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Making Belfast, his semi-autobiographical eulogy to his childhood in the Northern Ireland capital during the Troubles of the late 1960s, was — understandably — a deeply emotional experience for Kenneth Branagh. But Ciarán Hinds, who the filmmaker brought on board to play his beloved grandfather (aka Pop), says that it was for him as well.
Also born in Belfast — although in 1953, almost eight years earlier than Branagh — Hinds claims that he knew he was dealing with “something very special” within a few pages of reading the script.
“There are things that arrive sometimes in your life that you can almost taste them as you read them,” he told THR Presents, powered by Vision Media. “The truth and the atmosphere that Ken had carved into this scenario just touched me deeply, and as I was reading it I started visualizing going back into my grandparents’ life, into their backyard, into their front room. All these memories started flooding back.”
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Alongside being instantly drawn in by his own personal connection to the story, Hinds says that as soon as he was told that Judi Dench would be playing his on-screen wife — Branagh’s dear ‘granny’ — he knew there was no way he was “going to pull out.”
Branagh began writing Belfast at the start of lockdown in 2020, using the sudden quietness and solitude to deal with what he describes as “unfinished business” he had with a city he left at age 9 as violence erupted between loyalists and republicans. “It was the accumulation of decades of not quite shaking this thing from my past and the story of my Belfast came pouring out.”
Due to COVID-19 restrictions, the Belfast production couldn’t use a street in the real-life city that resembled where Branagh grew up, so one was painstakingly built on the carpark of a — closed — exhibition centre in Farnborough, south-west of London, with a pop-up studio erected next to a nearby airport (also shut due to the pandemic). And despite it being an imitation, the set stirred up strong childhood memories for both Branagh and Hinds.
“For me, it was walking onto Pop’s backyard and the crowded junk shop, Willy Wonka factory of my grandfather’s sort of workshop, where he did all his finagling,” said Branagh. “Seeing that was pretty magical — that was time travel.”
Hinds claimed that the set was “extraordinary in its detail” and recalled spying a pair of wooden skis in the corner and thinking, “Skis? In Belfast?” before realizing that it didn’t matter; they were just something that could be sold to make a bit of money.
“They lived fairly hand to mouth as the times were economically bad, so whatever you could get your hands on, you tried to shine it up, buff it up and sell it for an extra penny or two,” he said. “And my grandfather was like that.”
Belfast also stars Jamie Dornan, Caitriona Balfe and Jude Hill.
This edition of THR Presents was brought to you by Focus Features.
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