Hot actors give each other cold shoulder in 'Learning to Drive'

Actors Ben Kingsley and Patricia Clarkson have made three movies together and become good friends.

But they gave each other the cold treatment on the set of their new comic drama "Learning to Drive," opening this weekend in Chicago and Evanston.

Why? To keep it real.

"The camera, when it's filming a moment of discovery, is fantastic," Kingsley said Thursday during an interview at Chicago's Peninsula Hotel. "The camera can actually show the chemistry being built (between two actors), while you're watching. That's terrific!"

Kingsley, who won the best actor Oscar for 1982's "Gandhi," said the only way he and co-star Clarkson, also an Oscar nominee, could establish this sense of discovery between two strangers would be no talking. At all.

"Because we were friends, because we knew each other," Clarkson said, "we had to be very careful not to blur the lines."

In Isabel Coixet's "Learning to Drive," Clarkson plays a high-strung literary critic whose ignored husband dumps her for another woman. Kingsley plays a Sikh from India who works as a cabdriver and driving instructor. The two strangers connect when she needs to learn to drive in the face of her impending divorce.

"We wanted to keep it true to the script," Clarkson said. "So we remained separate, which was hard because I adore him. We kept to ourselves and led very separate lives while we shot this film."

Kingsley agreed.

"We knew each other well enough that we could trust a deep silence between takes, between setups," he said. "And never going to dinner with each other after a day's work. One could do this with another performer and he might say, 'Did I upset you? Why aren't you talking to me today?' Not with Patricia. Just silence. She stayed in her neurotic, wavy-line bubble, and I stayed very still. That's what you hopefully see on screen."

Clarkson said trial separation from Kingsley was tough.

"He's fun, he's witty. He's a guy you want to have a beer with," she said. "He's a consummate professional. He shows up ready for work. He's a workhorse. and I like that. He shows up on the set ready to go and that bonds me to him as an actor."

While filming on location in Brooklyn, Kingsley, dressed in traditional Sikh attire, became the target of a racial slur from passers-by who didn't know he was on a movie set with a disabled car.

"I didn't hear it, but it was quoted to me," the actor said. "'He should be buying a (blank)ing camel, not a (blank)ing car!' That was what was yelled at me. I think it actually focused my performance a lot."

As for having art imitate life (Kingsley's cabbie has slurs thrown at him in the movie), the actor remained pragmatic.

"Life will intervene whether we like it or not," he said.

I asked Kingsley if he agreed with the late film critic Roger Ebert that movies are "empathy machines" that allow us to glimpse into other lives and cultures so we can build understanding.

"That's beautiful," he said. "But I would step back and substitute the word 'storytelling' for 'movies.' But yes, Roger Ebert was right."