Ben Kingsley Quotations

There is so much to do on a film set. It is an extraordinarily invigorating and wonderful place to be, when things are running well.

If your best friend has stolen your girlfriend, it does become life and death.

That hunger of the flesh, that longing for ease, that terror of incarceration, that insistence on tribal honour being obeyed: all of that exists, and it exists everywhere.

There was one titanic guiding light on the film set, and I was in the presence of a true Mahatma, in the deepest and most profound sense of the word.

The 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!

Movie magic is movie magic and acting magic is acting magic.

I think that you can fall into bad habits with comedy... It's a tightrope to stay true to the character, true to the irony, and allow the irony to happen.

I think I'm more bonded, emotionally and in a craft sense, to films that tell extraordinary stories about extraordinary destinies.

There have not been any troughs as regards my work. There's never been a trough of my assurance.

When I choose a role it's either because I recognise the man, or that I'm very curious to know him. If I neither recognise nor know him, then it is better that I don't play him.

I just loved playing a man who was unafraid of making an idiot of himself in the process of falling in love. I found that admirable.

One of the greatest things drama can do, at it's best, is to redefine the words we use every day such as love, home, family, loyalty and envy. Tragedy need not be a downer.

I honestly have no strategy whatsoever. I'm waiting for that script to pop through the letterbox and completely surprise me.

I think Romeo and Juliet is uplifting. That's how much a son wishes to avenge his father. That is how much two young people can love each other.

I try and reduce myself to an almost blank slate and hope to God that I am creative.

I'm very in love with the fact that the camera is revolted by acting and loves behaviour.

I don't honestly think people know what acting is.

I think that most actors, and they're a very strange lot actors, very strange people, but I think that they attempt to keep in touch with the child.

In cinema, the leading player is the director.

In England, it's now Sir Ben. Mister has just disappeared. It's not even on my passport anymore. They've taken Mister away from me.

John Lennon and Ringo Starr liked my songs. I used to write songs and they heard me sing songs on stage in London.

The hierarchy of class in London was rigid. It was like a religion. It still is to a certain extent.

The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that.

If I were to play somebody who ran a fish and chip shop, I would not work in a fish and chip shop for three months. Staring at chips is not going to help me in my performance.

When Attenborough asked me to do Gandhi it was almost like stepping off one boat and stepping on to another, even though both boats are going at 60 miles per hour.

I do remember, as a child, that I always imagined, when I was maybe 6 or 7, my fantasy was that everywhere I went I was being followed by an invisible film crew.

All the great writers root their characters in true human behaviour.

I always try to find something I admire about every character I play.

I think if I were to go back on stage I might be in great danger of acting.

I would like to make it known, on this program, loud and clear, that I would absolutely embrace with all five of my arms being a Bond villain.

It is better for me to serve a charity as an actor or a voice, rather than at a luncheon being just a celebrity.

The many many imponderables come together when a film opens and for all sorts of reasons it may or may not succeed.

With narration, you have to be very accurate with your voice. It's a good exercise to do.

As a singer, I might have fallen among thieves. I wonder if I'd still be alive by now.

As an actor there's no autonomy, unless you're prepared to risk the possibility of starving.

But comedy I'd love to do as much as humanly possible.

But filming is good for you, because the crew isn't allowed to laugh. You can't get addicted to getting the laugh.

Fifteen years before I became a screen actor, I was in the theatre. A lot of my work was comedy, which I loved doing. It's harder.

Filming is so much to do with rhythm, as is music, and if it isn't there then you know in the end nobody can save it really, they can't.

I have a rather naive approach, I think, to my job.

I think the cinema you like has more to do with silence, and the theater you like has more to do with language.

I was fortunate as a young actor, to go straight to the RSC, where I learned that being an actor can bring with it wonderful responsibilities.

I'm convinced that had I not changed my name, I don't think I would have had quite the same career curve that I eventually had.

I've never had to turn my hand to anything for monetary gain, other than pretending to be somebody else. I'm deeply fortunate.

Well, it's wonderful to be identified strongly with my work.

When you drop your guard in films, the acting process compensates. You get lazy and you start acting.

Hopefully, as I get older in the business, I make my choices more accurately, and I perhaps know from either the script or the first meeting that it isn't going to work.

I think that all of us either lose touch with the child inside us or try and hold onto it because it so precious to us and it's such an extraordinary part of our lives.

I 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.

Somewhere in your career, your work changes. It becomes less anal, less careful and more spontaneous, more to do with the information that your soul carries.

Unfortunately I went to a hotel in Krakow, and unfortunately, one night, there was a brawl in the bar because a horrible anti-Semitic remark was made to one of my fellow Israeli actors, one of my fellow actors who was an Israeli, sorry, and we were all extremely upset. I reacted rather violently, I'm afraid.

I'm so dependent on reacting to the other actors on the set, and to the director. I'm very responsive. I react. And I treasure the energy that reaction gives.

I hope I'm able to achieve more on camera through stillness, through focus, through being quite careful to do less on every take, rather than more. So I'm reducing, rather than adding. Which hopefully is a good exercise. That's what I'd like to do.

My line-learning is very special. I like to learn the dialogue of the whole film before I arrive.

What 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.

Equal partners aren't always what we envision as being manifestly equal. Equality can come in many different shapes and sizes and combinations.

There's so much crap talked about acting.

I 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.

I think that Shakespeare had his male side and his female side extremely well developed. And this was a great quality of the Elizabethan, all-around Renaissance man. They were not afraid of their male side and their female side co-existing. This somewhere along the line got lost. And then it got misunderstood.

I didn't go to drama school because, from the first refusal I then, as I said, a couple of weeks later, was offered a professional job, where I am immensely grateful to the journey.

If you are a libertine, if you're not given to long-term faithful relationships, you tend to project your behavior onto everyone else. It's like the person who knows they're not trustworthy; they tend to mistrust everyone else.

You want to know what I want? I'll tell you what I want. I want back what Bobby Fischer took with him when he disappeared.

In order to inhabit a villain, you mustn't care what the audience think of you. That's not why you are there. You mustn't care for a second whether the audience likes you or dislikes you. Your villain has to be way beyond that.

It's Sir Ben. I've not been a Mister for two years.

The number of choices you make in the event that you see on stage, those choices are sometimes largely determined by the rehearsal process and the experiments that you go through and the choices that you make in the rehearsal room, not in front of an audience.

I never read anything in print about me. It started with not reading reviews and with the greatest respect to my publicist here, I never read interviews. I was there when I gave them. I never read reviews. I was there when I did the jobs - so I'm totally immune. I live in a bubble.

Shock is shock. Your body goes into shock, regardless of it being real blood or fake blood. The mind sends powerful messages to all the various glands and secretions in the body. It's impossible trying to act it; it just happens. It's a very important question: no acting.

If 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.

I want to play a man in uniform. I've got tremendous respect for that life that they lead. We know so little about it. It's never discussed or talked about, when they come back from battle. I want to examine the choices that have to be made in some terrible times. I'll get to wear a uniform.

I never went to drama school. I went straight into the theater. We had the most extraordinary voice teacher. I worked with her when I was starting out in my career. How to place my voice from a very relaxed position was all wonderfully reminiscent of going back to the basics. But I always like to do that with any role that I do, to dismantle it and put it all back together again.

I have never felt bereft of anything.

There 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.

Hamlet is an astonishing intelligence.

If 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.

I think that most actors attempt to keep in touch with the child.

The leaping Jaguar on the bonnet, to me, makes it look more like a hunter than something that is getting away. It's a hunter. Richard III definitely would have had a chauffeur driven Jaguar MK X.

We are adjusters. We empathize, we change rhythm and above all we listen to our fellow actors-if they're good actors.

I've met quite a number of people in my career, but I do have an extraordinary memory. And even though they may drift into the periphery of my memory, I can bring them right back when I need them.

The environment forces you to be utterly dependent between "action" and "cut" because the environment is perfect on your fellow actor. So as an acting exercise, it's absolutely thrilling that the focus that we had to bring to each other echoed in life, echoed in art. And when you get that parallel, it's really thrilling and it's full of surprises, but it all has a logic.

Shakespeare villains were extraordinary. Macbeth, Iago, Richard III... They're so richly layered that a British actor would find it almost impossible to create a two-dimensional villain, if he's explored in his early years or continues to explore his Shakespearean heritage. You can almost not judge them, if they're played really well.

You can throw away the privilege of acting, but that would be such a shame. The tribe has elected you to tell its story. You are the shaman/healer, that's what the storyteller is, and I think it's important for actors to appreciate that. Too often actors think it's all about them, when in reality it's all about the audience being able to recognize themselves in you. The more you pull away from the public, the less power you have on screen.

There is always something about the villains that I'm able to play, quote unquote, that isn't villainous.

Family is family over the internet, over Skype, over the telephone. Love is love. You don't have to actually go through some ritual to prove that you love somebody.

I love storytelling. If you strip all the bits away, what you'll find at the center is a storyteller. As I warm to my career and love it more, I have a sense that storytelling is healing, in many ways. You can reach an audience and heal, and by heal, I mean entertain and provoke. It's a wonderful life.

You cannot learn a lesson of profound forgiveness unless you understand what it is to be wounded and forgive that which has wounded you.

Working 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.

I don't want to be like the actor who rehearses everything in the bathroom, then comes to the set and carries on completely uninterrupted while the other actors tiptoe away.

Sometimes it's right to do the wrong things and right now is one of those times.

I do believe female directors, as well as our female writer, can bring out male vulnerability that some men can't because they can't face it.

The biggest surprise in a man's life is old age.

You don't go to a town to present the play and have applause at the end of it, but that's benign conquest. It's a glorious way of exploring other landscapes and other cultures in a very life-affirming way.

They're a very strange lot actors, very strange people.

Millions of children are disempowered and we need to empower them.

I think the actor has a tribal role as the archetypal story teller. I think there was a time when the storyteller, the priest, the healer, were all one person in one body. That person used to weave stories at night around a small fire to keep the tribe from being terrified that sun had gone down.

If we hit the collective nerve of the audience on that night, that they would be standing up and rushing towards the stage to hug us.

I have done three makeup tests and I'm very, very happy with them. I am completely unrecognizable.

I think that the stamina, the marathon stamina that you required of your actor, I probably developed on great texts during my Shakespeare tenancy, if you like.

It doesn't get any easier. I still get very nervous and excited, but I'm hoping... what I'm trying to do is simplify. That's what I'm trying to do.

I'm holding a mirror to the audience and telling them there is a violent person in all of us.

The astonishing silences in a Tarkovsky film... can sweep you into screen and... you don't want to end.