When Kenneth Branagh is working on a project - whether it's playing Macbeth in front of a small, lucky few in a deconsecrated church or directing, and starring in, a big Hollywood thriller, namely Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit - he wants the experience to be as authentic as possible.

"You approach the work in the same way," he says. "And you give it total commitment and you do your best and you hope to collaborate with some brilliant people. In the case of Jack Ryan it was a huge collaboration and I enjoyed it very much and most of all I want the audience to enjoy it too. I want them to feel immersed in this world."

The chance to direct a bang up to date contemporary thriller and to introduce Jack Ryan, a character who has featured in eight novels by Tom Clancy and several films based on his books, to a modern audience was one that he seized upon immediately. Quite simply, he says, the script was a 'page turner' - a great compliment from an actor and director who has seen plenty down the years.

"Chris Pine, who plays Jack Ryan, had already been involved in the project when I came on and he's very smart, David Koepp, who is one of the writers, is fantastic and Lorenzo di Bonaventura is one of the producers and very experienced with this kind of film.

"And then you add Kevin Costner into the mix and he can tell you about his experiences in No Way Out and other movies that he's made that border on this territory and you have a lot of history right there with you.

"So it was my job to make all of those separate experiences coherent. And, it's exciting to work with people who are very brilliant at what they do and our goal was to make a character-driven picture inside a big, action movie."

Branagh is a huge fan of the genre. As he points out, the second movie he directed, Dead Again, was a thriller. "A lot of the films I've done have links to other movies that I've directed in the past. Dead Again, for example, was a thriller. I love thrillers and I always have."

Shadow Recruit is an origins story and reveals how Ryan is recruited for the CIA by a veteran operative, William Harper (played by Kevin Costner) and then uncovers a terrorist plot to cause havoc on the world's stock markets and wreck the US economy.

Keira Knightley plays Cathy, Ryan's fiancée, and Branagh, himself, plays a Russian oligarch, Viktor Cherevin. "Yes, the director had a hand in casting that
particular actor," he jokes. "He discovered he was very, very cheap and very available and we knew where he was every minute of the day."

Cherevin, like all the characters in the story, is not a one-dimensional villain, says the man who plays him. "Paramount kept asking me to do it and so did Chris and I realized that with that part we had actually managed to stop people from talking about it as the 'villain' or 'the baddie' and they started talking about Victor or Cherevin and everything became a bit more specific."

Branagh and his screenwriters mined Clancy's books to help build up the characters and stay true to his roots but, he stresses, the screenplay is an original story and not based on any one specific novel.

"Nobody said 'it has to be this or that' but the thing that David Koepp and I both identified was that Jack Ryan is a man with a very brilliant mind - he is the best of the best and in that regard, we took him right back to his academic time at the London School of Economics - and numerous Nobel Prize winning economists have come from there - but that he was, in many other senses, an everyman.

"So he has a revolutionary mind and a rather bourgeois background in terms of his life in Washington and Baltimore. So if you like, in the crudest sense, he is an everyman with a brilliant mind.

"We started with the freedom not to be confined to any individual novel, but with the permission of Mr. Clancy to use elements from the back story. The novels are documented and filled with a lot of information about where he taught, where he was trained, his experience in the military, the nature of his analytical skills, Cathy's background as an eye doctor, the way they schooled their kids and his relationship with government.

"All of that is carefully tabulated and there are almanacs detailing all of this, the way you have with the Harry Potter back story, and we shaped our own story from that.

"Keira Knightley, Chris Pine, Kevin Costner and myself all came up with dossiers that were essentially the off screen life of all the characters and that's where we started to meet the laws of the world of Clancy and Ryan and the specifics we hoped to bring to it."

 

To help prepare Pine for the role, Branagh sprang a few surprises on the actor when he first arrived in London, where the film was based, immediately before the cameras started rolling.

"We made him do some spy stuff," he laughs. "We set up a 'drop' in a London park that was under surveillance by a dozen people and we told him with two minutes to go, what he had to deliver and what he had to pick up and that he had a time limit on it and if he didn't do it, he would be potentially arrested by people who possibly didn't know that he was Chris Pine the actor or that he was involved in a piece of research.

"And when I told him that, I did see the blood drain from his face. And when he finished it and we showed him the results in real time on CCTV footage, he said his pulse was racing and he thought his heart was going to come out of his body because he was so nervous.

"All he had to do was go to a London park and find the right bench and the right person but when you know you are being watched in that way, it can do strange things. But it was all helpful for Chris to get a sense of what doing this job would really be like."

Branagh, the actor, also did plenty of research to prepare for his role as Cherevin. "To get the Russian accent, I started by listening to Russian radio and TV broadcasts so I could hear the language.

"I listened to Russian music and then we had a Russian advisor who came in and I started to speak some of it and I found that extremely difficult - it was like doing piano practice every day for a few months.

"I went to Moscow and met some slightly powerful and scary people. We definitely had some experiences of powerful people and became aware of the large sums of money that can swill around when it comes to these large interrelationships between financial institutions and sometimes government institutions.

"So we tried to get inside it in a human dimension. This is a human picture and not super human - and that's where we started from."

Working with Pine and Knightley was a joy, he says. "I've always thought that Keira is a terrific actress. Most people wouldn't see it as a problem but the challenge for her is that she is extremely beautiful. I think some people can't see beyond that but I've always felt that she has a very intelligent, witty quality in her work. She really was a joy to work with.

"Chris is a very smart, sexy lad and he's also very complex and has wit. I so loved his performance as Kirk in the first J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie. Chris can make you believe that his Jack Ryan is as smart as we needed him to be, and also in terms of the image that we could present, very WASPY.

"And that's what Jack Ryan is on the surface and we weren't denying that kind of DNA. Chris is a very, very committed actor and performer."

Jack Ryan is, he says, an everyman - albeit one with a brilliant mind - caught up in extraordinary, terrifying events that unfold in London, New York and Moscow. "What is interesting, I think, is that in this story Jack Ryan could be any of us - it's not James Bond or Jason Bourne.

"We would be very grateful if there were Bourne or Bond out there because they know what they are doing but Jack isn't that type of super-spy. He's a man with a brilliant mind who can predict whether there is going to be a financial crisis in Tokyo tomorrow and whether it will affect the Australian economy but what he has limited experience in is that kind of subterfuge and what to do if you get caught.

"Jack Ryan is not a paid assassin; he's not being de-programmed and doesn't have a ton of fancy gadgets. He's a guy with a really sharp mind who wants to know why he is doing what he has been asked to do - so it means he asks a lot of questions up front before he decides he's going to arrive abandoned, friendless, deceived and deceiving in Moscow."

That human, rather than super-human, approach to the story is reflected in the action sequences, too. "Our attitude to some of the action stuff is to try and keep it quite human. It's more about how difficult it is for someone who is not used to being in a car chase finds it when he is in one - compared to somebody who can flip a car on to two wheels," he says.

Branagh has been nominated for an Academy Award five times - for Best Director and Best Actor for Henry V in 1990, Best Short Film for Swan Song in 1993, Best Adapted Screenplay for Hamlet in 1997 and Best Supporting Actor for My Week With Marilyn in 2012. As a director, his films include Much Ado About Nothing, Frankenstein, A Midwinter's Tale, Love's Labour's Lost, The Magic Flute, Sleuth and Thor. A live action version of Cinderella, directed by Branagh, will be released in 2015. As an actor, his films include Peter's Friends, The Gingerbread Man, The Proposition, Celebrity, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Valkyrie and Pirate Radio.He has appeared in numerous stage productions and in the summer of 2013, received huge critical acclaim for his performance as Macbeth in front of a small audience in a deconsecrated church at the Manchester International Festival. He will reprise the role in the National Theatre Production next June (2014) at the Park Avenue Armory Drill Hall in New York.

Q and A follows:

Q: Did you read the Jack Ryan novels before taking on this project?
A: I had read some, but not all of them. One that I read that was very helpful for this was one of the Russian set novels, The Cardinal of the Kremlin. It's very effective and it's about someone in the Russian military who decides to betray the military, and Jack Ryan goes to Russia. It was very interesting and it was helpful to look at some of those novels.

Q: How difficult is it to distinguish the film from some of the other action movies that are out there?
A: We started with the freedom, not to be confined to any individual novel, but with the permission of Mr. Clancy to use elements from the back story. The novels are documented and filled with a lot of information about where he taught, where he was trained, his experience in the military, the nature of his analytical skills, Cathy's background as an eye doctor, the way they schooled their kids and his relationship with government - all of that is carefully tabulated and there are almanacs detailing all of this, the way you have with the Harry Potter back story and we shaped our own. Keira Knightley, Chris Pine, Kevin Costner and myself all came up with dossiers that were essentially the off screen life of all the characters and that's where we started to meet the laws of the world of Clancy and Ryan and the specifics we hoped to bring to it.

Q: There have been movies featuring Jack Ryan in the past so was there anything you had to follow or acknowledge from what had gone before?
A: Nobody said 'it has to be this or that' but the thing that David Koepp and I both identified was that Jack Ryan is a man with a very brilliant mind - he is the best of the best and in that regard we took him right back to his academic time at the London School of Economics - and numerous Nobel Prize winning economists have come from there - but that he was, in many other senses, an everyman.
So he has a revolutionary mind and a rather bourgeois background in terms of his life in Washington and Baltimore. So if you like, in the crudest sense, he is an everyman with a brilliant mind.

Q: Does the villain who you play hark back to the Cold War?
A: I didn't see it that way and I guess I would say that because I'm playing him (laughs). We never referred to him as the 'villain' or the 'heavy guy.' And I've just played Macbeth here in the summer and there were four other versions of Macbeth going on so everything has been done before, everything in the world of classical drama and in the world of richly trodden genre stuff, so there is no question that we have the elements of things with which we might be familiar. But for us, the starting point was, 'who is Jack Ryan?' Jack Ryan lives in a world that we live in and know about from newspapers today where you have people questioning what should remain secret and what should not be secret. Do secrets revealed endanger the lives of us all or endanger the lives of those who allegedly are operating on our behalf? And so apropos are its Cold War antecedents; it's interesting and not as easy nowadays for someone like Jack Ryan to make a decision about how he enters the CIA. So the first third of our film is interesting territory where Kevin Costner's character has to some extent persuade or explain to a Jack Ryan in the 21st century why potentially working for a covert operation, if you believe such things are possible anymore, is a sensible way to serve and help your country. And we explore the difference between America and Russia.
And there are the other divisions that we have in this movie, which are between East and West, old and young, older and younger in terms of protagonist and antagonist, and old empire and new empire - in this case old empire is America and new empire is Russia potentially. And it's about financial empires and the way politics blurs into that and they are the kinds of things that Jack Ryan wants to know about and wants to take a view about. Jack Ryan is not a paid assassin; he's not being de-programmed and doesn't have a ton of fancy gadgets. He's a guy with a really sharp mind who wants to know why he is doing what he has been asked to do so it means he asks a lot of questions up front before he decides he's going to arrive abandoned, friendless, deceived and deceiving in Moscow.

Q: Chris Pine was already attached when you came to the project. Why is he the right actor for Jack Ryan?
A: Chris is a very smart, sexy lad and he's also very complex and has wit. I so loved his performance as Kirk in the first J.J. Abrams Star Trek movie. That's a terrific movie with substance and it's partly because the actors are all so good in it. Chris has intelligence and he has wit and he doesn't take himself too seriously and he has a bit of a twinkle in his eye. Chris can make you believe that his Jack Ryan is as smart as we needed him to be but kind of also in terms of the image that we could present, very WASPY. And that's what Jack Ryan is on the surface and we weren't denying that kind of DNA. And Chris is a very, very committed actor and performer. And when he arrived we had supper together on a Sunday night and I hadn't told him what I was planning to do.

Q: What did you have planned for him?
A: I said 'OK, tomorrow morning at 9 o'clock you're going to the City of London and you'll meet a compliance officer…' A compliance officer is somebody who works for the government really, but they are employed by the financial institutions so it's like having a spy in their midst. It's a legal requirement and the
interesting thing he discovered from talking to the compliance officer was that it can be a quite paranoid position to be in so already he was starting to find out about that. And then we took him to a leading Catholic priest to fill in on that part of Ryan's life that is influenced by Catholicism and having a spiritual confessor. And we made him do some spy stuff (laughs). We set up a 'drop' in a London park that was under surveillance by a dozen people and we told him with two minutes to go what he had to deliver and what he had to pick up and that he had a time limit on it and if he didn't do it, he would be potentially arrested by people who possibly didn't know that he was Chris Pine the actor or that he was involved in a piece of research. When I told him that, I did see the blood drain from his face (laughs). And when he finished it and we showed him the results in real time on CCTV footage, he said his pulse was racing and he thought his heart was going to come out of his body because he was so nervous. All he had to do was go to a London park and find the right bench and the right person but when you know you are being watched in that way, it can do strange things. But it was all helpful for Chris to get a sense of what doing this job would really be like.

Q: Did he do the drop?
A: He did it but he was caught acting suspiciously (laughs).

Q: Which park was it?
A: I can't tell you because we had to work with a lot of institutions that allowed us to do this so we could have all the hardware we needed. But what is interesting, I think is that in this story, Jack Ryan could be any of us - it's not James Bond or Jason Bourne. We would be very grateful if there were Bourne or Bond out there because they know what they are doing but Jack isn't that type of super-spy. He's a man with a brilliant mind who can predict whether there is going to be a financial crisis in Tokyo tomorrow and whether it will affect the Australian economy but what he has limited experience of is that kind of subterfuge and what to do if you get caught.

Q: So the preparation with Chris was all about linking up to various aspects of Jack Ryan's life?
A: Yes. For example, we took him to a rehab hospital in the southeast of England where they work with war veterans and that helped in terms of understanding the types of injuries that he might have sustained in a helicopter accident that we witness in the movie and so we already were into a whole different territory in terms of what we wanted to do with that character. And so by the end of that week of preparation, the first week that Chris had arrived in England and into proper rehearsals, and as soon as you put him into a room with Costner or Keira Knightley, it started to feel like we were doing a sort of character piece that happened to have an action movie built around it. And yes, we've seen Russian villains before, we've seen East versus West before, we've seen spy movies before, but our chance to make it different or original was to try and bring that specificity of character from the inside out and Chris was the one we started with and then we tried to apply it to everybody else.

Q: What about casting the actor who plays the Russian villain?
A: (laughs). Yes, the director had a hand in casting that particular actor. He discovered he was very, very cheap and very available and we knew where he was every minute of the day. Paramount kept asking me to do it and so did Chris and I realized that with that part we had actually managed to stop people from talking about it as the 'villain' or 'the baddie' and they started talking about Victor or Cherevin and everything became a bit more specific.

Q: How did you nail the accent?
A: To get the Russian accent, I started by listening to Russian radio and TV broadcasts so I could hear the language. I listened to Russian music and then we had a Russian advisor who came in and I started to speak some of it and I found that extremely difficult - it was like doing piano practice every day for a few months (laughs). I have an acting colleague who works with me and was keeping an eye on my performance so I would do rehearsals with him as well as with the writer, David Koepp, to make sure I could keep up with the other guys. I didn't just want to be coming in at the last minute and just saying my stuff so I had a parallel kind of preparatory period. I went to Moscow and met some slightly powerful and scary people. We definitely had some experiences of powerful people and became aware of the large sums of money that can swill around when it comes to these large interrelationships between financial institutions and sometimes government institutions. So we tried to get inside it in a human dimension. This is a human picture and not super human and that's where we started from.

Q: Could the premise of the film - that an oligarch and financial terrorism could threaten the world economy - really happen?
A: Well we know from our own experience of current news reports that it is possible for what appear to be smaller individual transactions or mistakes or miscalculations, whether it was way back with Lehman Brothers, to have huge repercussions. We also know that there is the possibility of corruption or incompetence at high levels within famous financial institutions or misappropriation of funds. And what we also know is that even if you put that financial bond in the perfect place and that is perfectly understood by a brilliant mind then, if all the variables we've talked about go together, it can be catastrophic and this does happen. There was an enormous impact, as we know, on the economy after 9/11 because of the reaction of the markets to that degree of instability, so it's something that is part of what is considered by those who wish to destabilize the financial order from the point of view of terrorism.

Q: Tell us about casting Keira Knightley as Cathy. A contemporary thriller seems like a bit of a departure from the kinds of roles she has done in the past…
A: Well first of all, we were trying to take the characters seriously and make sure that they have believable backgrounds. And essentially, one of the things David Koepp wanted to write about was deception inside a relationship. Jack and Cathy are not married at the beginning of the picture and Jack is hiding something. When you are in the CIA, you can't tell people you are a covert operative unless you are married and so there is a pressure that ultimately becomes something that she is suspicious of. And he wants to marry her so that he can tell her he is in the CIA, which is obviously not very romantic if you choose to absorb it only in that way. She is a smart professional woman in her own right, she is an eye surgeon and we get a sense of her own world as a professional in this and that she is a strong and passionate character rather than just the frightened woman that can be part of the cliché traps of this world. And I've always thought that Keira is a terrific actress. Most people wouldn't see it as a problem but the challenge for her is that she is extremely beautiful (laughs). I think some people can't see beyond that but I've always felt that she has a very intelligent, witty quality in her work. She was really a joy to work with. I think it was an interesting choice for her and as interesting in its own way as it was to do something like A Dangerous Method. I think you can see that she is having a real, proper career in addition to being a great beauty that has had great successes in period films, because they sometimes go together. She looks wonderful in some of the things we have seen her in visually and people think that somehow it's easy. Keira has a rigorous attitude to her work and she just happens to be a breathtakingly beautiful woman as well.

Q: Did you film all of the Moscow scenes in Moscow?
A: We were Moscow for some time, we were in New York for some time and we cheated in other places that weren't Moscow and New York.

Q: What was it like filming in Moscow?
A: It's a hectic pace (laughs). I wasn't quite geared up for how fast everybody drives in Moscow. I thought I had been in cities where people drive fast but they drive really fast in Moscow so crossing the road is tricky and if you are filming in the road, it's very tricky. I found it no more or less challenging (than filming in other places) but it's very noisy, very packed, and very dense and you have a sense of the landscape of that city changing very quickly. I felt that even in the time we were there I saw buildings go up and come down. There's a lot of construction and it gives a kind of physical energy to the place - it's fast and noisy and there's a tremendous intensity. It was quite a contrast to our time in New York, a city of equal but different intensity. And for me as a filmmaker I'd not
been to Moscow before so that was interesting to try and evoke what it was like and then evoke it elsewhere. I hadn't shot as a director in New York before so that was interesting, too and in both cases we employed the policy that Jack Ryan has in the movie - we had to be very fast moving and light on our feet.

Q: Which places doubled for Moscow?
A: We did some in Liverpool (in the UK) late at night where it was easier to go very fast in a car with the real Chris Pine in it in parts of Liverpool than it was in parts of Moscow. We wanted to make sure that he came back also at end of each time we sent him round the city. I find it easy to get lost in Moscow, at least that was my experience. We wanted more flexibility.

Q: Can you talk about your approach to the action sequences in the film?
A: Our attitude to some of the action stuff is to try and keep it quite human. It's more about how difficult it is for someone who is not used to being in a car chase finds it when he is in one - compared to somebody who can flip a car on to two wheels.

Q: The intelligence agencies in the US and Britain have been in the news a lot lately, not least because of Wiki-Leaks. Do you think there should be subject to tighter controls about how intelligence is gathered?
A: I think it's inevitable and necessary that there is a debate and the issue is addressed. The world has changed and without simply saying 'our film is so contemporary' it is true that one of the things David Koepp was interested in writing about was whether there is a line you draw beyond which we say to a government, an elected body in a so-called democratic society, 'it's all right, you make a decision for us, you decide what we need to know and if you think that a lot of people knowing this information makes us more at risk, then we empower you to make that choice.' The spirit of the new digital age is that information should be available to everyone and it should democratize our lives. And that's one point of view but on the other hand, we have so-called professionals telling us that it endangers us so it's a pretty vital area of debate. And the first third of our film is Jack Ryan asking those things of Kevin Costner's character and saying, 'why would I join up?' And also, 'why would I join up and trust you? I might be one of those 50,000 secrets and the first thing that happens is my wife gets killed...'

Q: Back when you started as a director could you ever imagine making big Hollywood films like Jack Ryan?
A: It's an evolution. I was saying to one of the kids on our show, Cinderella, the other day who was asking me the same thing: When I started in the British film industry, there really was a famine at that time because so few movies were being made here. At the moment, I'm working at Pinewood and we have all of our sets and I drive around the corner and we have Ridley Scott making Exodus with sets the size of Soho and you can't get in. Other filmmakers have to find spaces outside studios and there are tax incentives and the investment in filmmaking here in the UK is so huge. But I remember back then, it was really hard to even think that you would be in a movie, let alone make one. And nowadays, that has changed so completely and one's attitude to it has changed, too. For me, I see a link with the films I've made. The second film I made, Dead Again, was a thriller and that has a direct link to Jack Ryan.

Q: Let's talk about the character you play. Did you have any reference points in creating the character?
A: I think you look for anything where you feel you have been surprised by that kind of antagonist. You look at it from every which way. One was to look at the world of the Russian oligarch, ex Russian military - people from my generation who would have lived during the communist regime through to the explosion of the economic redevelopment with the invasion of other people who were telling the new Russia how to make money and then kicking out those people and saying, 'no, we'll have the money thank you very much..' And then there were the political/ commercial turf wars and everything. Cherevin is of an age that he would have lived across all of that. And it was interesting to find models that had been there before the wall came down in another part of the empire and who had lived through a period of economic and social wild, Wild West as some people I spoke to described it. And to have survived all of that, you have to be pretty tough. And sometimes you don't survive it even if you don't stay in Russia - as we know there are instances of people who have met bitter ends here in the UK in unusual ways. So that generation lived across a revolutionary period and so that in itself was a way of understanding that this is a different kind of person who isn't out to just rule the world.