Zen and the art of urgency

Kevin Maher has a man-to-man with the Oscar-winning actor, who tells him: ‘If we, as men, can talk like this, then I have done my job really well.’

IKNEW we were in for a humdinger from the moment Sir Ben Kingsley stopped me at the door of his hotel suite and wouldn’t let me inside until I corrected my own grammar.

‘‘No, you’re not ‘good’!’’ he said, gripping my hand tightly, seemingly shocked by my mumbled reply to his opening ‘‘How are you?’’

‘‘You are well! You’re not good! That’s an Americanism! You are well!’’

Actually, I say, I’m not that well either: I’m shattered. He nods silently and gives me a pitying look that suggests I might have just over-shared. Although, in retrospect, compared with what was to follow, that was nothing.

We meet to talk about Kingsley’s two new movies, Exodus: Gods and Kings and Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb, as well as the life and works so far of the 70-year-old Oscar winner, incessant performer (he has eight new movies and a mini-series on the way) and creator of iconic roles such as Gandhi, Itzhak Stern in Schindler’s List, Don Logan in Sexy Beast and my personal favourite Massoud Amir Behrani, the stern Iranian father in House of Sand and Fog (for which he received his fourth Oscar nomination).

Kingsley’s suite is dark, lit by lamplight, curtains half closed. The effect is akin to visiting a fortune teller or a psychotherapist. Dressed in grey suit and black shirt, the father of four (the children are from two mothers; he has been married four times) tends to speak in musical analogies and aphoristic pronouncements that drive his detractors wild. (‘‘Change is mortality,’’ he later says. ‘‘And if you wish to be immortal nothing must change.’’)

It has become fashionable to sneer at Kingsley, to pillory his ‘‘luvvie’’ pretensions and to take swipes at his enjoyment of knight bachelor status (even though he’s told anyone who will listen for the past decade: ‘‘It’s not Sir Ben; Ben is just fine’’).

For now, though, he tackles Exodus, in which he plays Nun, an ageing Hebrew mentor to Christian Bale’s Moses. The movie is a sumptuous biblical adaptation from Ridley Scott (budgeted allegedly at £90 million (NZ$181m) depicting the 10 plagues of Egypt (now that’s what I call frogs), yet it deliberately offers an ambiguous reading of their origins, leaving a way open for agnostic viewers to see Moses as delusional and the plagues as geophysical events.

‘‘I think Ridley’s approach is very mature,’’ Kingsley says. ‘‘He’s saying that if these are natural occurrences, they came together so remarkably that it must’ve been seen as a series of signs to a desperate people. It’s mature and, with great respect to the Old Testament, it’s a less lazy approach and very exciting as a story.’’

I wonder how he fared on set with Scott, a director, known for his, well, ‘‘unfussy’’ treatment of actors. He grins and with a hint of the victor asks: ‘‘Is there a modest answer? It’s like tennis. You hit it back. It comes at you a different way. Then you whack it back.’’

The most intriguing thing about the movie seems to be in the subtext (for all its spectacle and wow factor, the Moses story is still ‘‘just’’ the Moses story and grimly familiar), where Moses is essentially depicted as the nutso instigator of a fanatical holy war against the establishment.

Again, he says that Scott’s approach is mature and adds: ‘‘Certain patterns of human behaviour are barely below the surface of the skin and have not changed. Truthfully, we must accept this, especially as Europeans, that we have yet to evolve to a point where we can stop killing one another.’’

Multiple anecdotes describe a harsh patriarch snapping the young Krishna away from dreams and happiness until finally the boy decides to become an actor in a deliberate attempt to one day create the father figure within him that he never had at home. Seriously.

‘‘I am actually filling a vacuum with the fathers that I play,’’ he says with a quiet sigh. ‘‘By playing Gandhi, Itzhak Stern, Massoud Behrani, I am filling the vacuum in me. In little Krishna.’’ At which point he puts his hand out, parallel to the floor, to indicate a small child. It’s a simple gesture, perhaps theatrical but very touching.

IWANT to move on to House of Sand and Fog, and to the scene in which Kingsley’s formerly stern Behrani cradles his dying boy in his arms and repeats, in trauma, ‘‘I want only my son.’’ I want to tell him that the scene seems to speak to an entire generation of men, perhaps all generations of men, who struggle with this hollow mantle of achievement, of striving, of earning and of winning, and would swap it all at the last minute for the chance to go back and hold their children close to their hearts and whisper quietly: ‘‘I want only you.’’ Instead, what I actually say is, ‘‘That scene is one of the saddest things I’ve ever seen.’’ Then I start to cry (probably lack of sleep). Which is not what you do during an interview.

Kingsley, who has welled up before during media chats, is unflustered. Like Don Logan from Sexy Beast, he firmly barks, ‘‘Good! Good! Good!’’ while I hold my question sheet up to my face and get myself together. ‘‘You see,’’ he says, when the coast is clear, ‘‘if we, as men, can talk like this, then it means that I have done my job really well. Because my job, on a good day, is putting my hand on somebody’s shoulder and saying . . .’’ he leans forward and says solemnly: ‘‘I know.’’

It’s all getting a bit Good Will Hunting and so instead of going in for the tear-drenched bear hug we move on to Sexy Beast.

Kingsley remembers meeting a nervous Asian cinemagoer after a screening of the movie and hissing at him, in pure Don-style, ‘‘What the f*** are you looking at?’’ He says that he couldn’t resist and that they shared a laugh afterwards.

We then do the cursory runthrough of the career, from his early days in the 1970s at the RSC to his disillusionment with it in the early 1980s to the call from Richard Attenborough to audition for Gandhi. ‘‘At the time I just felt that Bapu [an affectionate nickname for Gandhi, meaning Dad] was something I needed. ‘I need you Gandhiji. Because you are something that’s missing in my life.’ ’’ He fires me a look, hoping I won’t blub.

We talk about the eight movies he has coming up (including the kids’ blockbuster The Jungle Book and Terrence Malick’s Knight of Cups) and he decides that one of the keys to his longevity, his youthful outlook and sprightly appearance is that he still feels ‘‘a sense of urgency’’ about what he does for a living.

So no fears of mortality? No existential pangs in bed at midnight?

‘‘I am what you see,’’ he says, suddenly very Zen. ‘‘I’ve been sitting here, talking to you for an hour and I hope that you’ve got some sense of how I approach life. I’m not going to tell you what it is, but I’m very happy for you to take away what you see.’’ And what I see, in the end, is a dedicated professional, a disappointed son and a bloody good actor.

‘All I have to work with is what I was born with. Body, voice, imagination.’ Ben Kingsley