Master thespian Sir Ben Kingsley has played a lot of varied roles and ethnicities in the last few years and at this year's Sundance Film Festival, he appears in two independent films as two very different characters.
In Jonathan Levine's second movie The Wackness, he plays Dr. Jeffrey Squires, a new age psychiatrist who befriends his young patient (and pot dealer) Luke, played by Joshua Peck, and tries to help him do better with the ladies, only for Luke to hook up with the doctor's step-daughter Stephanie (Olivia Thirlby). In his other movie, Brad Anderson's Transsiberian, Kingsley plays a corrupt Russian police officer who plagues an American couple on a train speeding across Russia.
ComingSoon.net had a chance to sit down with Sir Ben at the Sundance Film Festival--our fourth or fifth time talking to the venerable actor--and as always, he was an absolute joy to talk to as we discussed both movies with side trips into Shakespeare... and bongs.
(Also, check out our interview with Joshua Peck here.)
ComingSoon: Jonathan Levine mentioned how the two of you talked about trying to find resonance with this character. You must have spent some time in New York during that time period.
Sir Ben Kingsley: Once in a while, but not in that era, more recently I've been, but not then.
CS: He told me that you found some Shakespearean references in your character.
Kingsley: Well, when I talked to Jonathan briefly, we didn't have great, deep debates, but we're always chatting while we're filming. It doesn't necessarily have to hinge on the film we're doing; it can be about anything. I just love the relationship between Prince Hal and Falstaff in "Henry IV Part 1 and 2" and even though Hal eventually banishes Falstaff from his court, Falstaff is taught a great deal about the people in his kingdom that he would never meet, I'm not saying low life, but people who just live from day-to-day by hard work and trickery and villainy and dedication and just the hard slog of daily life. I'm sure that Falstaff helps Hal to mature and I'm sure Hal helps Falstaff to examine his own dignity and his own mortality. So yeah, like finding those references, but they're just little conversational touch points that the director and I bond over. They are sustaining, because you know that you're dealing with an eternal theme of the dialogue between two men--one who is supposed to be an adult and teacher and the other is the child and pupil that actually their roles are completely reversed. Josh becomes the adult and I am the child. (chuckles)
CS: I don't think I would have ever put those two together, but I wish I talked to you before writing my review because a Falstaff reference would have made it sound like I was really smart. Of course, Shakespeare didn't have marijuana back in his days.
Kingsley: No, they had massive amounts of alcohol.
CS: That pot culture must have been a very strange thing to delve into.
Kingsley: Very strange, but the screenplay is so well-written, so well-researched. The prop department was so meticulous about the accoutrements they gave me that accompany drugs because I know nothing at all. It gave me the energy of the really curious because I knew so little about it, I was keen to know, it was fascinating to me, this thing called a "bong" with the water in it and the noise it makes and the smoke that comes out of it. What I find rather endearing about Squires is even when he's interviewing patients, it's as if he's never done it before. He's always in the moment as a child, but not as an experienced adult. Even when I smoke my drugs, my marijuana, although he's a seasoned drug user, he looks as though he's never done it before, that he can't remember what bit goes where. He's very forgetful, he has the mind of a child. He has no retention. He can't hold a tought.
CS: Drugs will do that to you though.
Kingsley: Yeah, they will. In a sense, he's perpetuating childhood artificially. He doesn't want to grow up.
CS: I assume you've seen the movie with an audience so how do you react when the audience explodes with laughter when Sir Ben Kingsley takes a bong hit?
Kingsley: Well, I hope it's not that, because that would be a shame. I hope it's the character doing it. I really hope so, because the other wears a bit thin after a while. In time, I hope that that just drifts away. I think it's the psychiatrist picking up the bong, I don't think it's me. You know, he just had an in depth psychiatric session ending with this. I think that's the humor in it, but I don't know.
CS: I've talked to you for a few of your movies and you've played different characters each time, and this is a different look for you.
Kingsley: It is. I wanted to look just like that and Jonathan was great about it. I had that hairpiece made in Canada on another movie and we sent photographs over the Internet to him and he was very trusting. He said, "I think that's a great look." He allowed me to occupy the character from the inside outwards and I felt very comfortable, really right, in the costume, the dark glasses, the hair, the beard. And then the mannerisms and the gestures, and his forgetful nature, and the incongruity of the drugs and the wisdom and then the drugs and then the wisdom. Seeing it with an audience is delightful, because Jonathan got us so into character that after only a week or two of filming, we didn't realize we were being funny, neither were we trying to be funny.
CS: It's like you were just being those people.
Kingsley: Exactly. He has this wonderful way of creating characters and then he allows them to behave and he films their behavior and it's wonderful.
CS: I'm sure I've asked you this before and I'm sure everyone asks you this, but when you do these different looks and accidents, is part of it trying to get away from being Ben Kingsley on screen?
Kingsley: I was able to use my own voice in "Elegy" with Penelope Cruz and Dennis Hopper. Although the character is written as an American university professor, I asked the writers and the director if I could use my own voice, because it made me dangerously close to the character and therefore made playing him very dangerous and thrilling, because I couldn't hide behind an accent or a disguise, or anything. Sometimes, I feel I'm a little bit hiding behind it, I'm not really out there with the character, so it was great to use my own voice, but in "Transsiberian," I'm Russian.
CS: Did you actually shoot all of that movie out there on the train?
Kingsley: We had fourteen miles of track in Lithuania to use at our will, which was amazing and the snow was deeper than it is here. It was very cold and the landscape is like a character in that film and that isolated red monster crushing through this frozen landscape is very beautiful to look at.
CS: What else do you have going on?
Kingsley: I have a lot. "Elegy" I filmed earlier this year, "The Wackness," "War, Inc." with John Cusack, "Man on the Run," which is a film I did about the IRA in Northern Ireland just before Christmas.
CS: Is that a period piece?
Kingsley: It's 1988, about the IRA, and then I did a film with Mike Myers called "The Love Guru."
CS: Is that finished?
Kingsley: Yes, I finished that and I start my Scorsese film in about two months.
CS: Have you ever worked with him before?
Kingsley: No, so I've got massive amounts going on. It's really exciting.
CS: Is the writers strike affecting you at all?
Kingsley: It affects me as a fellow filmmaker and I hope they get it resolved, I'm sure it will be, it has to be resolved. It's no good treating the strike as an aberration or a mistake, it's part of our business, it's like growing pains, it has to shift and stretch every few years.
The Wackness hasn't yet been picked up for distribution but considering the audience of adoring young fans the movie has found at Sundance, there's little doubt that should change soon.
