CraveOnline: I never really thought about it that way. The men really do control the kingdom of Cinderella. Even in the original you don’t really see the Queen.
Kenneth Branagh: No, no, no.
Obviously we meet the prince now. He has a name in this one, finally. How much did you feel you could add? Did you ever have to pull anything out because there was too much of the men, and this is a story with a feminine slant?
Well, you’re always trying to find that natural moment where the weight and length of the film becomes clear. There was never any pressure for it to be a certain kind of length but there was always my feeling about what landed naturally.
“We couldn’t even begin to fool ourselves that somehow, with a few shots here and there, you [could] tell the boys that, no, no, really, you’ve got to come and see ‘Cinderella.'”
There was more material that followed some of that story through, but basically we felt we just needed to know who he was and give him a problem, and also make him an orphan also so that he understands a little more emotionally now what Cinderella will have gone through, so the stakes were a little more even. And also a chance to maybe draw a little lightly that the isolation of princeliness, the constantly being spied on [by] either servants or Grand Dukes, and the sort of public role inside a life that’s also just very concerned about his dad as well. It was important to have that in there.
I thought it was handled sweetly, but there was also a moment when we cut to the inside of the palace and it’s just dozens of men fencing. A part of me was thinking, “A little something for the boys in the audience.”
[Laughs.]
Was that ever a concern? That you have to make sure this is going to appeal to everybody?
I think that we couldn’t even begin to fool ourselves that somehow, with a few shots here and there, you [could] tell the boys that, no, no, really, you’ve got to come and see Cinderella. I think they’re smarter than that. But I wanted that kind of vibrancy in the movie. I wanted literally the steel and the sound and the clang and the sharpness of it to just be a punctuation point in the story.
I also just wanted to, in miniature, offer up this complete impression of [the prince] as that sort of man of action. At one point in the story we had seen him in the wars. Now we wanted to at least hint that: that he was a man of action, that he was a doer as well as thinker.
Did that bit in the wars ever make it in front of the cameras, or was that just an idea you toyed with?
It was script thing that didn’t make it into the [film]. There was a whole train of thought that brought back that element in, but it did not work.
I can imagine maybe the element of political intrigue. Like, he must marry another princess…
…in order to secure peace, yeah, because we’ve had all these terrible wars and things. It’s hinted at. It’s hinted at but we felt like it was just too much to get into this particular story, and trying too hard to be meaningful in another way.
