Perhaps this is one of the perks of knighthood: Before Sir Ben Kingsley even enters the restaurant at the Four Seasons Hotel in Beverly Hills, there's a table in the corner waiting for him, with two pots of tea and a basket of pastries.
When he sits down, though, there's nothing terribly stuffy or regal about the Oscar-winning actor who plays silent film pioneer Georges Melies in Martin Scorsese's "Hugo." Rather, Kingsley is affable, articulate and eager to talk about acting, storytelling and the director who, he says, sees everything on a movie set.
"Hugo" has proven to be a tricky sell commercially, and it's unlikely to be a moneymaker – but the film is a marvelous and magical journey that fully justifies Scorsese's decision to adapt Brian Selznick's book "The Invention of Hugo Cabret," and to shoot it in 3D. And Kingsley is sly, sad and commanding as a man desperate to bury his glorious past.
Were you familiar with the book, or with Georges Melies' work?
Neither. Neither the book nor Georges' work. My starting point was the script by John Logan, which was a wonderful read. The arc of everyone's character is so extraordinary it jumps off the page.
And also, I loved to see that Georges would be filmed by Marty at the height of his powers, in his glass palace where he was a king with so many domains: writer, director, designer, set decorator, editor, leading man, magician, special effects creator … Probably because he didn’t know what the limits were, he was breaking boundaries all the time. Because he was the first of the great auteurs, nobody told him, "Georges, you can't do that, "as I'm afraid they would today. He just had no boundaries whatsoever. I watch those early films of his, and his joie de vivre was completely contagious. It must have affected his audiences.
But when we first meet him, that feeling is long gone.
Yes. What I loved was to have that sequence filmed by Marty in which I'm deeply happy, at the peak of my creative powers, and then to film the sequence where I'm standing by an enormous conflagration as Georges burns all his things.
That was a very real day for me. The bonfire was extremely hot, and quite painful. I was burning things that our company had made, and they were beautiful. The moon's face, the spheres, the swords, the costumes, the helmets, the drawings of my wife, they were all perfect. And I was able to inhabit Georges' sense of utter defeat, and probably anger.
It's a very violent act, a kind of little suicide. He was the king in his palace, then the suicide, then the toy shop. For me, that was an arc that I could fully appreciate and fully inhabit.
Did you film it in that sequence?
As a matter of fact, I didn't.
