Interview conducted by Josh Horowitz
December 11, 2003
Maurice Micklewhite might just be the most charming man saddled with such a horrible name on the planet. Well, this is something of a lie. Maurice doesn’t really exist anymore. Early on, inspired by a poster for THE CAINE MUTINY, Maurice stepped aside and decided that “Michael Caine” had a nice ring to it and might get him somewhere in the acting business. It did. And he’s ridden that name to a nearly unparalleled film career. Here’s a quick refresher: ALFIE, THE IPCRESS FILE, THE ITALIAN JOB, HANNAH & HER SISTERS, DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS, THE QUIET AMERICAN.
For a while Caine was known as much for the sheer volume of his work as its merit, not to mention his willingness to take on a role simply for the paycheck. He wrote about one infamous payday, “I've not seen JAWS 4, I've heard it's terrible. What I have seen, and I can assure you is not terrible, is the house it paid for."
But today it’s both quality and quantity and he’s on cloud nine about it. Nothing brings a smile to his face more quickly than a mention of his first multi-picture deal to star as Alfred, Batman’s loyal manservant, in the new incarnation of the franchise.
And now with his performance in Norman Jewison’s THE STATEMENT, Michael Caine, 70 years young, proves he is
somehow still at the top of his game. This is no small feat for a man who has won two Oscars and created some of the most indelible screen portraits in the history of the medium. It's becoming old hat to find Caine in an Oscar-worthy performance each year but THE STATEMENT continues the streak. Don't count him out when the nominations are announced. He’s a favorite son of the Academy and the Hollywood Foreign Press and gutsy performances like this one show why.
THE STATEMENT finds Caine on the run as Pierre Brossard, a French Nazi and fugitive from justice for crimes against humanity perpetrated during the second World War. The law is on his trail, embodied by an unusual tandem of Tilda Swinton and Jeremy Northam, not to mention some former friends in the Catholic church who used to harbor him.
I got a chance to meet up with Caine in New York just as the first snow of the season began to fall outside. He worried about getting out on a plane the next day but otherwise was in great spirits as we talked about his new film and his veritable resurgence in recent years.
Josh Horowitz: [THE STATEMENT director] Norman Jewison was telling me how you’ve known each other for thirty years without working together.
Michael Caine: That’s right. We always wanted to work together and we never made it until now.
JH: How did you find time to be directed by Alan Alda in a film [SWEET LIBERTY] and not Norman Jewison?
MC: It’s the projects he’s had. I can’t play a black boxer or something. I could have done THE THOMAS CROWN AFFAIR. In fact, I nearly did it.
JH: What happened?
MC: I was working on something else.
JH: I’ve heard you say that at this point in your career it has to be an offer you can’t refuse in order for you to take a role. Why did this role fall under that heading?
MC: I keep looking to test myself all the time so I look for parts that are farther and farther away from me and then try to make them real, which I think is the peak of the actors job. I can’t think of anyone farther away
from me than a French Nazi! (LAUGHS) The other degree of difficulty about it was that it was the first time I’ve played somebody I disliked so much. Throughout the movie, I’d have this selective amnesia so I could never remember what I’d done. I knew what I was going to do everyday but once I’d done it, amnesia set in. So when I saw the movie, for the first time in my entire life, I saw myself on screen not knowing what was coming. I had forgotten what I’d done with it. I hated the man so much I put it out of my mind.
JH: The selective memory you describe is almost what [your character] Brossard has. He is in such denial about his past.
MC: Exactly. He’s denying what he’s doing. I’m denying what I’m doing because I hated it so much. But I’m not looking for absolution the way he was. I’m looking for box office. (LAUGHS)
JH: Box office absolution.
MC: That’s right! Box office absolution is what I’m looking for!
JH: The opening sequence says so much about the character.
MC: You’ve got to build a character without any dialogue. It’s Hitchcock-ian except that it’s also the slowest car chase in the world. It’s an old guy in a Renault! (LAUGHS)
JH: You really let go of your vanity for this film.
MC: Norman said, “I want you to look like shit for this movie.” They put hardly any makeup on me, which helps a great deal in my case. I grew this sort of stubble. I had them make the wardrobe one size too big. I hunched myself over to try to make myself smaller. I saw him as a pathetic little man. Some people have felt sympathetic for him and I think it’s a natural thing because he’s a fugitive. We sympathize with a fugitive. My main fear is that we would make him sympathetic so instead I tried to make him pathetic and sad.
JH: Why is this film relevant for you today?
MC: I’ll tell you what makes it relevant to me and it was pointed out by [producer] Robert Lantos. He said, “it s not about the past, it’s about now.” You see all the shitty stuff Brossard does and what a little shit
he is but it’s the people who are manipulating him who are still there. Of course our film also has to be entertainment. So we have to wrap it in some chocolate or silver paper or something. It’s a very good chase thriller. The film applies to everything especially about those in power. Like supposing you’d stopped Pol Pot earlier. Pol Pot killed people with false teeth! Then he couldn’t think of anyone else to kill so he killed people with glasses! You and me for a start! We’d have been gone. He figured if you had enough money and you wore glasses you could read and you were intelligent and therefore you were not a communist.
JH: It’s a good thing for him contact lenses hadn’t come into practice yet.
MC: You’d have been executed as a spy for hiding your glasses!
JH: I’d guess that working with someone with the track record of Norman Jewison gives you one less thing to worry about.
MC: Sure. If you look at the first ten minutes of the film where I don’t speak, you still know who the guy is and what’s going on. That’s Norman and not me. Also, Norman is as actor’s director. He’s on your side. He’s not going to start yelling and screaming at you.
JH: Another thing he said to me and many would agree is that in the last five years, you’ve had as many great roles as you’ve ever had.
MC: About ten years ago I was getting crap scripts. You always come to a period when you’ve been the leading man where you got all the girls and now you’re getting older and there’s a swap-over time.
JH: A transition period…
MC: Yes. We all get it. And I whacked into it. I said to Sean Connery, “did you get it?” He said, “I didn’t work for two years!” So I goofed off. I took a holiday for six months and then I wrote my autobiography. I opened some restaurants. I goofed off and went to South Beach, Florida of all places. I opened a restaurant there and I had this enormous penthouse the size of an airplane hanger. I had gotten pissed off about everything about the business because I was getting the wrong kinds of scripts. This business retires you and it almost retired me and I knew it. Then Jack Nicholson and [director] Bob Rafelson turned up in Miami to do BLOOD AND WINE. It was such a wonderful experience working with Jack and Bob, I rang my agent up and said, “I’m going back to work”. I was very fortunate. With Harvey Weinstein at Miramax I got LITTLE VOICE and THE CIDER HOUSE RULES. It was quite strange. I
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won Best Actor at the San Sebastian Film Festival for BLOOD AND WINE. I won the Golden Globe for LITTLE VOICE and an Oscar for CIDER HOUSE RULES. I thought, jeez I’m doing ok here. I’ve got QUIET AMERICAN, which I loved, and got nominated for an Oscar. In the meantime I got fun bits with MISS CONGENIALITY and I was Austin Powers’ dad. Now I’m going to be Batman’s guardian and butler! I’m doing MISS CONGENIALTY 2! Everybody is remaking my movies so Jude Law, who is doing one with ALFIE, came to me and said, “let’s remake SLEUTH!”
JH: You’ve got like five franchises going!
MC: (LAUGHS) I’m seventy years old and with BATMAN I have my first three-picture deal. It’s like I’m some kind of starlet or something with big tits! (LAUGHS)
JH: They’ve finally figured out what to do with you!
MC: They finally figured it out! They said, “let him go. He can play an American. He does all these fucking accents.” It’s true. I’m earning more money now than I ever did. It just came. I’m kind of having the best time of my life. It keeps getting better. I heard a phrase the other day, “you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.” Because he’s got something else in mind for you. (LAUGHS) So I always say, “God willing, I’m going to do this.”
JH: When’s the last time you auditioned for something? Did you hate it?
MC: I didn’t enjoy auditioning. I never got a job from an audition. John Neville is in this movie. He was the original Alfie in the play. He left and I auditioned three times for ALFIE and I didn’t get it. (LAUGHS) The last time I auditioned was probably my screen test for ZULU. Cy Endfield, the producer and Stanley Baker, the star, had seen me in a play where I was playing a Cockney. So they wanted me to play the Cockney guy but by the time I got to the audition it was cast with someone else. I was very slim with long blond hair and they said, “you look
like an aristocrat, not a cockney.” They asked me if I could play upper crust and I said, “yeah.” That was the last screen test and audition. I saw the director the night after the screen test at a party and I asked him, “how was it?” and he said, “rubbish. But we’ve given you the part.” He said, “we haven’t got time to screen test anybody else” and also he said they’d cut me out if I wasn’t any good because I wasn’t that important anyway. (LAUGHS)
JH: Does anyone still call you your given name, Maurice?
MC: No. Even my mother called me Michael. Maurice never made any money anyway. You don’t want to get in with Maurice. He’ll borrow money from you and hit you up for a free drink. (LAUGHS).
JH: You’re well known for your professionalism on the set.
MC: That had to be the minimum for me. At least I might fool them with professionalism. I’m always on time. I always know all my lines and I always hit all my marks. I’m a pain in the ass because I’m always on time.
JH: They told me before I sat down with you that there’s no dilly dallying with you.
MC: (LAUGHS) You don’t want to keep me waiting. Like I could be sleeping. I like my sleep. I’m an ex-soldier. I sleep when I can. Because you never know when you going to get to sleep again.
JH: Your autobiography, WHAT’S IT ALL ABOUT?, was a great success for you. Do you have enough dirt for another?
MC: Yeah. I’m going to do a second one. I was getting pissed off about something and my wife said, “you can’t write about that.” The older you get the more pissed off you get. You’ll find that. So she was saying that I couldn’t write down what I wanted because of the lawyers, but I have a plan. I told her, “you can publish it after I’m dead and make a fortune!” (LAUGHS)
JH: It’s the inheritance!
MC: That’s right. And I have a go at everybody. It’s really nasty. I’ve got a thing you talk into and if something pisses me off, I talk about it. When they said there would be no more screeners from the Academy, I did a whole volley about that. I went mad about that because I love screeners. I was so pissed off! And then they said there are going to be screeners but they’re going to be video and not dvd. I just spent $60,000 re-doing my cinema with the latest state of the art dvd and I’ve got a crappy old video there which is a hundred years old!
JH: Do you keep any mementos from your films like the Harry Palmer glasses?
MC: I do. Yeah. I was looking through my wardrobe the other day and saw a shirt and it said “M.T.” on it. I thought, what the bloody hell is M.T? But I remembered, Milo Tindle from SLEUTH.
JH: Any characters of yours you’d like to revisit? How about a Dirtier, even more Rotten Scoundrels?
MC: That is what I would love to make. We never got it together. You know what happened, Orion went bankrupt. They had SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, DANCES WITH WOLVES, and DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS in one year and they went bankrupt! What the hell other films did they do? Steve [Martin] came to me and said “I have a great idea for [another] Dirty Rotten Scoundrels. We try to sell a race horse in Venice” (LAUGHS) Only Steve would come up with something that nuts. And he says to me, it gets out in a glass factory and we have to catch it. We’re creeping around slowly and it’s the slowest horse chase in the world. I mean, it’s a great idea!
JH: Are you aware of the Hackman/Caine theory that there’s always a Gene Hackman or Michael Caine movie on somewhere?
MC: Yeah. He makes as many movies as I do!
JH: As we speak right now, THE CAINE MUTINY is on right now. That’s the best I could do. At least it has a personal connection for you.
MC: Yeah. It’s where I got my name from.
JH: Does that work? Is it close enough?
MC: No, I’m not taking the blame for everything! The other one is if you go to France, Gerard Depardieu is in the same amount of films as Gene and I are in this country.
JH: He’s the French Michael Caine.
MC: He’s the French Michael Hackman!
JH: What’s your take on Alfred for BATMAN? What are you going to bring to the role?
MC: Humanity. If you have a man who is bullet proof, where’s the jeopardy? I’ve had long chats with [director] Christopher Nolan. I asked him, “how are you going to bring humanity to Batman?” He said, “He’s big because he’s a human being who does push-ups, not like Superman or something.” And he has all the weapons because he’s a multi-billionaire. So the weapons are not going to be like science fiction. They’re fact.
JH: Are you going to get in on a fight scene or two maybe?
MC: No. I’m too bloody old for that. I don’t want to get into that. Don’t even ask. You never ask old people how they are. They’ll tell you for an hour.
JH: They have computer generated effects for that. They can help you.
MC: Yeah, I’d love to whack someone again but I don’t do that anymore.
JH: Maybe in the sequel?
MC: In the sequel, yeah. Well I’ve got a three-picture deal. I can hear God laughing. (LAUGHS)
THE STATEMENT opens in New York and Los Angeles December 12th and wide in January.
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