Hugo: Ben Kingsley interview - 'My father died in a cloud of alcohol and resentment'

Francine Stock Let’s start at the beginning. You were born in 1943, in North Yorkshire, near Scarborough.

Sir Ben Kingsley On New Year’s Eve.

FS Your father was a doctor… Was there any kind of theatrical, thespian background at all?

BK Apparently either my father’s mother or his stepmother used to sing ghazals with an accordion. They’re very beautiful songs and they’re quite dramatic, so there was performance in his blood. And my mother was in a lot of films for the Korda Brothers. She was an extra and a fashion model.

Acting first [attracted me] when I was very little. A film was screened in Salford, where my dad was a GP. It was in black and white and it was about an orphaned Italian boy, Peppino, whose village had been bombed by the Allied forces and his sole companion was his donkey.

I looked just like him, and at the end I was in floods of tears. I decided that I was him and he was I, and then the cinema owner spotted me and mistook me for the star. He grabbed me and lifted me above the crowd saying, “It’s little Peppino, it’s little Peppino!”

FS And you didn’t protest?

BK I thought, “This is rather good, I could get used to this.” I conducted the next few years followed by an invisible camera crew and an invisible donkey. I just so wanted to be part of that narrative tradition.

Then, by great fortune, I was auditioned by a Tie – Theatre in Education – company, and they mounted plays and excerpts of plays for schoolchildren. I went to some very tough schools in south London [and performed] excerpts from Julius Caesar, from Romeo & Juliet – my first taste of playing Shakespeare in front of kids at a very early age. That was my baptism really.

FS And you changed your name?

BK I auditioned for Rada and I remember sitting in the waiting room with the chap with the list of auditionees, if that’s the word. He called out “Kristina Blange!” and nobody moved, and then I thought “Oh gosh, that’s me!” Because my name, Krishna Bhanji, in my awful handwriting, looked like Kristina Blange. So up gets Kristina Blange out of his/her chair and with a breaking, sinking heart does quite a passable bit from Richard III, but doesn’t get in.

I told this story to my dad, who was very pragmatic, and he said “change your name”, and I did. So I got Ben from dad’s nickname, Bhanji-Benjy-Benjamin-Ben. He was called Ben by all his pals at school and beyond. And Kingsley from his dad’s nickname because his dad was a spice trader in East Africa, so successful that he was called Clove King, or King of the Cloves, so I got Kingsley from that. It’s in there, my heritage.

FS We’re going to move forwards to Gandhi. You’ve spoken in the past about finding your way to the heart of him. Apart from reading books, what other devices or methods did you employ?

BK I like to have a phrase, or a piece of invented mythology that catalyses my whole performance. With Gandhi it was to do with anger, rage and indignation. My key scene in the film was being thrown off a train and my little bit of mythology was “Once upon a time they threw a man off a train. Big mistake”. Be very careful who you bully because sometimes that person can intellectually manoeuvre themselves with such brilliance into being a very, very serious adversary.

FS I look at the scale of Gandhi, the number of people [in the cast, and think that] these days the crowd scenes would be partly rendered with CGI.

BK Totally. Those extras totally changed my body chemistry every time Dickie said “Action!” It was amazing. Just the sheer input of all their affection and concentration.

FS Immediately afterwards you did Pinter’s Betrayal, then there’s a whole string of films leading towards your encounter with Steven Spielberg for Schindler’s List.

BK I had already had the privilege of playing Simon Wiesenthal in a wonderful Disney Showtime miniseries, and therefore I was acquainted with the Holocaust and how it remains to this day totally inexplicable and unforgivable and indigestible. I was very reluctant, I was frightened of going back into that era [for Schindler’s List].

FS You’ve said before that Spielberg is one of those directors that you know immediately you’re going to be able to work with. How can you tell?

BK It’s the level of attention that he gives that’s devoid of all flattery. You can always tell feigned attention because you begin to squirm at the flattery of it. All the great directors I’ve worked with have a layer peeled away from their retina. You never have to scrabble around with your actor’s begging bowl to ask them if they like this bit or that bit.

FS There was an Oscar nomination for Sexy Beast [in which Kingsley played arch criminal Don Logan]. With Logan there’s not a great deal of obvious ambiguity, but ambiguity is there in many of your roles, including House of Sand and Fog, which is from 2003 [and for which Kingsley was again nominated for an Oscar]. As the title implies, it’s really about shifting perceptions.

BK Yes, indeed.

FS Was that one of the things that appealed to you about the script?

BK Now, I promised my wife that I wouldn’t talk about my childhood, but here we go. My dad, much as I loved him, was very absent. You could not really describe him as a great patriarch. He disappeared and died in a cloud of alcohol and resentment and sadness through a whole series of parts of his history that would be indigestible for anybody.

So I never honestly had a patriarch in my life. In fact, I didn’t have any elders in my life that I felt secure with, that I could breathe with, that I felt were there, were listening, were attentive. So what hugely attracted me to House of Sand and Fog was that [my character] Colonel Behrani was the patriarch, as was Itzhak Stern, as was Otto Frank, as was Meyer Lansky, as was Mahatma Gandhi, they’re all patriarchs. And that comprehension of that word, from a child’s point of view, is missing in my life.

FS So you kind of imagined it?

BK I have to invent that. As a dad myself, I love playing dads on screen to explore that which wasn’t present in my life as a child. That kind of sobriety and sternness and deep-rooted patriarchy in Behrani was something that greatly appealed to me. I think, probably in years and years and years and years to come if you wanted to show a biography of me you could definitely not use any documentary footage whatsoever, but stick a montage of my work together and I’d be there, absolutely be there.

FS Now we’re going to talk about your two collaborations with Martin Scorsese, Shutter Island and Hugo.

BK I still can’t believe it, I still pinch myself when you say that. With Martin Scorsese there’s a guarantee that the camera will be in exactly the right place, day after day, take after take, lens, position of camera, light all perfect for the narrative of your character.

So even though Marty and Thelma [Schoonmaker], his editor, say that I was different in every take and so subtle, I wasn’t really. The subtle changes were going on around me as to how Marty was perceiving me. Marty sometimes saw me as the walls of the room were seeing me and other times he saw me as Leo [DiCaprio, his co-star] was seeing me, through a prism of utter terror and paranoia.

FS Shutter Island had the most extraordinary mood to it, but some critics found the whole conceit quite difficult to grasp. They felt it was overblown in some ways.

BK Well, I don’t read reviews so you’ve got me there.

FS Never?

BK No, never. I’m just too vulnerable, even if the notices are overwhelmingly stunning it’s that one bad one that will have me waking up at four o’clock in the morning asking, “Why? why? why?” I’m not strong enough.

FS Hugo has been described as a great departure for Scorsese; it’s his first film in 3D.

BK The 3D camera brings such a level of scrutiny. It demands a very strict economy on your performance, an exactness.

My journey as an actor, hopefully, is to become more and more economic like those wonderful Japanese painters who will start out doing a painting of a lake and a tree and two fishermen and a bird in 32 strokes, and when they’re 107, they do it in one stroke.

And it’s all there, but it’s one stroke of the pen.

FS And that is a goal, something that you’re consciously saying to yourself?

BK Do less. Do less.

FS I wanted to ask you, given your interest in real life and fiction, whether there were any real people, historical or still alive you’d like to play?

BK There are a few, they’re on our slate of films in development and there are three hugely important biographical characters that I’d like to play.

Admiral Lord Jellicoe, who commanded the British fleet at the Battle of Jutland; William Shakespeare, dying in his house, dictating his will to his lawyer Francis Collins; and Shah Jahan, who built the Taj Mahal.

• This is an edited transcript of a conversation which took place in London as part of the Bafta Life in Pictures series. Hugo, starring Ben Kingsley, is out now