UNITED KINGDOM: BEN KINGSLEY STARS AS A GANGSTER WITH RAY WINSTON IN JONATHAN GLAZER'S FILM "SEXY BEAST"

Record ID: 546795

  • Title: UNITED KINGDOM: BEN KINGSLEY STARS AS A GANGSTER WITH RAY WINSTON IN JONATHAN GLAZER'S FILM "SEXY BEAST"
  • Date: 10th January 2001
  • Summary: LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM, RECENT (REUTERS) SCU (SOUNDBITE) (English) BEN KINGSLEY SAYING "I'm fascinated by the actor portrayal. Don jumped off the page at me in a way that only an animal in its pure form can jump off the page. No matter how we ethically or morally see Don from our perspective, what one also does see is this animal in its purest, purest form down to the grey trousers, the obvious weekly visits to the gym - probably goes to a boxing gym. Don could have been south-east county amateur champion but he headbutted the referee."
  • Embargoed: 25th January 2001 12:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: LONDON, ENGLAND, UNITED KINGDOM AND VARIOUS FILM LOCATIONS
  • Country: United Kingdom
  • Reuters ID: LVA5YI6T4F0RKVCYE4C7L1J3UWDE
  • Story Text: Ben Kingsley - as you've never seen him before - unleashes his animal side on the big screen in this latest Cockney gangster set-up from British director Jonathan Glazer.
    Kingsley's beastly performance is sending shock waves across the globe.
    It's yet another British gangster film but one with a difference. First of all the filthiest animal of all is played by Ben Kingsley - quite a departure from the saintly natures of Gandhi and Itzhak Stern - and secondly, the film's debut director, Jonathan Glazer insists the world of Cockney gangsters is purely a structural technique: "Equally the film could be set in the court of King Arthur or something. It's about something very other, very abstract and the actual gangster aspect of the film is impressionistic, its purposely avoided in the fillm because the central character wants to avoid going back into that world."
    That central character is Gal, played by Ray Winston. He's gleefully thrown off the gangster underworld for the sun and calamari in the Costa Del Sol. But his fellow thugs in London decide they need him for one last job, and Don Logan - played by Kingsley - is the man to make him do it: "Don jumped off the page at me in a way that only an animal in its pure form can jump off the page. No matter how we ethically or morally see Don from our perspective, what one also does see is this animal in its purest, purest form down to the grey trousers, the obvious weekly visits to the gym... " The character of Don is a beast in the filthiest sense of the word. Glazer acknowledges that one of the biggest risks he's taken with this film is inviting audiences to see Kingsley churn out this shocking, although at times, very funny, behaviour, but it was a risk worth taking: "We looked at lots of Don Logans but I couldn't find the right Don Logan and my producer, Jeremy Thomas, said to me 'What about Ben Kingsley?' and I said 'It's ridiculous! You know, Ben plays these wonderful sort of iconic characters, he won't be able to do it. And within seconds, genuinely of meeting him, I thought, 'He's Don Logan'. It was as obvious as that to me."
    So how did Kingsley manage to access such a character? "There must have been some kind of information on that voice already in me. Where I've heard it, where I saw it, I don't know. I think I must have seen it quite a long time ago, a very long time ago, because it's primal. It's probably somebody as a child who deeply, deeply frightened me. But I think the way a creative person can make peace with history is to say to that angry voice from my childhood 'One day, I will have my revenge because you'll be stuck up there on the screen and everyoe will see the kind of person you are and what you did to me.' So the same ethos that says to Don, the same set of rules that Don lives by - 'Don't mess with me' - oddly enough, it seems, I also live by. Because anyone who's ever affected me, maybe as a child, one by one they're appearing on the screen."
    For Glazer, this film also marks a major personal development. He's the creative force behind music videos for the like of Jamiroquai, Massive Attack and Radiohead, as well as Guinness and Nike commercials. Finally he succumbed to the pressure to apply his directorial flare to a full-length feature, quite a switch from 30 seconds to 90 minutes. The heavy stylization of the film clearly indicates Glazer's background: "The fact that the film's very behavioural and is very abstract in its dialogue - quite Pinter like - it needed something to create a very specific world for it. And it wasn't a big film, it wasn't a film that required me to do big visuals, it just required me to be quite architectural about it, and I think just in trying to be very still and composed about things, picking a palette very carefully was enough in this film. Because you can't compete with density and dynamism of the words, they're doing everything. And if they're doing all the work and I'm doing all the work then we're kind of cancelling each other out. So I think I was totally enslaved by the words."
    It's likely that audiences will be too. Although those outside Britain may have a few problems understanding the Cockney! Sexy Beast is released at cinemas around Britain from 12th January.
  • Copyright Holder: REUTERS
  • Copyright Notice: (c) Copyright Thomson Reuters 2014. Open For Restrictions - http://about.reuters.com/fulllegal.asp
  • Usage Terms/Restrictions: None
Register