Before you even get to your performance, before the cameras start to roll, before the work starts, you have to turn up—on time, alert and ready for whatever mental and physical challenges the day is going to bring. I’m talking about the absolute basics of professionalism and courtesy here. So many people fail to pay these things enough attention, yet just by taking care of the basics you can put yourself well ahead of the game. None of this is glamorous. It’s a lot like getting ready for school. But then film-making—and I’m assured the same goes in the supposedly glamorous worlds of modelling, fashion design, PR and air travel—is not glamorous: it’s just a lot of hard work.
So, these are my basics for making sure I turn up ready to perform. I learnt them as a young actor but I still stick by them today. Number one: I always have my magic travel bag packed and by the door before I go to bed. Whether I’m going on location for three months, or popping into the set for half a day, I think through what I need to take with me, not in the morning in a mild panic but calmly the night before.
Number two: I have to get a good night’s sleep and, even more importantly, I have to have a fail-safe plan to be sure I’m up in time in the morning: one alarm clock good, two alarm clocks better.
Three: I make sure I know how I’m going to get to the studio or location or wherever I need to be, and how long it will take me to get there. I build in extra time for unexpected traffic, or the bus being late, or finding a parking spot. If someone else has made transport arrangements for me, is that person going to be available at the end of a phone at whatever unpleasant time of the morning I have to leave, in case the arrangements don’t go to plan? A lot can go wrong with transport, and if you don’t know how you’re getting there, you may not have a job when you eventually appear, late and flustered, looking disorganised. I always mentally rehearse each step of the journey, anticipate the problems and have a back-up plan.
A calm, unrushed journey to work is a good time to take a few deep breaths and give myself a pep talk. I skip the pep talk, these days, but it used to be something along the lines of: “You’ve come this far. You don’t want to go back where you came from.” That gave me the motivation to get through whatever I had to get through.
By the time I turned up for my first day of rehearsals on Sleuth in 1972, I had played major roles in around twenty pictures. I had been around the block a few times. But I was very nervous because this was a two-hander and the other hand was going to be Laurence Olivier—or, to give him his proper title, Lord Olivier—the founder of the country’s brand new National Theatre and at that time the most celebrated actor in the world. As I sat in the car on the way to Pinewood Studios, I gave myself a talking-to: “Larry Olivier might be a giant of the stage and screen, one of the greatest actors of all time, and, yes, I might be only the greatest actor from the Elephant and Castle, but I’m good at what I do. So I’m just going to do what I do, and not allow myself to be intimidated by him or his reputation. I’m going to give him a run for his money.” (I was still very nervous when I got there. And I remained ill-at-ease even when the great man arrived at ten on the dot and made straight for me, hand outstretched, eyes twinkling. “Michael,” he boomed, “we meet at last.” He could not have been friendlier or more welcoming to me, but I felt acutely conscious that what I was dealing with here was a quite formidable force. The pep talk helped a bit.)
Pep talk over, deep breaths taken, I have now arrived on time and in the right frame of mind. It’s a good start.
Now I get my bearings. I establish where I need to go and what I need to do.
In movie-making that will mean finding my dressing room, Makeup and Hair, locating exactly where we are going to be shooting, then getting myself into makeup, hair and costume. In most other lines of work, you will have put on your “costume”—maybe a uniform, or maybe that outfit that makes you look good and feel quietly confident—before you left the house.
I find the people I’m going to be working with and introduce myself. On a movie set, I always make a particular point of seeing the assistant director, whose job it is to call the actors to the set when it’s their moment. If you aren’t on a movie set, there will often be someone with a clipboard who is coordinating the logistics. Make yourself known to them.
If you are going to be using any kit or technical equipment, track it down and test it. If you are conducting an interview, check the batteries on your voice recorder. If you are giving a presentation, review your slides on the laptop, check the mike, stand at the lectern.
For me, this is the time to check out the set before it fills with technicians. If it’s supposed to be my home or office, I’ll look like an idiot if I don’t know which way the door opens, or whether it leads to the bathroom or into a cupboard. Even a moment’s hesitation will destroy the illusion. It all needs to be natural and automatic, as it is in my real home or office. I pick up the props I’m going to be using too. I check they work and note where they’re going to be placed. Unless I’m trying to show that my character is absent-minded or distracted, I should know exactly where I put down my glass or where I hung up my bag and how to switch on the bedside light.
If the set is supposed to be somewhere I have never been before, that’s different. On Sleuth, my character was going to be entering the set as a stranger. I didn’t want to go blundering about but I didn’t want to over-familiarise myself with it either. The camera sees lack of spontaneity just as keenly as it sees hesitation. So I took myself off and walked things through quietly, once.
One last bit of kit. I always have a pencil on me so I can take notes on the moves. (“The first thing you need to become an actor is a pencil!” Alwyn D. Fox of Horsham Repertory Theatre screamed at me on my first day. Alwyn D. Fox did scream a lot, but he was usually right.)
Now I have to keep myself pristine and maintain my energy levels. I must not smear mayonnaise all over my makeup. I have to avoid that chair, where someone has abandoned half a slice of Victoria sponge. My costume and I probably shouldn’t go for a little wander in the rain. And I have to eat as sensibly as I can. I won’t necessarily be able to eat when I’m hungry—we may have to keep shooting—so I have to know myself well enough to grab something before I start to keel over.
Taking care of these basic requirements gives me confidence in myself. Confidence allows me to relax, and relaxation allows me to perform. Nailing the basics also makes me appear reliable, which is how you make sure they ask you to come back.
Depend on it
Reliability is at a premium in the movies and, I’m ready to bet, everywhere else. Time is money, and holding things up because you haven’t planned properly, or haven’t worked out what is expected of you, or for any other reason within your control, is a drain on the producer’s money and your reputation.
But it’s not just turning up on time, and keeping the butter off your chin and your shoes shiny. It’s also about functioning well under pressure, when the camera rolls, about bobbing back up no matter what gets flung at you, whether it’s your hat coming down over your eyes or your director setting fire to your script. It’s about anticipating and avoiding whatever gets you flustered or distracted, anticipating and avoiding hunger and exhaustion. It’s about maintaining a high level of alert competence, even when there appears to be chaos all around you. That comes from focus and experience.
I wanted to make reliability part of my personal brand. I wanted people to say, “If you get Michael Caine, you’re going to have a laugh on set, but you’re getting a professional. You’re getting someone who always knows his lines, who always hits his mark and who’s always doing the best job he can possibly do.” I wanted people, when they had worked with me once, to want to work with me again.
And, if you look at the directors I’ve worked with, I think I succeeded. I worked with several great ones more than once, starting with Julian Amyes, who gave me my first speaking roles in film (A Hill in Korea) and TV (The Lark, by Jean Anouilh), and Lewis Gilbert, who directed Alfie
and Educating Rita, but who I had obviously impressed with my performance as “Thirsty Prisoner on Train” in Carve Her Name with Pride in 1958, right through to Christopher Nolan, who has cast me in each of the seven films he has made since I first appeared as Alfred Pennyworth in Batman Begins in 2005.
Because I got a reputation as a safe pair of hands I was also brought in once or twice to replace a leading man who, for whatever reason—alcohol, drugs or personal problems—couldn’t make it through the movie.
Only a handful of people can get away with being unreliable.
The 1959 movie Some Like It Hot, one of the funniest and most daring comedies I have ever seen, starred Marilyn Monroe and was directed and produced by Billy Wilder. I never met Marilyn despite my best efforts (I must have had a bit part in a movie at Pinewood Studios when Laurence Olivier was directing Marilyn in The Prince and the Showgirl on the next set, each of them completely infuriating the other. I kept going over to their set but Marilyn was always with her coach, Paula Strasberg, and eventually the third assistant director Colin Clark threw me off the set. When I saw Colin portrayed by Eddie Redmayne in the 2011 film My Week with Marilyn I understood a little better why.) But I became close friends with Billy. One night over dinner I asked him if Marilyn Monroe had been difficult to work with. “Yes,” said Billy. “She was always late and she didn’t know her lines. But then,” he said, after a pause, “I could have cast my Aunt Martha, and she would have been on time and she would have known her lines, but who the hell would have gone to see her?”
When I worked with Elizabeth Taylor on Zee and Company, written by my friend Edna O’Brien (Elizabeth played my wife, and the two of us ended up in a love triangle with Susannah York: the movie was a little ahead of its time when it was released in 1972 and did not do as well as it should have done), Elizabeth never turned up until ten o’clock in the morning. She had had it written into her contract, while the rest of us had to be in costume and makeup and ready to work by eight thirty. I used to have to do close-ups and back-of-the-head shots with the continuity girl every morning for ninety minutes until Elizabeth showed up. Then there would be a tea break—or, more accurately, a Bloody Mary break—at half past ten.
But actually, once she had arrived each day, Elizabeth was charming, no trouble at all and very professional. She never, ever messed up a line. And she could take a joke against herself too. One day when there was a lull in shooting the director Brian Hutton—the funniest director and possibly the funniest person I have ever met—told her he had been talking to some older technicians at MGM Studios in Hollywood; they had said that of all the child stars at the studio from the old days—Mickey Rooney, Margaret O’Brien and so on—she had been the only one who had not been a pain in the arse. Elizabeth inclined her head regally to receive the compliment. “Why, thank you, Brian,” she purred charmingly.
After a short pause Brian went on, “So what I’ve been trying to figure out is, when did you become one?” We all held our breath until Elizabeth roared with laughter.
Marilyn could get away with it and so could Elizabeth. For everyone else, if you’re flaky or temperamental, you have about three movies before you’ll be replaced with someone who can do whatever you do, but without all the hassle. On a movie set, the continuity person writes down everything that happens, including the reason for any delay on a take—for example, “a dog barked” or “the ceiling fell down.” Or “actor, Flaky McDitzy, one hour late.” If a movie’s budget is blown, the continuity sheets will tell the story of how and why. And if your name is bigger on the sheets than it is at the box office, you become unemployable. It’s very clear-cut in the movie business. But in most other industries, word of mouth will usually do the job of continuity sheets.
Talent will get you only so far. You need to add in boring old reliability if you want to endure. Your life can be disorganised, but your work can never be. I am a disorganised person in every other aspect of my life: I can never find my glasses or my hat, and whenever we’re going out I forget where we’re going. But I am very organised when it comes to my work, whether on or off the set. It’s professional; it’s courteous; it will get you asked again. Unless you’re confident you’re as big a star in your universe as Marilyn or Elizabeth were in theirs, I would suggest you turn up on time with a clear head, a clean face and a pencil in your hand.
6.
The Rehearsal Is the Work
“It’s fear dries the mouth, isn’t it?”
Zulu, 1963
THE MAIN LESSON I learnt from Joan Littlewood—the only person who ever fired me—was this: the rehearsal is the work, the performance is the relaxation. Once I had worked out what it meant—that by the time you get to the performance, you should be so familiar with what you are doing that it seems effortless—I understood its importance, in acting and in life.
This goes beyond getting the basics right—turning up on time, maintaining energy levels, checking the kit. It’s about knowing your role inside out. If you can prepare thoroughly, if you can put in the spadework before the performance—or any big challenge—then you’ll be more in control. You’ll be more in control of your material, your nerves and yourself. That control should free you up to listen, pay attention to what is going on around you and react to whatever gets thrown at you. You have already done the work in rehearsal, you have already been through all the sweat, had all the nightmares, and when it comes to the performance you can relax, give it your best and deal with everything—from a slight change of plan to a complete and utter balls-up—from a place of alert but calm confidence.
If you do it right, preparation is not in any way opposed to spontaneity. It actually allows you to be spontaneous. When you are prepared, you are able to subdue your fear, control your nerves, channel your energy and enter that state of highly alert relaxation that is spontaneity’s best friend.
In the theatre and in the movies, preparation means researching your character, working out gestures, movement and mannerisms and above all learning your lines. In the theatre you can add another layer of rehearsal with the cast. In the movies you don’t get that luxury: the director will expect you to bring a fully formed characterisation with you. I reckon that Stanislavski’s principle applies way beyond acting in the theatre or the movies, though. I use it when I’m cooking. I use it when I’m doing publicity interviews. As far as I can see, it’s useful everywhere. Prepare the basics as thoroughly as you possibly can. Do your homework. Know your stuff. Be clear on what you have to say. So that when it comes to the moment to “perform,” you’re so confident in your own role that you can put your energy into listening and reacting to what is happening in the moment.
Do your research
I always research my performances by finding and observing people who are in some respect like the part I’m going to play.
If I’m playing a real person I read about them, watch documentaries about them, find out as much as I can about them. Not so that I can do an impersonation but so that I can get a sense of their real selves, connect to their truth. My part in Zulu was based on a real person and, in a history book from a second-hand bookshop on the Charing Cross Road, I found a photograph of him. Lieutenant Gonville Bromhead was five foot six inches tall with a black beard and rather expressive dark eyes. The man staring out at me from the page made me want to play the part not as the chinless wonder that Cy Endfield and Stanley Baker were envisaging but as a man who, though he was ultimately overpowered, set out believing himself to be strong.
The other real people I have played on film are F. W. de Klerk, South Africa’s last president under the apartheid system, in the 1997 TV film Mandela and de Klerk (my good friend Sidney Poitier played Nelson Mandela); Brian Reader in King of Thieves and—wait for it—Joseph Stalin, the murderous Soviet leader, in the 1994 TV miniseries Then There Were Giants. The drama focused on the three great Allied leaders and their personal relationships with each other during the Second World War. John Lithgow was Roosevelt and Bob Hos
kins was Churchill, and although I was nominated for an Emmy for the role, Bob and I got slammed by the critics as having been miscast. At the time I think I probably agreed. The character and the Russian accent were a stretch for me, and because I didn’t look anything like Stalin, I used to spend hours in Makeup. To my astonishment, though, I have just found it, and watched it, on Netflix. It wasn’t as bad as I’d thought it would be. I wonder whether the critics who thought we had been miscast were possibly a little boxed in by the working-class roles Bob and I had played before, and their ideas about who we were.
Of these three “real” people I played on film, I only managed to come face-to-face with one of them. Stalin was dead by the time I was playing him. I was not allowed to visit Brian Reader in prison. I did, however, go to dinner at his very grand official residence with F. W. de Klerk. One little thing I noticed that evening, which I had not picked up from studying the tapes: he was a chain-smoker, but clearly a private, secret one. De Klerk chain-smoked through the meal but I had never seen him smoking in interviews or in a single photograph. I now recalled, though, that I had often seen him holding one hand behind his back. I guessed he had got so used to hiding his cigarettes that it had become a habit even when he didn’t have one. I put that into my characterisation: the hidden hand was a kind of reserve and withholding. De Klerk, in the end, always reminded me a little of President Gorbachev of Russia: both were key players in the dismantling of terrible, brutal regimes but both got left behind by the forces they helped to set in train.
I also met Kip Thorne, the American theoretical physicist on whom my character Dr. Brand in Interstellar is based. Kip was a technical adviser to the movie, and my character’s office, including the algebraic equation around the walls, two foot high and forty foot long, was based on Kip’s real office. When I saw it I asked Kip, “Is that a real equation?”
Blowing the Bloody Doors Off Page 7
