INTERVIEW: Recruiting Jack Ryan...

His first love may be Shakespeare, but in the last few years Kenneth Branagh has stepped into the shows of a Swedish detective (Wallander), entertained the Olympic crowds (appearing as Isambard Kingdom Brunel for Danny Boyle at its opening ceremony) and walked with Asgardian gods (as director of Thor). In short, he obviously likes to keep busy.  But with jack Ryan he was recruited for the dual responsibilities of both diretcor and actor - essaying evil Russian tycoon Viktor Cherevin. John Mosby caught up with the cast and crew to discuss taking Jack Ryan to Moscow and bringing Moscow to Liverpool...

The late Tom Clancy wrote several Jack Ryan books and, of course, some of those stories have had well-known big-screen adaptations. What was the attraction of the project and going with a younger Jack Ryan and effectively take him back to basics?

Lorenzo di Bonaventura (Producer) :  Look, the opportunity we had was to tell the origin story which was something that hadn’t been done before. So we were able to see a more complete character-study of someone and it’s rare you have a movie where you see the lead character facing the two or three seminal moments of his life all in one movie. Usually it’s about one seminal moment, if that. So, that was a great opportunity to connect the audience to the character again. We looked at this as an opportunity to mine from all the books. Now, having done it with Chris (Pine), we’re at a younger phase than most of the books are at. So we’ve trapped ourselves into NOT being part of the books at the moment. But what we’ve been able to do is to be true to the books by taking all these pieces of information  and putting them into one medium and no other movie was able to do that because they were contained by a single story…

David Barron (Producer) : I agree.  Being an origin story, it meant we could introduce a new audience to an old character, a character that previous generations had lived with but that they might not necessarily have had.  It was useful to be able to start from the beginning.

Kenneth Branagh: I couldn’t put the script down – it was as simple as that. David Koepp’s screenplay came long. I knew that Chris was involved and that was exciting. I thought that was a great piece of casting. I did know the previous films and some of the novels and, like Keira, I love thrillers so this was a chance to do what the boys were saying… getting Jack Ryan and the things that made him compelling for an audience… that character, as created by Clancy, into the twenty-first century an see if him and that new world collided in a strong, entertaining way. 

Chris Pine: I think the world we live in nowadays is a fertile ground enough to mine many interesting stories about what we know about, y’know… tapping Anglea Merkel’s phone and all sorts of stuff like that. I was curious about playing a guy who I felt… whose experience really pivoted on 9/11… a man who went and served in war, was affected by war and was damaged physically and emotionally  was still compelled to serve and HAD to. He felt very contemporary, he felt very over-the-now. I liked the idea of that kind of reluctant ‘hero’  being compelled to serve from something deep in himself, the deep sense of a personal, moral code…

Keira Knightley:  I’d never done a ‘thriller’ before,  I don’t think - and it’s always been a genre that I really liked. I think it’s  a very difficult one because you combine action with proper story-telling and it needs a proper story-teller to do it. I was excited by the challenge of it…When I finished doing Anna Karenina, I realised that I’d been playing characters that pretty much died or had something horrendous happen to them for about the last five years.  I fancied doing something fun. I think it was partly to do with that. I really enjoyed the script, I couldn’t put it down – it was a page-turner.

As well as the relationship between Jack and Cathy… I was interested in the idea of what happens to a relationship when there is a ‘secret’, when there’s something that can’t be discussed… something that can tear two people apart even though they are completely in love. I was interested in what that would do to a relationship. I thought that was a very interesting part of the story – the things that people who work in the secret services have to give up and the emotional toll it takes on them…

Then there was Ken. Ken basically said 'Awwww, go on, do it.' And I said “Oh, alright then!’ (laughs). It was a combination of all of those things really..

KB: Well, we DID go to Moscow actually.  I won’t tell you how many days, but we were there briefly and one of the things we DID do was – early in the shoot – try to establish… let’s call it  ‘a breathless pace’ that the film often has. I remember we got off the plane from New York that morning, went to ‘reccie’ the first place in Moscow and then that afternoon Chris was on our hotel roof with us and we got forty-minutes as the sun was going… there was a three-page dialogue scene and I asked if he minded doing it all in one as we only had  half-an-hour. Moving around in Moscow was a bit like that… so when we came back to some of the ‘cheated’ Moscow in Liverpool and Manchester and parts of London we adopted the same hit-the-ground-running approach. But we were there long enough to get a sense of vibrancy that the new Moscow has…

Given that most of the Russian characters in the film were, shall we say, pretty nefarious, was it a hard sell to get the kind of co-operation needed from the relevant authorities?

KB: I think though... my sense is that people understood that this was a drama and that in a way, without copping out but being quite specific, our intention was to tell the story of one fictional Russian oligarch with a very specific personal biography and history that was not trying to at a stroke say ‘This is what all wealthy Russians are like...’. I think people understand that. Anymore than having just played Macbeth in the theatre… the Scots aren't up in arms at being portrayed as murderers and regicides. One has to take it in the context of that. And in a sense for us what was fairly interesting in the Clancy DNA these books set in the Cold War period featured this old enemy and this old rivalry between America and Russia. It’s very clearly there right now: in the person of this unusual modern creation, the 'oligarch'... sometimes we don’t know what they own, what the state owns, they’re blurry links to government... so they’re formidable individuals. So the possibility of looking at a legitimate dramatic investigation is in the tradition of such things. I think they took it in that spirit. The Russians are great storytellers and we don’t make the Americans whiter than white. We were trying to be complex and I hope they respected that. Anyway we managed to leave in one piece. And in fact the movie right now is number one in Russia. Thankfully.

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