A Quote by Ben Kingsley
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.
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They are deceptively simple. I admit that. But for me, all my life I try to simplify things. As a child in school, things were very hard for me to understand often, and I developed a knack, I think. I developed a process to simplify things so I would understand them.
What interests me is all the stuff that goes into abstract and abstract-figurative art. Not the styles, but the stuff that, in various combinations, make the styles: mixing and matching painting methods and ideas.
I grew up the son of an acting teacher, so I was kind of introduced to all of these various methods early... I've never been really good at articulating how, what that process is in the way that Stanislavsky could.
Sometimes we all work so hard to overcome various things, and we are very cruel as a society and tough on people who we think aren't trying hard enough.
I trained at the Lee Strasberg Institute at Tisch, which is a huge foundation for young actors. They teach you their methods and give you the sense that acting is much more tangible than most people think. I think there's a mysticism of what acting is, in the fact that it's this ungraspable, spur-of-the-moment thing that nobody can understand.
Filmmaking is hard. I mean, it's not that hard, but it is hard to find your way through a system because there's a lot of people, there's money, there's a big machine to kind of make it - and how to find methods and processes that allow it to continue to be a lively process and a creative process.
My education was a huge influence. I trained at the Lee Strasberg Institute at Tisch, which is a huge foundation for young actors. They teach you their methods, and give you the sense that acting is much more tangible than most people think. I think there's a mysticism of what acting is, in the fact that it's this ungraspable, spur-of-the-moment thing that nobody can understand.
I think one of the lessons of the Depression - and this is something that Franklin Roosevelt demonstrated - was that when orthodoxy fails, then you need to try new things. And he was very willing to try unorthodox approaches when the orthodox approach had shown that it was not adequate.
There's so much to learn about acting and performance in general... I mean, acting is a very complex art, and there are a lot more theories and methods and techniques to it than I think anybody would think.
I think acting really helps as a director. It's just no question, because you totally understand the acting process.
What's hard to do is describe why you like something. Because ultimately, the reason things move people is very amorphous. You can be cerebral about things you hate, but most of the things you like tend to be very emotive. It's really hard to do a literary reproduction of what makes you happy. That's what I try to do. If nothing else, it seems like there's enough people out there telling the world what isn't cool, or what's terrible, or what's depressing. I think there's an element of cynicism in my writing, but I'm an optimistic cynic.
Instead of thinking that you put pieces together that will add up to a whole, I think you have to start with the premise that they're already together and you try to keep from destroying life by segmenting it, overorganizing it and dehumanizing it. You try to keep things together. The educative process must be organic, and not an assortment of unrelated methods and ideas.
I cannot understand why any young man - or young woman, for that matter - would wish to undergo the painful process of disfiguring the skin with various multicolored representations of people, animals, and various symbols.
I've met a lot of people, interacted with them, and experienced a lot of things in my life that I try to keep in mind. Such large and small experiences are accumulated and incorporated into acting in various ways.
I think Marriaga is a very good opponent for me. It's very hard when you have to find the keys to his defense. If people don't understand boxing, they don't know what he's capable to do. I understand it all.
When you keep the caliber of musicians very high in the band, people are going to come and go. Some of them will be people who have to try various things, it's natural.
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