crying]
That’s heartbreaking.
Yeah, and she turns around and those women [her stepmother and stepsisters] all have gone and she’s on her own in the hall, before going off to do yet more of this work.
