All of those things seemed like a great backdrop. That whole place makes you understand why there was a revolution in France, it’s just so extraordinary, and it’s full of hidden doors, it’s full of ways of getting through rooms that makes you feel that the people in those places must have felt incredibly paranoid and concerned with their privacy. The hall of mirrors in Versailles is an extraordinary thing. I just felt it was very, very decadent, and it seemed to be very right for Hamlet, which I wanted to get right away from the kind of gothic, gloomy, glowering castles and things, which has been done, and done very well in previous versions, so over the years I was always kind of pursuing how to try and bring that on, and obviously various places like Versailles. I saw a film called Mayerling in the late ’60s, which was about a scandal in the 19th century involving the Austro-Hungarian royal family and a prince who got involved with a kind of illegitimate child, and the world of that film was all candles and mirrors and corruption. KB: Actually, the very first production of Hamlet I was in when I was 20, which was in drama school, was more or less set in this period, though it was a very, very spare production.

What made you change the setting to the nineteenth century?

Branagh hamlet full movie