Academy Award-winning actor Sir Ben Kingsley stars in Roman Polanksi's adaptation of Charles Dickens' classic novel, "Oliver Twist," which co-stars Harry Eden, Leanne Rowe, and Barney Clark as the adorable Oliver Twist. Set in the 1830s in old England, the movie tells the inspiring tale of an orphan named Oliver Twist and his adventures growing up. After running away from an orphanage, Oliver finds himself mixed up with a strange man named Fagin and his band of child thieves. Oliver, however, realizes the wrong of his ways and tries to leave - but Fagin won't give him up so easily.

Below, Kingsley talks about the classic tale

Q: Are you aware of all the criticism of Dickens' portrayal of Fagin as a Jewish character, and did you feel like you were walking a tightrope?

A: I was not aware of this tightrope for one second.

Q: Dickens was accused after the book came out of being anti-Semitic and as a result, in "Our Mutual Friend," he wrote up some sympathetic Jewish characters. Were you ever worried about that?

A: No. It never entered the debate. Roman and I never spoke of it. Roman allowed for a completely uncluttered avenue toward completing that character, completely uncluttered. It never, never entered the workspace, and therefore never entered my head.

Q: What's your sense of the fact that he has been stereotyped though?

A: Honestly, I don't have one. I don't have any sense of that at all, or any strong opinions about that. I think Roman wanted me to play Fagin because he was aware, as an actor, of my journey through Simon Wiesenthal's life, through Isaac Stern's life and through Otto Frank's life as Anne Frank's father. Confronting that enormous tribal grief as an actor, wearing my yellow star on three different overcoats in three different films with three different numbers on them, it's a very strange journey I've had as an actor to have those three experiences in my life and then having also played Moses, and Myer Lansky, to also now be invited to play Fagin. So it never, never entered the workspace or arena and therefore Roman never allowed that debate into my head, and I promise you it didn't. I promise you it never entered my head, any more than when I was offered Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, did it enter my head that I wasn't blonde. Truly, it never entered my head to think I should be blonde because I'm the prince of Denmark.

Q: Did the hair and teeth and everything help you to get into the character?

A: It's not a question of getting used to it, sir, because they were all my choices. I chose to have those teeth because it reminds me of a man my brother and I used to go and see in a part of Manchester called the Shambles, that was an 18th-century part of Manchester, which already sounds Dickensian. And there was a character who owned an antique shop that was a mountain of stuff that he collected and bought and sold - musical instruments, stamps, coins, metals, helmets, everything, piled up behind him. He had teeth like a horse that would come out of his mouth at different angles. I was 8 at the time, and I looked up at this person and saw this extraordinary creature. He had two overcoats, tied together with rope, just like my Fagin, and hunched over. He wore gloves with no fingers in them, mittens, his hands were covered with oxide because he was handling metal all the time, his hands were black. And I remember my brother asking him for a particularly rare stamp, a Victorian stamp called a penny black. My brother was 10 at the time and we both looking up at him waiting for his answer.

"Do you have a penny black, sir?", my brother, and this voice from this man said, "You're asking for the moon!"

All these years later, I remembered that. There was my Fagin that I saw as a child, because I wanted to create a Fagin who Oliver would see, from Oliver's perspective, because everyone in that novel, everyone in the film, they're all necessarily in that journey to show Oliver's journey. We're all parts of Oliver's journey. There's a good angel and there's a dark angel fighting for this boy's soul - Mr. Brownlow and Fagin, if you like, two angels struggling for the possession of the soul of a child. Therefore, my role has to be there to show that child's journey, that's the only reason Fagin is in the novel, and Fagin doesn't exist. Doesn't exist. Even though you see him walking around on the street he doesn't exist. He's there to show the journey of a child, the struggle for the soul of a child as one of the two angels in the film.

Q: I got the impression you had a lot of fun playing this role...

A: Did you really? I loved him, and from the moment I put the prosthetic teeth in I became him. I bent down, bent my back, bent my knees. As soon as I walked down the set of stairs into this studio corridor, and I walked along that corridor every morning as Fagin, quickly, swift walk I had, greeting all the crew as Fagin. I allowed Fagin to forget who everyone was every morning. I'd ask the same question of Roman Polanski. I'd say, "Good morning, who are you?" He'd use to laugh so much and I'd say, "So what do you do?" I gave Fagin a lot of license to wind people up. He'd say, "I direct the film." I'd say, "We're not making a film, are we?" It was beautiful. I loved being inside him.

Q: By being in character all the time, even off camera, did it help with working with the children?

A: I stayed in character all day so that whenever the camera was on a child, even if I wasn't in the shot, if I was behind the camera but just in eye line for the child. Sometimes the first assistant director would say, "You know what, it's going to be two hours before we set up this scene, you can get out of makeup and you can come back as you and you can go home," and I said no. If I'm behind the camera and a child is looking at me I want the same expression on that child's face as my brother and I had when we were asking for the moon. If I'm standing behind the camera as me the child's just going to say, "Well, who's that? That's not Fagin." If it's Fagin, then they looked to me so differently and they listened to me differently and they reacted to me so differently. That was beautiful, I loved that aspect of it.

Q: Do you think you enhanced their performances then?

A: They enhanced mine, so I hope it's a two-way street. I'm opening a film with Annette Bening shortly, and Annette is totally responsible for my performance as Herman Tarnower [in "Mrs. Harris"] because of what she gave me as a colleague, as a fellow actor. She gave me so much, so yeah. It's absolutely a two-way street, absolutely.

Q: Dickens is also interested in social criticism. How far do you think we've come since then?

A: Not very far. I'm hoping there is a way where we can link premieres of this film to First Star, to Save the Children, to the Princess Trust, to UNICEF, to Unesco, to all these great organizations that are battling out there in the field. I visited Afghanistan with the Save the Children three months ago, and what those people are doing on the front lines there is breathtaking. I hope that we can somehow link this film with organizations that are going out into the favelahs, into the Palestinian camps, into the slums of Mombai, into townships and into shantytowns. I hope that we can make a link there and empower those people by not only the film, but by charity premieres as well. I think there's a direct connection, I'm sure there is. Tragically, it hasn't gotten any better. It's just migrated from London to somewhere else.

Q: How do you think Dickens' work stands up today for modern audiences?

A: I think that is exactly our point. I think that we have to accept that it is a classic, I think we have to accept that the ideas and emotions and the characters and the feelings that he put together he put together with the same integrity that Mozart put his symphonies together, and we still listen to Mozart. We never question whether or not it's relevant, we just know that it's beautiful, uplifting, provoking, extraordinary music and we listen to it. We would go to a Mozart concert tonight, and we wouldn't worry about listening to music that was written over 200 years ago. It wouldn't worry us at all. This is horribly relevant.

Q: This is pretty harsh criticism of the British class system. Did you feel any conflict being part of that system/

A: Once I was in my three overcoats and I tied that rope round my waist I was just on my little journey with those boys. Fagin creates his own family because he was an orphan himself. I'm convinced that Fagin was an orphan, I'm sure that his grandparents brought him over to England from some terrible pogrom they were trying to escape from, and I'm sure that he in London with his grandparents, he having to learn English, they not speaking a word of English, a very, very isolated child, in a very poor part of London with extremely restricted aspirations placed on that child, so be a street kid. And what do you do then? Then your aspirations shrink even more. Be the best street kid on the street. When I grow up I'll have my own street kids. The limited imagination is a simple product of history, not whether he's good or bad or this or that, just a product of history.

Q: Because of their age, the boys had no notion of who Roman Polanski is. Do you think that's an advantage for them?

A: I'm sure it is, and he was wonderful with them. He's a loving father himself, he's a parent, and some of the children were about the same age as his older child. His working relationship with them was, again, uncluttered, it was just clean lines of communication between all of us in making the film.

Q: What were your expectations of working with him?

A: "Death and the Maiden" was a lovely experience for me. We'd kept in contact by telephone, letter, and then I would see him in Paris when I visited Paris, and very recently before he offered me Fagin I was on his jury at Deauville and we'd all sit round a big table and debate cinema. To be at the same table as Roman, as chairman of the jury, debating what he thought of the films he'd just seen, was beautiful.

"Oliver Twist" opens wide this Friday.