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BRANAGH’S NEW FANTASY THRILLER
IF YOU LIKE HARRY POTTER, YOU’LL LOVE THE MAGICAL WORLD OF TROLLS, DWARVES AND FAIRIES IN KEN BRANAGH’S NEW FILM ARTEMIS FOWL. HERE HE TELLS HOW HE BROUGHT THEM TO LIFE...
This is teen fantasy – with a difference. In the dazzling new movie Artemis Fowl, a young boy goes in search of his missing father but finds himself not in a world full of the futuristic technology you might expect, but the mythical creatures we all learned about as children in fairy tales. It’s a world of magic somewhere beneath the ground, where dwarves spar with gnomes, trolls are best avoided because of their propensity to eat people (‘good to know’, notes young Artemis dryly when he learns this) and law and order is maintained by the Lower Elements Police Force, whose elite branch is known as Leprecon.
The film, beautifully shot on location in England, Northern Ireland and Vietnam, begins with an unkempt figure sitting at a table being addressed by an unseen interrogator. ‘We want to know everything about the man you work for,’ demands the voice. ‘This isn’t about the father,’ the shaggy figure replies, shaking his head. ‘This is about the son...’
And so we enter the world of Artemis Fowl. The character in the film has been made less of a villain than the young master criminal of the book series by Irish writer Eoin Colfer. There are eight books in total, but the film is based on the first two, published in 2001 and 2002. Artemis is the computer genius son of a sharp-dressing millionaire art collector who has more than a few secrets in his closet. But when Artemis Sr suddenly goes missing, his son learns that he must descend to Haven City, the capital of the Lower Elements world of the fairy creatures, in order to rescue him.
For Kenneth Branagh – who directs the film starring teenagers Ferdia Shaw as Artemis and Lara Mcdonnell as Holly Short, the Lower Elements Police Officer who will be his guide – the challenge to take on the material was irresistible. Having directed both Thor in 2011 and Cinderella in 2015 he’s now an old hand at myths and fairy tales, and he was backed up in this endeavour by acclaimed playwright Conor Mcpherson (best known for The Weir) and Hamish Mccoll (Johnny English Reborn) as screenwriters.
‘Eoin Colfer gives you such a broad canvas to work from,’ says Kenneth. ‘There is the modern world of course, and set against that there’s Haven City, a world of fairies living under all that emerald green grass in Ireland. In Haven City you get everything – goblins, dwarves, trolls. You get this whole cityscape and the police force protecting it. Because Eoin wrote eight books, we could pilfer from the rest of them to understand all the things he developed later in his very vivid imagination. A lot of it was completely new, so our task was trying to make sure that every time we presented some new creature or some new craft or way of transportation, we sprinkled it with some very special Artemis Fowl-style fairy dust.’
He says he thought long and hard about the costumes, with Artemis clad in a sharply tailored black suit and tie. ‘We wanted to give Artemis a sort of superhero costume that was in keeping with the fact that he’s already years ahead of himself in terms of intelligence. He starts out as a regular sweatshirt-wearing Irish boy, but when he starts to look for his father he wants to look like whatever his version of cool is.’
When it came to the fairies, Kenneth (who was born in Belfast and spent the first nine years of his life there) decided to stick as closely as possible to the book’s Irish heritage. ‘We wanted to acknowledge the roots that come from that tradition of myths and fairy tales, so we had the pointed ears on the fairies and the colours of Ireland in the clothes, the browns and greens, the shades of running brooks and ferns and surf.
‘On the other hand, because there’s also a lot of action in the film, we wanted to have clothes that were aerodynamically sleek, that you could move around in and perform stunts in. All the actors
had input into their costumes, and Lara in particular was brilliantly agile and had good opinions.’
He admits it took him more than a year before he settled on the two young leads. At 16 Lara has already played the title role in the
West End production of
Matilda, as well as appearing on TV in To
Walk Invisible, while
Ferdia, 15, grandson of legendary Jaws actor
Robert Shaw, is making his professional debut here.
‘It was a long process,’ says Kenneth. ‘We met a ton of kids of that age from all over the globe, and one of the ways of working out whether or not they were right for the part was to talk to them about what interested them. One of the things I noticed in both Ferdia and Lara was the speed of their thought, their dexterity with ideas and their familiarity with the ideas that both Eoin, and JK Rowling, were pioneering in their books.’ Joining the young leads are a couple of Ken’s regular stable of actors: his old friend Judi
Dench, rocking pointy ears and an Irish accent as Leprecon head Commander Root (‘She takes the work very seriously,’ says Ken, ‘but she also laughs a lot’), and Murder On The Orient Express’s Josh Gad as Artemis and Holly’s helper, the ‘giant dwarf’ Mulch Diggums.
‘Mulch, in our version, is not a full dwarf,’ says Josh. ‘He’s half-dwarf and half-gnome, and in the underworld the difference between dwarves and gnomes is not only their height, but the fact that dwarves are excellent at mining because they use their mouths to do it. Because Mulch has dwarf blood he uses this ability to great effect, mining with his mouth to dig through dirt and break into places to benefit himself and others.’ Like many of the cast, Josh says he had a lot of fun with the special effects. ‘There was one sequence I had with a giant troll puppet that was controlled by three puppeteers. It was a chase sequence that had me hanging off a giant chandelier. It’s moments like that which make you think, “What is my life? This is so surreal!”’ A smaller role in the film, but no less essential, was that of Artemis Sr. ‘I came late to the party, because the film had been shot when they added my character in,’ says Colin Farrell who plays him, and is the father of two sons in real life. ‘Artemis’s father had been mentioned, but because he was such a fundamental part of the tale they felt his absence more as the film went on. I went in to shoot those scenes six months later, which was a bit mad.’ Most of his scenes were with Ferdia, who he describes as ‘an absolute joy. I think our scenes are important, as was the mythological background to the story, and I would love it if this film were to inspire a greater dialogue in the audience between fathers and sons – and mothers and daughters too – about the stories they grew up with, because there is an incredible emotional and psychological education to be found there.’
nArtemis Fowl is available now on Disney+.