The smell of struggle

Sir Ben Kingsley on revisiting the Troubles
in Kari Skogland’s IRA drama 50 Dead Men
Walking

BELFAST AND FURIOUS: Jim Sturgess and Kingsley

By MARK SLUTSKY

I’ll admit that I’m scared to interview Sir Ben Kingsley. He may have exhibited non-violence and compassion with his star-making turn in Gandhi 27 years ago, but the image that’s much more firmly in my mind is Kingsley’s savage performance as London gangster Don Logan in Jonathan Glazer’s great 2000 semi-surrealist crime pic Sexy Beast. Which Kingsley will I meet, I wonder, as I wait to sit down with him at last year’s Toronto International Film Festival—the mellow Mahatma or the obscenity-spitting hardman?

Luckily for me, the Kingsley I speak with is charming and eloquent—a little free-associative, even—and happy to discuss his role in Canadian director Kari Skogland’s 50 Dead Men Walking, which tells the story (though the veracity of the film has been publicly contested by the man himself) of Martin McGartland, a Northern Ireland hoodlum turned informer for the Royal Ulster Constabulary and placed deep within the IRA. Kingsley plays Fergus, McGartland’s RUC handler, who becomes a substitute father figure for the young man (played by Jim Sturgess) torn between two worlds.

I compliment Sir Ben on his performance in Isabel Coixet’s Elegy, based on the novel by Philip Roth, and that leads into a discussion of how he decided to work with Skogland. “I was immediately predisposed to working with another woman, great, another female director, wonderful!” he says. “I liked the script very much and I really liked Kari’s ideas—her commitment to the story and her perception of the human ingredients, the little footnotes of history that can’t be ignored. How Kari allows children onto the screen in the film. You get children watching a car being burned. You get kids, just kicking their heels, sitting on a brick wall, watching soldiers or the odd stone thrown. Or you pan across and there’s a woman pushing a pram. Indeed, there’s a pregnancy throughout most of the film, so that children and women are totally implicated in this male-dominated struggle.”

MIXED FEELINGS

It’s a knotty role, with Kingsley having to project seriously conflicted emotions without showing much on the surface. “As an actor, that’s a gift,” he says. “Because I always get very suspect when a director says ‘Could you just do a little bit more for me?’ A voice in me says ‘No...really, no.’ Change the lens! Do something. But don’t ask me to do a little bit more. Because what does a little bit more mean? (laughing) More than what? It’s meaningless.

“Kari never went there. She’d change the lens, she would alter the lighting so a face would be half in light, half in shadow—that tells a wonderful story of the mind’s mental state. Street lighting, the wetness of the road, that merciless urban landscape, the barbed wire, the broken glass—it smelt of violence, that film, it smelt of war! To bring that female sensitivity to my dilemma, my character’s dilemma, which is you can’t give too much away. You cannot show your emotions. You cannot scream. You cannot cry. Okay, if you want, go and have a glass of whiskey. But don’t let it show.”

Shooting on location, it seems that the past of the film was never that far away. “The leap of imagination wasn’t that great, because we were in Belfast,” Kingsley says. “We knew as we drove to the set, as we approached the set, that people looking out their windows, standing in their doorways watching, had seen what we were trying to recreate. It wasn’t that long ago. It was yesterday, really, historically. We felt that they were very much on our side, we felt that we were welcome there, that it was a story that they were relieved was being told—it’s cathartic, it’s healing.

“Jim, of course, was a child, but I was an adult during those Troubles. I remember them very clearly, the terrible newsreels, the news bulletins, the political prisoners starving themselves to death. We visited the graves of some of the people who died in the hunger strikes, in a cemetery on the side of the hill one rainy afternoon. Their graffiti is still on a lot of the walls, the murals are still there, some roads are still divided down the middle. So although the aftershock of the Troubles was still rumbling underneath Belfast, we were paradoxically at the same time made to feel safe and welcome. It was perfect to film it there.”

50 DEAD MEN WALKING OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, JULY 31