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With Friday’s “A Haunting in Venice,” director-star Kenneth Branagh charts a surprisingly dark and sinister vision for this, his third Agatha Christie-Hercule Poirot murder mystery.
Where Branagh’s “Murder on the Orient Express” and “Murder on the Nile” were lavish, all-star scenarios complimented by extensive CGI, “Haunting” is set entirely in a 1947 Venetian palazzo on the Grand Canal shockingly visited by violent death.
It was screenwriter Michael Green who conceived the premise of a Halloween mystery by adapting Christie’s novel “Hallowe’en Party,” said executive producer James Prichard, CEO of the Agatha Christie Limited and the legendary author’s great grandson.
“At first I wasn’t quite sure what Michael wanted to do or why,” Prichard, 53, explained in a Zoom interview from London. “But his view was that we shouldn’t just do another big story in the traditional way, but maybe we should try something different, play with it a bit.
“One of the things I actually learned from my father” – Michael Prichard, Christie’s grandson, who’s now 80 and retired – “was you pick your partners very carefully and then you trust them.
“In terms of my role as the Chairman CEO of Agatha Christie Limited and Agatha Christie’s grandson, it’s much more towards before the actual filming. I believe very firmly that the script is the essence of all movies. Without a good script, you’re in trouble.”
Prichard smiled, “With a good script, you could be in trouble but definitely without one you’re in trouble. So I like to be involved quite heavily at that point and then I fade out of the picture.”
As to why Christie, who was 85 when she died in 1976, not simply endures but thrives, “I think one of the things is that everyone reads these stories very differently,” Prichard said.
The key to this continuing popularity, he believes, “Are these adaptations. They’re not literal copies of books or whatever’s come before.”
He cites the BBC’s determinedly dark 2015 version of Christie’s most popular book (100 million copies sold!), “And Then There None” scripted by Sarah Phelps.
“Sarah had a particular view of Agatha Christie stories; she read them in a very serious manner. Her ‘The Witness for the Prosecution” in 2016 is another very, very dark story. I think they lend themselves to that.
“My great grandmother wrote these extraordinary stories, which have these incredible plots, which can be updated and work in both the 20th and the 21st centuries. And work actually in multiple languages, which is why we have such an incredible following all over the world.”
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