Kenneth Branagh says...     I first became seriously interested in Henry V when I was training to be an actor.  Constantly on the lookout for unusual Shakespearean audition speeches, I scoured the famous text for something that wasn’t just full of quotes.  Like many students I knew ‘Once more unto the breach’ and the St. Crispin’s Day Speech, but I was very surprised at how unfamiliar this most popular of plays seemed.  I discovered the king’s marvelous tirade against Scroop as well as his terrifying speech to the Governor of Harfleur, but apart from these meaty passages for the young actor, the play itself was a constant surprise.  For a modern audience, the abiding image of Henry V is provided by Sir Laurence Olivier’s famous film version, but the powerful Elizabethan pageantry and chivalric splendor of that extraordinary movie did not accord with the impression I received as I read the text afresh.  To me, the play seemed darker, harsher, and the language more bloody and muscular than I remembered.  Although I was aware of bringing a particular set of post-war sensibilities to bear on my reading, I sensed that a 1980s film version of such a piece would make for a profoundly different experience.

      In 1984, I played Henry V for the Royal Shakespeare Company in a production by the brilliant young director, Adrian Noble, which confirmed for me the marvelous potential for modern views of the play.  Although Olivier’s film had been welcomed and celebrated as part of the war effort, its seeming nationalistic and militaristic emphasis had created a great deal of suspicion and doubt about the value of Henry V  for a late twentieth-century audience.  The play is performed very rarely and the RSC production was the first for ten years.  Although understandable in some ways, this apparent lack of confidence struck me as unfair.  It is a more complex play than is traditionally acknowledged and Adrian’s production strongly resisted the concept of a two-dimensional Boy’s Own adventure.  In my own performance, I tried to realize the qualities of introspection, fear, doubt and anger which I believed the text indicated, an especially young Henry with more than a little of the Hamlet in him.  It was conveying these elements of the King’s personality that gave me the initial idea for a new screen version—the idea of abandoning the large-theater projection and allowing close-ups and low-level dialogue to draw the audience deep into the human side of this distant medieval world.  I thought that the combination of this concentration with the strong possibilities of the siege of Harfleur and the battle of Agincourt might produce an extraordinary modern film.  And when I left the RSC in 1985, after playing the part for nearly two years, I was already producing a mental storyboard for the movie version...from the Henry V film program