ACTOR DANIEL KISH INTERVIEW

I think one of the biggest differences that you tend to see is his confidence from a psychological stand point. It’s a bit like a sighted person being confronted with complete darkness. People don’t know what to do with that. They don’t know how to function, they don’t know where they are, they don’t know where things are. Whereas when someone is able to use flashes of light, match light or star light or moon light, it doesn’t matter where the light is coming from, as long as you have even a little light to shine into your environment, that makes a complete difference in terms of one’s ability to feel confident about interacting with and approaching the environment. So, any sighted person who’s been confronted by complete darkness and who then has access to even little light knows the difference. And that I think is one of the crucial differences between someone who is an active user of echolocation versus one who has relatively little experience using echolocation.

World Access for the Blind is a non-profit charity organization in the US. It was founded 11 years ago. I helped it to establish. Its focus is to advance orientation and mobility techniques. Actually, we have developed a new process that we call perceptual mobility, which means mobility that is self directed based on their perceptual ability, based on the ability to know what is around them and to make choices based on that. From the beginning we committed ourselves to making the strategies and techniques that we are developing are available globally to individuals throughout the world.

It’s a bit ironic because as a kid growing up, Batman was certainly one of my favorite characters and I even designed my own utility belt. I was quite a brawler as a child. So I fought other kids like batman fights his foes.

I certainly didn’t claim the name Batman. It was never a name that I applied to myself. The name ‘Batman’ was first used in ‘Ripley’s Believe it or Not’ in 2001 and the name seems to have stuck from that point. They called that episode ‘Batman’ and then in 2004, one of the biggest magazines in Europe called me with the same name. And the Dutch took it up, Discovery used the term ‘real life Batman’ and the Swiss also took it up. So, everyone started using the term batman and it seems to have stuck.

We met at my home and we talked long about my life. He asked me a lot of questions. And then we went to various places in the community that I would go. The park near where I live, the places I eat, and other places I frequently visit. He wanted to know about how I live my life. So I took him to a few places and showed him how I do things. I own a house in Long Beach, California. I showed him how I live my life in a natural and relaxed way.

He picked it up very well. He certainly understood the concept. He’d already got the clicking down, before I even began working with him. He’d done his homework as well. I had sent him some videos that he could use to train himself. He used those videos very well. He was a very efficient actor and student in that sense. I’ve worked with other actors. I’ve never participated in a feature film, but I have participated as technical adviser to other films. A good actor has the capacity to absorb characteristics from others into themselves. And Vikram was able to do that very well. He was able to absorb some of my characteristics and also of Brian Bushway, who is one of our mobility coaches, who lost his vision at 14. In that sense, Brian had more in common, with Vikram’s character Kenny than I did, because I’ve been blind for as long as I can remember. And yet Kenny lost his vision much later in life as did Brian. So, I actually had Vikram study Brian, in terms of how to move, how to address and interact with the environment. I just helped Vikram develop the specifics of echolocation and he responded very well.