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Interview with Sir Ben Kingsley, Jennifer Connelly
By Jeff Otto
Film Force
December 17, 2003
House of Sand and Fog is based on the 1999 novel by Andre Dubus III. The book was released to critical acclaim and ultimately became a best seller and a selection of the hallowed Oprah Book Club. If Oprah likes it, it has to be good, right? The book tells the story of Kathy Nicolo (Jennifer Connelly), a recovering addict struggling to keep clean. She is evicted from her house because of a government error regarding her taxes. Before she can correct the situation, the house is auctioned and sold to Massoud Amir Behrani (Sir Ben Kingsley).
Behrani is a former colonel in the Iranian Air Force. Since coming to America, he has seen his once respectful life crumble. He is currently working two demeaning jobs he considers to be beneath him on a construction crew and in a convenience store. He sees the house as the answer to his problems. He moves his family in, hoping to ultimately resell the house at a profit. Kathy tries to persuade Behrani to see her side of things, but he is unflinching in his plans. The battle for the house gradually escalates. Kathy finds an ally in one of the officers originally sent to evict her, Deputy Sheriff Lester Burdon (Ron Eldard). Stuck in an unhappy marriage, Burdon finds a new salvation in Kathy's love and uses his badge to try to persuade Behrani to see things Kathy's way as the battle for the house escalates.
House of Sand and Fog is directed by first time feature director Vadim Perelman, who also adapted the screenplay. Perelman stumbled upon the book by Dubus at a Rome airport and read the book on a flight across the Atlantic. By the time Perelman's plane had landed, he knew this was a movie he wanted to make. Perelman found a distinct parallel to his own immigrant experience leaving the Soviet Union in his teens. His work as a successful commercial director afforded him the proper contacts to obtain the book's rights and his excellent script and enthusiasm for the project ultimately attracted an exceptional amount of talent for the film. He got cinematographer Roger Deakins, composer James Horner and, most importantly, two Oscar winners, Jennifer Connelly and Sir Ben Kingsley, to play his lead characters.
One could not imagine more perfect casting for the lead characters of House of Sand and Fog. Dubus himself had used Kingsley as a model for his Behrani character when writing the novel. Dubus' wife actually sent Kingsley a copy of the novel after it was finished. Kingsley has one of the most distinguished and varied careers in all of Hollywood and has recently been knighted in honor of his accomplishments as an actor. Likewise, Jennifer Connelly has risen from mere teen star 'it' girl status in the '80s to become one of the most daring and exciting actresses of recent years. Her balls to the wall performances in films like Requiem for a Dream, Waking the Dead and A Beautiful Mind have lavished her with critical acclaim and bestowed her with one of those golden gentlemen named Oscar.
Connelly and Kingsley spoke with press in Los Angeles recently about their work on House of Sand and Fog and working with first-timer Vadim Perelman.
Kingsley's first experience with this story actually came about before being approached by Perelman for the film. It came in the form of a letter from the wife of Andre Dubus III. Kingley reflects: "The letter was beautifully written and she quite simply said that her husband had used me as a kind of image in mind for Behrani, for writing Behrani... She said it may become a film. But really, it was to read the novel and to understand that her husband had always thought of me physically as embodying certain characteristics of Behrani. I want her to know I found the novel beautiful, beautiful in its grandeur, it's scale, in the sheer distance people travel in the book emotionally..."
Much has been made in interviews with Vadim Perelman of his personal attachment to the project. It is a rare case for a first-time director to gather such an impressive cast and crew, but it seems Vadim's enthusiasm was contagious. Kingsley recounts his first meeting with the director: "I met Vadim at the Shadow Ma Ma, having read the novel, having read the screenplay, and loved the screenplay, Vadim's screenplay. Vadim never once mentioned to me what he wanted Behrani to be at that meeting and I thought, 'That's a good start,' that he'll trust me. And he talked a great deal about his own journey, his own journey from Russia, his mom and his stepfather and the first troubles he had to emerge [from] as a Russian boy, an adolescent, an American man. And all these things are intact in Vadim. The Dostoevsky in Russia is very alive and well in Vadim and you see it in his films. So, that was also a great gift for me. If people are generous with their information, then the actor can use that information lovingly and respectfully..."
"I just try to do the things that I respond to, that just grab me when I read them for whatever reason," Connelly says. "It's hard to put your finger on it. ... I guess all those movies felt important to me when I read them and they just really resonate with me. I like a good drama, personally. ... I like to sit up late at night and watch scary movies and watch kind of mindless comedies too sometimes, but you know, I do love a good movie that makes me think. I read this script and I thought it was moving. I thought it was beautifully written and really brave, really bold, to have central characters that are not your typical American heroes. They're both characters from the margin of society and your sympathies shift. At times, they're all riddled with contradiction and with flaws. And at times, I like each of them; at times, I really don't like them at all. And I thought that was really interesting and something I hadn't really seen in a long time. I thought Vadim had done a great job and I felt really confident with him, even though it was his first film," says Connelly. "I thought that he did a great job on the screenplay. There's something about him and the way that he spoke about it, and he got great people on board. Sir Ben and Roger Deakins, who is, I think, a genius, and James Horner. All these people signed on with, you know, I think without hesitation, and were really eager to work with him based on his enthusiasm and just what he did with the screenplay."
Surprisingly, Kinsley himself admits to being a little intimidated playing a Persian amidst a cast of actual Persians. "I do have a massive curiosity," Kingsley says. "I'm outgoing enough to really squeeze every drop of love and information out of those Persian people. ... I believe the first scene I did was the wedding scene. I think that's the first they filmed. And there I was, having to give a speech as a Persian colonel to a room full of Iranian extras. Three hundred..."
Connelly's character is a recovering addict who is finally clinging to a bit of stability in her life. When her house is taken away from her, her recovery suddenly begins to slip away. Connelly also played an addict in Darren Aronofsky's brilliant Requiem for a Dream. I asked her if she drew on that performance at all here or if she saw any connection between Kathy in Sand and Fog and Mariel in Requiem: "I think they had really different psychologies, those girls. Mariel's much more the sort of hipster, and you sort of find her, where she went... She was so much in denial at the end of that movie that I thought when she walked into that sort of dreadful sort of sex show at the end she had to make herself believe that it was sort of what she wanted. She had become this creation and she's kind of put on this exoskeleton. ... So she was sort of retreating in a different way. And I felt that Kathy was really different. She was someone who started out a really desperate woman who had nothing to tether at her desperation, so it sort of spiraled in this kind of vortex. Everything just sort of spilled out. I thought she was someone [whose] emotion was constantly spilling out. She doesn't quite know how to rein it in. She's a really watery kind of character in that way. But I think she's very blinded by her fury through most of the movie and incapable of seeing the Behranis as anything other than the people on the other end of the argument. And it isn't until, towards the end of the movie, that she starts to see them as human beings. I think she softens and becomes more grounded by the end of the movie. ... I think she's very moved by the connection that she has with Nadi (Behrani's wife, played by Shohreh Aghdashloo)..."
The power of House of Sand and Fog hinges largely on the ability to draw the audience's sympathy towards both characters. This is a very difficult endeavor since audiences are usually accustomed to the simplicity of a single protagonist and antagonist. "I think if there were 400 people in the cinema, there are gonna be 400 people going away with an entirely different map of the events," Kingsley says. "Great drama deals with the struggle for people's selves. You see it on the screen. Everyone is involved with the struggle with their own soul, struggling for that soul and to possess that soul... Also, there's struggle in the audience: 'Who do I love, who do I care for in this film?' The struggle jumps off the screen and starts thrashing around in the audience. There'll be as many, hopefully, as many different conclusions as there are people who see this film. That would be an ideal."
"I think she's a girl who really means well," Connelly says of Kathy. "I think she's a girl who wants a family, who wants a home, who wants to be loved, who misses her dad, who feels like a fuck-up and is really ashamed of it. I think she is a girl who has a good heart. I think she is a girl who has bad habits and eases defenses and I don't think it's coincidental that she sort of shows up at the police station when it seems like there's no way she's gonna get her house back. ... I don't agree that she's manipulating [Lester], but I do think it's the beginning of her slide back down into addiction..."
"The trick [for me was] not to judge my character," says Kingsley. "The trick is to try and justify every word on the page and make sure my character is the man who would say that. That my character is the man who would, if his beloved wife calls him a liar... and that's the worst person in the world to call him a liar... it's unbearable, he has to stop it, he has to end the sentence violently. He's not hitting his wife. He's saying that, 'I can't bear that from you.'"
The dual nature of the film's central characters also appealed to Connelly: "It's a movie that's about racism and judgment, and how we judge people [who] are on the fringes of society. It's a movie that questions who's entitled to live the American dream. And are the people that have chemical dependencies allowed to be part of that dream, or is it their fault that bad things happen to them because we see them as sort of, you know, irresponsible?"
Getting into the mind of an actor as respected and revered as Sir Ben is an occasion we are seldom afforded. Kingsley himself looks for the moments when he truly loses himself in the part, and hopes to witness a few of those moments when he views the film for the first time. "There may be moments tonight where I'll see something on the screen and I will not recall how I did it. There is a speech in Sexy Beast, more distant from that, which is a page and a half long. And I watch it now on screen and I don't know how I did it. It's as simple as that. Because I don't have the focus, I don't have the adrenaline. Adrenaline is very important, you know, like athletes, in that respect. Maybe there'll be, tonight, there'll be a few seconds here and there in the film where I think, 'Yeah, you let go. Good for you. You completely let go. And now you're off to you're old tricks. I know where that one comes from, where that one comes from [laughs], but there, you let go.'"
House of Sand and Fog's greatest achievement may well be its total and complete commitment to tell a story far outside the conventions of mainstream Hollywood. In staying true to the convictions of both Perelman and the novel itself, everyone involved had to step up and fight for the story. As a first-time director, it was a major asset to Perelman that Connelly was also passionate for the story and willing to help Perelman fight for his vision when the studio suggested a happier and more upbeat ending. "I think you need to know what kind of movie you're making," Connelly says of the film's drama. "This movie was never going to be like a big Hollywood movie, that's not the movie that it is. To try and sort of make it a little bit of that at the end, I think sort of sacrifices the movie and so, the whole point of the movie is that it doesn't pick a winner. So I thought it was dangerous to [show Kathy a few years later]. It wasn't in the novel... This is just preserving what was in the book and what was in the original script. No one wins, so I didn't think we should impose that upon the movie."
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