What do Martin Scorsese and Chandran Rutnam have in common? Aside from the obvious, they’re both fans of Sir Ben Kingsley. When ‘SBK’ began popping up around Colombo he was immediately recognized, but nobody was quite sure what had brought him here. Now we know it’s Chandran Rutnam’s ‘A Common Man’ – the film being hailed as the first local production to star an Oscar winner.
Playing opposite Sir Kingsley is another British actor – you’ll remember Ben Cross for his masterful turn as Harold Abrahams in ‘Chariots of Fire’. Neither are strangers to Hollywood – Cross was recently directed by wunderkind J.J. Abrams and Kingsley has only gone from strength to strength post ‘Gandhi’; he is now in between two Scorsese films. “I’m clearly in good company,” Mr. Rutnam quips, sounding well pleased with himself.
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| Intense portrayal: Ben Cross as the DIG, with Jerome de Silva
in the background. Pix by M.A. Pushpa Kumara |
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| The stand-off: Cross and Kingsley in one of the film’s pivotal moments. |
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| On the sets at Wesley: Ben Cross, Mohammed Adamally and Jerome de Silva |
He has every reason to be. It’s the last day on the sets of ‘A Common Man’ – with 25 days of relentless filming under his belt, there’s just one crucial scene left. The action unfolds in the auditorium of Wesley College, now converted into the largest set for the film. Tall ‘walls’ enclose a space lined with long tables.
Extras dressed in police uniforms tap busily away on their screens, large maps mounted on the walls, indicate the progress of the manhunt that is underway. In the centre of the room, Cross and Mohammed Adamally face off – one is the D.I.G of the Police, the other the Chief Secretary to the Chief Minister.
“This is a crucial scene,” explains Mr. Rutnam, adding that while the shot is populated for most part with local actors, it’s not meant to be set in Sri Lanka or even in India. Meanwhile, on screen, harsh words are exchanged and Adamally’s character storms out.For all its drama, this isn’t the last scene in the film.
That’s already been shot – in it the D.I.G played by Cross comes face to face with ‘The Man’ played by Kingsley. “They’re opposites, and they finally meet in the last scene,” says Mr. Rutnam. “You’ll see it on the screen...their chemistry was excellent.” Cross describes it: “We had a little sequence at the end of the movie, where I come to arrest him.
It is a stand-off,” he says, adding that audiences will have to discover the outcome for themselves. Though Kingsley and Cross only shared the set for a day, the latter gives his colleague very positive reviews: “Sir Ben was knighted for his services to the film industry and so you would imagine that he knows what he was doing, and he certainly does,” Cross told the Sunday Times.
Mr. Rutnam himself is cagey about the plot but reveals that Kingsley’s character is a man pushed to his limits and that he eventually resorts to violent means. The film’s tagline is also as good as a synopsis – ‘Five bombs in the city. The clock is ticking.’ It’s more difficult to tell, though, who our sympathies are supposed to lie with – the loose cannon or the ruthless cop? Mr. Rutnam expects the audience will find their allegiance swinging from one to the other. Still this isn’t a drama, rather it’s an action/thriller, he says, adding that special effects will be layered on post production.
This will be the responsibility of Boris Clavel of the Paris based post-production outfit known as LUXART. Having worked with Mr. Rutnam before, Boris brought his team and equipment to assist Director of Photography Chandana Jayasinghe. The film was shot entirely in Colombo and its environs, says Boris, describing scenes outside the airport, at the police headquarters and at Wesley College. They also took their equipment 17 storeys up, to the top of a high-rise in Dehiwala. Still under construction, the building provided a perfect foil for the action. However, the heat and the dust were hard on the crew who had to begin work early each morning.
In post-production Boris says sharp cuts and colouring will set the pace for the film and give it its own distinctive look.
As the plot unfolds with the leads in two separate locations, Boris hopes to find a way of distinguishing them – “we’d like to create two moods for the two different locations,” he says. “This movie...it is huge for Sri Lanka,” he says, adding that he sees it as a triumph of Sri Lankan production.
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| Chandran Rutnam: Finally a Hollywood production |
Certainly, local talent is well represented. For instance, Sunil Wijeratne serves as Art Director and Sri Lankans hold all the key production roles, points out Mr. Rutnam. There are plenty of familiar faces among the cast as well – Jerome de Silva, Ashan Dias, Numaya Siriwardena, Patrick Rutnam, Sanath Gunathilaka, Wilson Gunaratne, Wilmon Sirimanne, Sando Harris and Dushyantha Weeraman have all been cast in supporting roles.
Considering the calibre of its cast, it would be safe to say that the project is made possible by a multi-million dollar budget. Backing Mr. Rutnam are producers H. L. L. Manohan Nanayakkara, the Chairman of Asia Capital, Paul Mason and B.S. Radhakrishnan of Asia Digital Entertainment Pvt. Ltd. With the support of Mr. Nanayakkara, Mr. Radhakrishnan says his company will help ensure that 150 local cinemas will switch to screening films digitally.
This method has several advantages and deters piracy. The two men also want to support the local industry by funding what Mr. Radhakrishnan dubs “crossover films” – ‘A Common Man’ is their idea of a good start. The producers have signed NDAs that prevent them from revealing the salaries paid to entice their stars. However, audiences are drawn in by big names on the marquee, says Mr. Radhakrishnan, for which “definitely, you have to pay the price.”
Having been screenwriter, director and editor, Mr. Rutnam is heavily invested in the movie’s success. He hopes to release it next year, and anticipates that the support of a major Hollywood company will ensure a worldwide release. It’s certainly a milestone in his long career. “For 35 years, I’ve been making other people’s films,” says Mr. Rutnam, explaining that it was the success of ‘The Road from Elephant Pass’ that opened new doors for him.
“I have planned projects for years, which have never worked out. This time, the whole process took about six weeks and then I was in production, a Hollywood production. It’s been something I’ve wanted to do all my life, and now I’m finally doing it.”
Chariots of Fire
was demanding but
rewarding – Ben
Under the lights, Ben Cross has begun to sweat. His heavy, brown uniform doesn’t help, so in the breaks between filming it’s the first thing he takes off. Now, sitting in his white undershirt, in a bright red silk air-conditioned tent, Ben is talking about his other great love. Up on youtube, you’ll find recordings of live gigs at a dark piano bar in Sofia, Bulgaria. Backed by either a trio or a sextet, he is the vocalist. Crooning out old jazz hits - the screaming trumpets at his back, fingers clicking, head thrown back – he is clearly in his element.
“I’ve been singing all my life,” says the British actor, naming roles in musicals like ‘Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat’ and ‘Irma La Douce’. “There was even one crazy production in which I played the chorus in ‘Henry the V’, where I came on with a guitar like a hippy in army fatigues,” he says grinning at the memory. In fact, it was with his portrayal of the wily lawyer Billy Flynn in the 1978 stage production of ‘Chicago’ that he also auditioned for what would become his most famous role – that of Jewish athlete Harold Abrahams in the Oscar winning film ‘Chariots of Fire’ (1981).
Ben was 32 then – but his character was a mere 19 years old and though Abrahams would age five years in the course of the film, he was still an Olympic standard athlete. So after Ben had submitted his tape for the consideration of director Hugh Hudson and Producer David Puttnam, he began to train in earnest. He knew that in a few weeks, he would be asked to ‘run around’ a little for the cameras before the final decision on casting was made. “I started to train three months before that, just in case I got the job,” he says, “I was running every night...4 to 5 miles every evening, a couple of miles every morning, lifting weights and doing sit-ups and all sorts of things. I really wanted that role and so I did everything in my power to get it.”
Ben has described the character of Abrahams as being almost unlikeable (“as indeed, was the man”) but he put a great deal of thought into how he would handle what was portrayed as Abrahams’ driving force, his desire to fight anti-Semitism by, well, running really fast.
In the movie, a memorable bit of dialogue refers to Abrahams having ‘felt the cold reluctance in a handshake.’ After much research and thought, he decided that he didn’t have to “play at being a Jew” when everyone knew who his character was. Instead, “I was just on the lookout for those moments when in my portrayal of Harold Abrahams, I could show a kneejerk reaction to something that may or may not have been meant as an insult or slight.”
In spite of all that preparation, Ben would later identify that first week filming ‘Chariots of Fire’ as the most gruelling in his entire career. Describing himself as “naive,” he says he only realised the scale of the production when he saw the number of trucks parked outside the location and the size of the crew. Soon after, he was put straight into scenes with some of the most accomplished actors of that generation - Sir John Gielgud, Lindsay Anderson and Ian Holm.
“This was extremely intimidating,” he says, adding “that same week I had to recreate a newspaper picture of Harold Abrahams doing the long jump in which he’s frozen in mid-air and I had to do the long jump so many times, and I was chasing a car...at one point I was sitting in a chair, exhausted for having pushed myself so much physically and I threw up over the side onto the grass. I remember thinking, I hope nobody saw that, or they might sack me.”
By the end of that week, he was “a wreck, physically and emotionally.” “In a sense, I had lost my virginity,” he says. He knew it was unlikely that another movie would ever demand so much of him again, even if it did, he would now be far better equipped to deal with it. Strangely, he found himself “lamenting” that. “It was extremely demanding, thank God,” he says with relish. It seems an odd thing to be grateful for, so why is he? “Because I like to feel at the end of the day that I earned my money...sometimes, I do films that don’t make those kind of demands on you.”
Unfortunately, he’s only being honest. In a career with over eighty movies, none has been of the same calibre as ‘Chariots of Fire’. Certainly not ‘Species: The Awakening’ or ‘Exorcist: The Beginning’. He was briefly in the spotlight when he was cast as a Vulcan and Spock’s father in the most recent Star Trek film (the most successful in the franchise) and of course as Prince Charles in ‘William & Kate: Let Love Rule’. The movie was panned by critics, though it spent some time at the top of the list of DVD sales in the U.K. Still most had something good to say about Ben’s performance – they may dislike his movies, but they almost always respect him as an actor.
With memorable portrayals of Rudolf Hess and Solomon, as well as host of theatre credits, Ben has managed to keep his acting bona fides. As a musician, he’s written and recorded songs, and even penned a musical ‘Rage’ about Ruth Ellis, the last woman to be hanged in the U.K. Looking back, he says “I think I have been blessed in my career, I have played a hugely wide range of characters and frankly that’s what I love.”
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