“Great roles are great challenges, but nothing is as great as having a starring role in changing a child’s life forever.”

Sir Ben Kingsley

Actor

Oscar winner

Sir Ben Kingsley was a donor, a supporter and an Oscar-winning actor.

So, when we discussed producing a feature film to raise awareness about the problem of clefts, I wrote to Sir Ben and asked for his help.

This was the second time we thought about producing a feature film. The first time, four years earlier, I went to Hollywood to explore this idea but virtually nobody would meet with me.

I came back to New York with my tail between my legs. I met with my team and told them there was no way we could produce a feature film. But perhaps we could produce a first-rate documentary and that might give us a chance of winning an Oscar which would raise a tremendous amount of awareness and donations.

We wrote to the top 10 documentary directors in America and received proposals from eight of them. Not only were the proposals excellent, they were extremely inexpensive averaging about $250,000 per documentary versus $20-$30 million to shoot a feature film.

Shooting and producing a documentary was so cheap, we decided to produce two films to double our chances of winning an Oscar.

We hired a director who had actually won an Oscar for her documentary, “Chernobyl Heart.” We asked her to shoot her film in China, but the Chinese Minister of Propaganda forbade it so that film was never made.

The other director we hired had been nominated for an Oscar. We asked her to shoot her film in India. We gave her the location, the plot, and even found the stars of her film when we did a casting call of more than 1,000 children with unrepaired clefts.

She did a great job but finished the film one week after the Oscar deadline.

So, we decided to stick it in a closet for a year and then submit it for an Oscar. And our dreams came true when our film, Smile Pink, won the Oscar for best short documentary in 2009.

After we won, he gave us reason to believe a feature film might be successful, so we started talking with a lot of directors and producers in Hollywood. Suddenly everyone would talk to us since we had won an Oscar.

Around the same time, I scheduled a trip to London to meet with some major donors and I wrote and asked Sir Ben Kingsley if we could meet to discuss this project.

I was so grateful when he said yes.

Sir Ben was incredibly gracious and generous with his time. He seemed interested in the idea of a movie about clefts and even had a very strong vision of what the movie should be like. He was adamant that we use special effects to create the clefts because he felt that if we used real children with unrepaired clefts, we would be exploiting them.

I met with him 3-4 times in both London and New York and we focused on producing a feature film that would show the pain and suffering of millions of children who live with unrepaired clefts in developing countries.

And the miracle of cleft surgery and how it just 45 minutes can give the suffering child matches the new smile but a new life.

We talked about recruiting other Smile Train supporters for this movie such as Jackie Chan from China and Aishwarya Rai in India, “the most beautiful woman in the world.”

The project was really starting to get momentum when I had a meeting with another one of our major donors and supporters, Ron Meyer, the Chairman of Universal Pictures.

I told Ron what we were trying to do, and he shook his head and said, “Have you lost your mind?”

He went on to explain to me how difficult the movie business had become. Even with big movie stars like Sir Ben Kingsley, Jackie Chan and Aishwarya Rai, our chances of producing a successful film were slim to none.

He told me that his team at Universal had expected the previous year to be their most successful year ever – but most of their movies bombed and it was their worst year ever.

I thanked him for his very frank and direct advice. I was depressed when I left his office, but I was also very grateful. I felt like he saved me three years of my life and $30 million.

When it broke the news to Sir Ben Kingsley he understood. He certainly knew how much the movie business it changed and how difficult it was to produce a hit movie.

Thank God for Ron Meyer and his sobering advice.