'Schindler's List' A Grim Reminder For Ben Kingsley | Interviews

"I totally agree. There are enormous benefits in not manipulating the audience's sensibility, which I don't believe this movie does for one single frame. What you reveal is a filmmaker saying to his audience, not feel this now, but look at this. I think that's what he succeeded in doing, frame after frame after frame: Saying simply, witness this."

For Kingsley and Neeson, and the other actors, the movie was a physical ordeal. They shot the 184-minute movie during a cold, snowy winter in Krakow, using such actual locations as Schindler's original factory, and then moving on to the charnel house of Auschwitz. The acting style chosen, from the leads on down, was one of somber realism, and in the case of Stern, there is a certain watchfulness: His own life, and the lives of 1,300 others, depend on the motives of a man who never really says what his motives are.

It is a strange part for Kingsley, an Anglo-Indian from Britain, but no stranger than many of his other roles. After becoming a film star and winning the Oscar for "Gandhi," Kingsley has been cast in such an array of intense ethnic types that the only roles he seems really to have missed would be other Indians in addition to Gandhi. His parts have included the gangster Meyer Lansky in "Bugsy" (1991), a Turkish spy in "Pascali's Island" (1988) and even Sherlock Holmes' chronicler Mr. Watson in "Without a Clue" (1988). But there is one role that was an obvious prelude for "Schindler's List." In 1989, he played the title role in "Murderers Among Us: The Simon Wiesenthal Story."

"That was important preparation," he said, "but a lot of my preparation for this period in history started a long time ago. It's odd; you see something as a child, and you remember it years later. I remember when I was about 11, watching a series called 'War in the Air,' narrated by Richard Burton. As a schoolboy doing my homework in grammar school, I was watching this program, and they got to the scenes of the relief of the Belsen concentration camp.

"I remember that my heart stopped beating. I had no idea that people did this to people. I was watching it at home in the sitting room by myself, on this black-and-white television, and I was just poleaxed. And I'll never forget that footage, seeing it as a child, as long as I live.

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