The older Kenneth Branagh gets, the more he values 90-minute movies. “Maybe that's a bladder issue. I don't know,” he jokes on the set of Disney’s Artemis Fowl. Though, he admits he “inflicted very, very long movie experiences on people” in the past. While in between shooting the movie adaptation of author Eoin Colfer’s fantasy book series, he would “watch a 90-minute classic” and “see how master filmmakers did things swiftly.” That doesn’t necessarily mean Artemis Fowl will be a “rushed” experience, he clarifies. More so that he’s “celebrating the swiftness of thought, which is characteristic of the Irish and of [Colfer] and of the central character.”

So, in the swiftest way possible, Branagh introduces Fandango to the world of Artemis Fowl, direct from the set.

Artemis Fowl II, played by newcomer Ferdia Shaw, is a 12-year-old criminal mastermind. He’s a descendant of a long line of criminal masterminds, so it fits the bill. He’s like Lara Croft in the sense that he’s a wealthy adventurer aided by a butler (Game of Thrones’ Nonso Anozie) who is looking for ancient artifacts on his larger journey to find his missing father — only he’s more self-centered and more believing in the existence of fairies, alluding to his prepubescent age bracket.

On his mission, he confirms his suspicions — that fairies are real, living mostly underground in a vast, intricate, fantastical city that’s far more advanced than anything humans have created.

Branagh was keen on introducing his version of Artemis “at a real school, like the kids who'll be watching this film will be seeing.” Though this kid regularly deals with troll attacks at his mansion in Ireland. Artemis’ Irish heritage will be a “distinctive flavor” of the character on screen, which Shaw brings to the set — aside from his immunity to be “overwhelmed or intimated” by a big-budget production.

Judi Dench — that’s Dame Judi Dench to us common folk — plays Commander Root, head of the LEPrecon reconnaissance police force of the fairies. The character is a cigar-smoking male in the books, but for the film, how could Branagh not cast Dench in a more androgynous role.

“I worked with her many times now and there was just something that the great theater director Peter Brook referred to as the uninformed hunch,” Branagh, who worked with Dench most recently on Murder on the Orient Express, says. He tries to explain, “Whenever I ask Judi to do something, she asks, ’Is it different?’”

Commander Root, marked by pointed elf ears and an emerald police uniform, is definitely something different. But more on that later when the LEPrecon authorities allow us to report such intel.

It hasn’t been an easy process adapting Colfer’s work for the screen. Branagh has been at it for three years now, but the effort predates him. “It's exciting, but it's a little scary,” he says of adapting this world. Luckily, he already has world-building experience working on the first Thor movie.

“When it comes to something like this and we're talking about the many, many kinds of fairies -- elves, sprites, trolls, goblins that live under the earth -- and at the same time you’re looking to have a very contemporary feeling modern world that embraces technology and quite advanced technology, I do not feel so intimated,” the director remarks.

Branagh’s biggest guide was Colfer’s books, which are “very rapid, very punchy, and pacy.” He hopes to convey the same with his film — hence his appreciation for 90-minute movies. “We've changed a few things that are to do with the translation of the book into a film, especially for a first-time audience,” he explains. The writers, in consultation with Colfer, “came up with a few things” and they got a “gosh, I wish I had thought of that” moment from the original author. “He said, ‘I didn't put it in the book, I’ll certainly put it in the reissue,” Branagh laughs.

One of the biggest changes involves the incorporation of Colfer’s second book in the Artemis Fowl series, subtitled The Arctic Incident, which mainly deals with Artemis’ missing dad. The filmmaker can’t quite map out potential future films at this point, but he definitely made room to accommodate future plots.

“We‘re trying to hold onto as much of the first book in its entirety as possible,” Branagh mentions. “We’re trying to lay out what may skew on [future stories], but essentially we're trying to service this first one with an anchoring, emotional pull that comes from a bit of the second book, which is that Artemis' father is missing. And so the search for a father and the search for family and the reunion of family is, if there are only six or seven stories that are told, that's definitely one of them.”

Artemis Fowl opens in theaters on Aug. 9, 2019.