With narration, you have to be very accurate with your voice. It’s a good exercise to do.
BEN KINGSLEYWith narration, you have to be very accurate with your voice. It’s a good exercise to do.
BEN KINGSLEYJohn Lennon and Ringo Starr liked my songs. I used to write songs and they heard me sing songs on stage in London.
BEN KINGSLEYThe many many imponderables come together when a film opens and for all sorts of reasons it may or may not succeed.
BEN KINGSLEYMillions of children are disempowered and we need to empower them.
BEN KINGSLEYWhat is chess, do you think? Those who play for fun or not at all dismiss it as a game. The ones who devote their lives to it for the most part insist that it’s a science. It’s neither. Bobby Fischer got underneath it like no one before and found at its center, art.
BEN KINGSLEYI told myself that I would not go back to the camps as an actor ever again, that I was very frightened of wearing a yellow star. It was fear, it was cowardice, I was.
BEN KINGSLEYIf the director wishes to print it, then you have a series of choices, maybe millions of choices within that minute-and-a-half, or 80 seconds, or 2 minutes or however long or short the take is, you have all those choices committed to celluloid. I find that absolutely thrilling.
BEN KINGSLEYThe trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.
BEN KINGSLEYThere are some directors, lesser in confidence or skill, who make the actor feel very uncomfortable because you feel you’re auditioning for them, every day, and that’s a terrible feeling on the set.
BEN KINGSLEYI think that most actors attempt to keep in touch with the child.
BEN KINGSLEYThe camera does not like acting. The camera is only interested in filming behaviour. So you damn well learn your lines until you know them inside out, while standing on your head!
BEN KINGSLEYWorking in film, if you work with great directors, you learn that after every take you must let go. Sitting with my wife at the Academy Awards, we both let the moment just go.
BEN KINGSLEYI think that various styles and methods and approaches are an invention of people who don’t understand the process of acting and who try very hard to label things.
BEN KINGSLEYBut filming is good for you, because the crew isn’t allowed to laugh. You can’t get addicted to getting the laugh.
BEN KINGSLEYThey’re a very strange lot actors, very strange people.
BEN KINGSLEYIf it’s a really well written villain, he probably has more layers than the archetypal good person. So that would be very attractive to an actor. No one chooses to be a villain; it’s usually a reaction to something else.
BEN KINGSLEY