美国国家公共电台 NPR Kenneth Branagh On His Meticulous Master Detective Role In 'Murder On The Orient Express'

 

KELLY MCEVERS, HOST:

In his latest film, Kenneth Branagh becomes a character who is known to a lot of people - at least a lot of people who read Agatha Christie crime novels. His name is Hercule Poirot. He's a mastermind detective who has appeared in more than 30 of Agatha Christie's books. And on those pages, he solved crimes around the world for decades, starting in the 1920s. One of the most famous moments for Hercule Poirot is after there has been a murder on the Orient Express.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "MURDER ON THE ORIENT EXPRESS")

KENNETH BRANAGH: (As Hercule Poirot) I will speak to all of you in time. For the moment, I must recommend that you remain in your compartments¹ with the doors locked.

MICHELLE PFEIFFER: (As Caroline Hubbard) I feel like a prisoner here.

BRANAGH: (As Hercule Poirot) It is for your own safety. If there was a murder, then there was a murderer.

MCEVERS: Kenneth Branagh directs and stars in this new remake of "Murder On The Orient Express" as Hercule Poirot. You also heard Michelle Pfeiffer in that clip. The film also stars Judi Dench, Penelope Cruz, Daisy Ridley, Johnny Depp and others. And Kenneth Branagh is with us now. Welcome.

BRANAGH: Thank you very much.

MCEVERS: So when we first see your character, Hercule Poirot, he is in the middle of solving a crime in Jerusalem. He's in his office. He's very particular about his eggs. But we only see him from the back. And then the camera gives us his face and we are confronted with his most notable feature. Can you describe it for us?

BRANAGH: It is a set of facial furniture that Agatha Christie described as being the most magnificent mustaches in England, that they had a tortured splendor², creations which are lovingly oiled, waxed, curled and prinked by him at all points.

MCEVERS: I like that you're referring to it in the plural³, like mustaches.

BRANAGH: Well, he - in this particular creation Carol Hemming⁴, a very fine makeup⁵ artist and hair artist, really designed this sort of double sort of - a quadraphonic mustache, if you like. There's a sort of mustache behind the mustache.

MCEVERS: Right.

BRANAGH: And it's also something that Agatha Christie points out that he relishes⁶ and she certainly relishes for its impact on the other people that he encounters. In fact, usually, as his friend Hastings says in one book, because of the way he looked, the reception of my friend - my dear friend, he says - was often as a complete joke.

MCEVERS: Right.

BRANAGH: People dismissed him, ridiculed⁷ him, and in so doing they lay themselves open to dropping their guard. And particularly in the matters of criminal investigation⁸ that gives him a significant advantage.

MCEVERS: I want to talk about how you became Poirot. The first novel he appears in, I believe, is "The Mysterious Affair At Styles."

BRANAGH: That's correct. Yeah.

MCEVERS: It was written in 1920. Christie talks about how he is an extraordinary-looking little man, 5-foot-4 with an egg-shaped head. He's impeccably dressed. Did you read all of the novels that he appears in?

BRANAGH: I did. She varied⁹ in her descriptions. And she would make him a little taller, a bit - have a bit more hair. I enjoyed finding the sort of obsessive-compulsive in him rather than the dandy and the prissy individual. Somehow, I mean, as soon as we started putting together - for instance, the mustache we've spoken about a little. This moustache became, like, the - sort of the prow¹¹ of a boat or a car or something. You know, you felt like you were driving through the evidential swell¹², as it were, with your entire body, sort of truffle-hounding your way to the truth.

I basically went through the books with a Sharpie and highlighted anything I thought was part of what might make mine sort of different. And I'd have a little checklist of the things I'd go back to and have your sort of identikit version of who he is, ultimately trying to leap off into something that you thought moment to moment could be spontaneous and real. But she gives lots of detail.

MCEVERS: You know, it's interesting to think about this, that there could be so much material out there about a character that you're going to play and that you can kind of select the things that speak to you. You know, this is a character in a story that's been done many times. Of course, Albert Finney played him on film in 1974. And he was a very different Poirot. I mean, he was kind of stiff-necked and comical. Your Poirot is brooding, I think, more brooding than he is comical.

BRANAGH: Yeah, the brood of Poirot was to do with feeling as though in the here and now, the underbelly of what the novel talks about - which is a crime eventually, without giving too much away, revealed to be intimately connected with revenge and what you might call as a result of that a crime of passion - unfolds many things about the human condition which challenges a Poirot who in our film begins early on to declare that his experience is there is right. There is wrong. There is nothing in between.

And the events of the story over which, as you say, he in this version broods are to consider that there is potentially some moral gray zone where there may be quite a lot in between good and bad. And that was what I suppose made the coloration, if you like, go in the way it did. But still, you know, I personally feel with the character that those moments - and whenever he can find them, he does embrace them - his reading of Charles Dickens or, indeed, just plain old straight up and down pudding. He does like a dessert. And even if it's offered by a gangster¹³ he has to think twice about whether he's going to have a spoonful, particularly if it's Johnny Depp.

MCEVERS: But that is interesting. The Poirot in this "Murder On The Orient Express" does sort of go through this arc, right? He starts out thinking that everything is black and white and of course is completely challenged. Again, it's a story that is familiar to so many people. But I don't know that that is - I guess were you thinking about how to try to make a story that was familiar to people new?

BRANAGH: Yes. I mean, inevitably¹⁴, if you believe that the classics are worth doing each time - and I've I spent a career doing this.

MCEVERS: That's right.

BRANAGH: You go back to whatever - I just directed a production of "Hamlet" this last autumn. And I went back to it just feeling not dissimilar, frankly¹⁵, to the thematic material of "Murder On The Orient Express," that there was a sort of cry in the play that spoke¹⁰ to me in the here and now for an acknowledgement of the passing of people. You know, there's a great line at the Arthur Miller's play "Death Of A Salesman" - attention must be paid. There's a sense in "Murder On The Orient Express" that the desire for accountability for those who have suffered silently screams loudly out of the story. And I think it does in its different way from "Hamlet."

MCEVERS: As you were doing all of this, reading all of Christie's books and immersing yourself in Poirot, looking back, is there anything that surprised you?

BRANAGH: What was surprising and very satisfying about the whole experience of playing Poirot and working on this material was I found myself falling under the spell of Poirot, I suppose. And I felt privileged to see this new version of his life and to be a tiny part of it and see the surprise of quite how vividly¹⁶ alive he seems happening all over again.

MCEVERS: And this is a character who, when he was eventually killed off by Agatha Christie, got an obituary¹⁷ in The New York Times in 1975.

BRANAGH: Absolutely. Isn't that amazing?

MCEVERS: So Kenneth Branagh, thank you for bringing him back to life for us.

BRANAGH: I appreciate it. Thanks so much.

MCEVERS: Kenneth Branagh's new movie is "Murder On The Orient Express."

1 compartments   

n.间隔( compartment的名词复数 )；（列车车厢的）隔间；（家具或设备等的）分隔间；隔层

参考例句：

• Your pencil box has several compartments. 你的铅笔盒有好几个格。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• The first-class compartments are in front. 头等车室在前头。 来自《简明英汉词典》

2 splendor   

n.光彩；壮丽，华丽；显赫，辉煌

参考例句：

• Never in his life had he gazed on such splendor.他生平从没有见过如此辉煌壮丽的场面。
• All the splendor in the world is not worth a good friend.人世间所有的荣华富贵不如一个好朋友。

3 plural   

n.复数；复数形式；adj.复数的

参考例句：

• Most plural nouns in English end in's '.英语的复数名词多以s结尾。
• Here you should use plural pronoun.这里你应该用复数代词。

4 hemming   

卷边

参考例句：

• "Now stop hemming and hawing, and tell me about it, Edward. "别再这个那个的啦，跟我说说吧，爱德华。 来自英汉文学 - 败坏赫德莱堡
• All ideas of stopping holes and hemming in the German intruders are vicious. 一切想要堵塞缺口和围困德国侵略军的办法都是错误的。

5 makeup   

n.组织；性格；化装品

参考例句：

• Those who failed the exam take a makeup exam.这次考试不及格的人必须参加补考。
• Do you think her beauty could makeup for her stupidity?你认为她的美丽能弥补她的愚蠢吗？

6 relishes   

n.滋味( relish的名词复数 )；乐趣；（大量的）享受；快乐v.欣赏( relish的第三人称单数 )；从…获得乐趣；渴望

参考例句：

• The meat relishes of pork. 这肉有猪肉味。 来自辞典例句
• The biography relishes too much of romance. 这篇传记中传奇色彩太浓。 来自辞典例句

7 ridiculed   

v.嘲笑，嘲弄，奚落( ridicule的过去式和过去分词 )

参考例句：

• Biosphere 2 was ultimately ridiculed as a research debade, as exfravagant pseudoscience. 生物圈2号最终被讥讽为科研上的大失败，代价是昂贵的伪科学。 来自《简明英汉词典》
• She ridiculed his insatiable greed. 她嘲笑他的贪得无厌。 来自《简明英汉词典》

8 investigation   

n.调查，调查研究

参考例句：

• In an investigation,a new fact became known, which told against him.在调查中新发现了一件对他不利的事实。
• He drew the conclusion by building on his own investigation.他根据自己的调查研究作出结论。

9 varied   

adj.多样的，多变化的

参考例句：

• The forms of art are many and varied.艺术的形式是多种多样的。
• The hotel has a varied programme of nightly entertainment.宾馆有各种晚间娱乐活动。

10 spoke   

n.（车轮的）辐条；轮辐；破坏某人的计划；阻挠某人的行动 v.讲，谈（speak的过去式）；说；演说；从某种观点来说

参考例句：

• They sourced the spoke nuts from our company.他们的轮辐螺帽是从我们公司获得的。
• The spokes of a wheel are the bars that connect the outer ring to the centre.辐条是轮子上连接外圈与中心的条棒。

11 prow   

n.(飞机)机头，船头

参考例句：

• The prow of the motor-boat cut through the water like a knife.汽艇的船头像一把刀子劈开水面向前行驶。
• He stands on the prow looking at the seadj.他站在船首看着大海。

12 swell   

vi.膨胀，肿胀；增长，增强

参考例句：

• The waves had taken on a deep swell.海浪汹涌。
• His injured wrist began to swell.他那受伤的手腕开始肿了。

13 gangster   

n.匪徒，歹徒，暴徒

参考例句：

• The gangster's friends bought off the police witness.那匪徒的朋友买通了警察方面的证人。
• He is obviously a gangster,but he pretends to be a saint.分明是强盗，却要装圣贤。

14 inevitably   

adv.不可避免地；必然发生地

参考例句：

• In the way you go on,you are inevitably coming apart.照你们这样下去，毫无疑问是会散伙的。
• Technological changes will inevitably lead to unemployment.技术变革必然会导致失业。

15 frankly   

adv.坦白地，直率地；坦率地说

参考例句：

• To speak frankly, I don't like the idea at all.老实说，我一点也不赞成这个主意。
• Frankly speaking, I'm not opposed to reform.坦率地说，我不反对改革。

16 vividly   

adv.清楚地，鲜明地，生动地

参考例句：

• The speaker pictured the suffering of the poor vividly.演讲者很生动地描述了穷人的生活。
• The characters in the book are vividly presented.这本书里的人物写得栩栩如生。

17 obituary   

n.讣告，死亡公告；adj.死亡的

参考例句：

• The obituary records the whole life of the deceased.讣文记述了这位死者的生平。
• Five days after the letter came,he found Andersen s obituary in the morning paper.收到那封信五天后，他在早报上发现了安德森的讣告。