Sir Ben Kingsley speaks at the Facing History and Ourselves 20th anniversary Los Angeles benefit dinner on Monday, Jan. 27, 2014 in Beverly Hills, Calif. At age 70, Kingsley still keeps a schedule that looks like a highway in gridlock. THE CANADIAN PRESS/Matt Sayles/Invision/AP

TORONTO - At age 70, Sir Ben Kingsley still keeps a schedule that looks like a highway in gridlock.

"I've got 12 projects to be released at the moment," the Oscar-winning "Gandhi" star said this week at the Toronto International Film Festival. "I'm producing as well. We have a production company, so we've got six films on our slate. I think one of them's about to pop, which is brilliant.

"So there's lots to do."

This month will see the release of the animated feature "The Boxtrolls," to which he contributed vocal work, and he's also expected to appear in the following films this year: "Night at the Museum: Secret of the Tomb," "Exodus: Gods and Kings," "Autobahn" and "Robot Overlords." Next year he has more than a half-dozen projects on the go, including the animated reboot of "The Jungle Book."

The British thespian was at the Toronto film festival to promote "Learning to Drive," a sharp-tongued comedy that reunites Kingsley with director Isabel Coixet and Oscar-nominated actress Patricia Clarkson, with whom he made 2008's "Elegy."

Based on a New Yorker essay, "Learning to Drive" casts Clarkson as a book critic whose husband suddenly and coldly leaves her after 21 years of marriage. Seeking to recover her independence, she reluctantly agrees to take driving lessons from Kingsley's Sikh part-time cab driver, who's enduring a life crisis of his own. Soon an unlikely friendship forms, and they open up to each other on deeply private matters.

Kingsley, too, gets abstractly philosophical when asked what drives his prolificacy.

"Urgency," he replied. "In a preface to a lovely book I own and dip into occasionally — but I haven't for a long time — it's called 'Women Who Run With the Wolves' and it's by Clarissa Pinkola Estes, and in her preface she says: 'Storytelling is healing.'

"I absolutely believe in that phrase," he added. "I'm not a healer, but I do think that telling stories to each other is very urgent right now. There is a thread, which I can't define only in as much as I fear it's about to snap, and acting and storytelling and beautiful filmmaking are constantly repairing that thread that's about to snap.

"Because if it does snap, we've had it."

— Follow @CP_Patch on Twitter.

News from © The Canadian Press, 2014