And if the film had gone into more detail about the human contradictions in Gandhi’s character, what would it have served? Attenborough and Kingsley and John Briley, who wrote the screenplay, wanted to focus on the qualities that inspired people when Gandhi was alive and that went on to inspire Martin Luther King and many, many others. Does it “idealize” Gandhi? Probably-look closely enough at anyone and you’ll find their flaws. The level of craft in Gandhi seems extraordinary today, and so does its spiritual force. And by the time he made Gandhi, he already had Young Winston and A Bridge Too Far to his credit, so he’d had experience with large-scale action and masses of people. Attenborough, who started as an actor in the ‘40s and very quickly became one of the most popular actors in British cinema, brought a rare level of emotional intelligence and articulation to the pictures he directed.

As time goes on, judgments about what’s conventional and what isn’t start to fade away, and you can see very clearly how timebound they are. The film was a box-office hit, a multiple-award winner and it justifiably made a star out of Sir Ben, with whom I’ve had the pleasure of working on two pictures.Īs it always happens when a film is so successful, there was a backlash: it was conventional and stodgy it was partially subsidized by the Indian government it presented a whitewashed portrait of Gandhi, etc. When Attenborough came aboard, he cast a theatrically trained actor of half-Gujarati descent, Ben Kingsley, in the lead.

It took many years to get a film about Gandhi made (at one point Lean was going to direct). At the time, it was treated as an event, an epic in the vein of David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia and Doctor Zhivago. I recently took another look at Gandhi, Sir Richard Attenborough’s 1982 film about one of the most inspiring figures of the 20th century. In partnership with The Film Foundation, Turner Classic Movies is proud to bring you this exclusive monthly column by iconic film director and classic movie lover Martin Scorsese.

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