Ben Kingsley in Fifty Dead Men Walking
Sir Ben Kingsley knows the emotional push and pull of playing a character embroiled in Northern Ireland's time of the Troubles.
On the one hand, there's the need to depict the character's view, his clear division between personal allies and enemies. On the other hand, there are the myriad of complexities behind the intercommunal tension, the closer version of reality.
So for his role as an English officer operating deep inside the conflict in the film Fifty Dead Men Walking (opening Friday), Kingsley had his character come from Manchester.
"The north of England, Liverpool, Manchester, Lancashire, has always had a relationship with Ireland. And that really was the bigger picture for me. We have always had and always will have a very emotional, strong relationship to Ireland historically and now," Kingsley says.
The Good Friday Agreement in 1998, which brought the worst of the Troubles to an end, has made it easier to see the conflict in a calmer, retrospective light, he believes. Yet for Kingsley and actor Jim Sturgess, who plays an informant within the Irish Republican Army, the whole point is to return to the emotions of the time.
"In war, truth is always the first casualty," Kingsley says, referring to the quotation ascribed to the ancient Greek dramatist Aeschylus, which Fifty Dead Men Walking's Canadian director Kari Skogland liked to repeat.
The film was shot in Belfast, with the aim of absorbing the local character and its geography of tensions.
"I lived through those years in England," says Kingsley, interviewed last year when the film screened at the Toronto International Film Festival. "I find for me, almost as a process of osmosis, I get the picture. We filmed Schindler's List in Krakow, Poland, and boy did I get the picture quickly. And filming Gandhi in India, you soak up the predicaments. You say, I see how this could have happened. I see how it could be a part of the history of this country."
Those experiences helped Kingsley decide that his English policeman would have to understand both sides of the conflict.
"We were really making a war movie. It was a war. The IRA was extremely disciplined, tough adversaries, that did earn the respect of many of the opposing forces, because they were so well organized," Kingsley says. His voice grows softer and more methodical, as he smiles across the table of a Toronto hotel restaurant as each new thought comes to him.
"I think my character had a certain degree of respect, not to underestimate the enemy - which is quite an interesting shift from what we have in most films, where there is the good guy and the bad guy. And the bad guys are constantly held in contempt [in many films] That's never the way to win any kind of struggle. The way to win a struggle is to understand the enemy.
"And that's where the film gets really thrilling," he adds, "where Jim's character has to go in and understand, and to a certain degree pretend to empathize with the enemy, in order to save lives. So, the IRA can never be dismissed as a ragtag collection of evildoers. You can't slap the evil label on them. Some terrible things [happened]on both sides."
Kingsley choose not to meet at length with Belfast locals and hear their stories. He felt he already saw those stories in the faces of people on the street. He didn't want to be thrown by getting even closer, he says, but instead wanted to stick to his character's reaction to that environment.
Sturgess was the opposite. Whereas Kingsley's character is more cerebral, more of a coaxer, Sturgess plays the doer, a young man caught in a violent mess. The actor hung out with Belfast residents in the weeks before shooting began. Local guides introduced him around pubs and house parties. It was also the first time that Sturgess, a native Londoner, maintained the accent of a character for the entire production, even when talking on the phone with his mother, he says.
"You live in the accent, and by doing that it changes you as a person. If you change the way you speak, it changes the way you behave," he says. "I remember I became a lot more cheeky, because the accent sort of allows you to have that cheekiness in your personality."
He adds that he never met Martin McGartland, the informant whom Sturgess's character is roughly based on, and who wrote a 1997 memoir with the same name as the film. There was enough material in the book and the script to understand his role, Sturgess says, without having to try to adopt McGartland's specific mannerisms. Instead, the actor relied on the city and its stories.
"It just wasn't black and white, there was so much grey area in between. It was about filling in those grey areas and finding out what they were for everybody," Sturgess says. When the actors and crew shot on location, local residents gathered to watch. What was their reaction given the tensions undoubtedly still raw for some?
"They were excited, they kind of loved it. Kids would hang around and steal our sandwiches. They were just such a good group of people. Literally, we would be filming on the streets where [the violence]really happened. And in the riot scene, a lot of the people in the scene were people who were there when it really happened to them all those years ago. And they were coming back, and they were reliving that experience," Sturgess says.
Sometimes locals were asked by the film crew if Sturgess could quickly change outfits in their homes between takes. He invariably would be welcomed in and offered tea and biscuits. "The sense of community is so strong in those areas," Sturgess says, "which I think helped me to understand the guilt - or the difficulties - that Martin McGartland would have gone through when he acted against some of the people of the community that were strong IRA believers or sympathizers."
So while Kingsley, true to his role in the film, maintained a certain distance, Sturgess dove in. Yet in the end, the outcome was the same. As Kingsley says, "The ultimate exercise is to connect with the empathy, to empathize - which is not to judge, and it's not to sympathize. It's to comprehend that particular dilemma and empathize with it, in order to tell a story."