San Francisco Chronicle, 22 April 2012
By Pam Grady
*Thanks Renie

Branagh is pleased the SFIFF has chosen to screen "Dead Again," his second film and one he recalls with fondness. The success of "Henry V" opened doors in Hollywood for him - but only so far. His dream was to make an adaptation of Thomas Hardy's "Return of the Native." The studios weren't interested, but the executives at Paramount were very kind, letting him down gently. They also gave him a script to read by Scott Frank that had been knocking around the industry for some time, a mystery paralleling the relationships between a modern-day Los Angeles private detective and his amnesiac client and that of a 1940s era German refugee composer and his bride.

At the time, Branagh was playing Edgar in "King Lear" at the Mark Taper Forum in L.A.. While waiting for the curtain to go up that night, he read the first page aloud to then-wife Emma Thompson, vowing to put the script aside if it didn't grab their attention immediately. He kept reading through the night, stopping only to step onstage.

"In between my scenes, I read the rest of the screenplay," he says. "It was quirky and unusual. I think a few people had been put off in terms of how to do it, but to me that quirkiness, the thriller element, the reincarnation angle, the double lives part of it and the European-slash-American kind of intersection was un-put-downable. I remember I rang Paramount the next day and said, 'I want to do this.'

"We were on a real adventure, to be in Hollywood, to be playing these parts," he adds of his and Thompson playing the dual roles. "It was really one of the most enjoyable experiences in film I ever had."

Branagh, who directed last year's epic "Thor," might direct the next Jack Ryan film, and next year he is set to helm "The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society." His acting career continues apace with another season of the "Wallander" TV series due out this year. He felt a jolt of recognition recently when he saw Richard Linklater's "Me and Orson Welles," in which Welles directs and acts and works in theater and radio and prepares to leave for Hollywood to make "Citizen Kane."

"I don't suggest for a second that I'm trying to compare myself to Welles, but just to see a slightly mad, central figure there occasionally rings a bell and the blurry lines between the mediums and the feeling that it's all part of the same thing," he says.

"I do relish the opportunity to act and direct," he adds. "They seem to me interwoven. I relish it all. After 30-odd years to still be doing it constitutes a thrill and surprise."