Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent
Thursday November 3, 2005, The Guardian

Kenneth Branagh is to direct a film of The Magic Flute, with a libretto translated from the German by Stephen Fry.

The opera - Mozart's fantastical tale of the triumph of lovers Tamino and Pamina against the evil Queen of the Night, complete with masonic overtones, pyramids, lethal serpents and a lustful Moor - will be set in the first world war.

The $27m (£15.2m) venture, which starts shooting in January, is being financed by the 73-year-old Littlewoods heir Peter Moores, whose charitable foundation has supported opera recordings sung in English for decades. "It's not the world of the small chequebook," he said.

His dream of bringing opera to film audiences has been brewing for 15 years. "My original idea was to ask Richard Attenborough. I have about two ideas every morning. Most of them die, but some of them live on under the floorboards."

The Chamber Orchestra of Europe, under James Conlon, recorded the opera in September with the cast, who will mime on set at Shepperton studios.
The cast includes German bass René Pape as the wise ruler Sarastro and Lyubov Petrova as the Queen of the Night. Joseph Kaiser and Ben Davis, both veterans of film director Baz Luhrmann's Broadway production of La Bohème, sing Tamino and Papageno respectively. A complete unknown, recent Cambridge graduate Amy Carson, sings Pamina.

The three ladies who accompany the Queen of the Night will be recast as field nurses, and the feathered man, Papageno, will become the custodian of canaries used to detect lethal gas.

Después de ser Oscar Wilde, el sr. Fry se ha tomado demasiado en serio lo de ser scritor, no?

le Shakespeare de Branagh is maravilloso ! ! !