Or look at me as Frank in Educating Rita. I had been Alfie in Alfie, and Jack Carter in Get Carter. A lot of my friends thought I was mad to be in a film that was about someone called Rita. But I knew that at the heart of this story there was a relationship between two people, and that even if Julie Walters, as Rita, had the most lines, and did most of the moving about—and a quite superb job she made of it too—a lot of the dramatic interest would come from cutting to a sedentary Frank for his reactions.
Once again, less is more. In movie acting, as in life, you don’t have to be saying a lot to be effective. In movie acting, as in life, the real value is not in how you say your own lines but in how you listen and react truthfully in the moment to what other people are saying to you.
8.
Having Serious Fun
“Not many people know that.”
Educating Rita, 1983
ABOVE AND BEYOND YOUR craft there are some characteristics that come in very handy if you want to succeed in the movies or anywhere else. You are going to need stamina, flexibility, the ability to focus completely and the ability (at the same time) to relax and have fun. The last one isn’t strictly necessary but it definitely makes life easier for you and for everyone around you.
Finding your inner strength
One day, in the middle of a tough shoot in a difficult location, the assistant director announced that as we had fallen behind schedule we would be shooting for an extra three hours that day. “But it’s one hundred degrees in the shade,” I protested.
“Well, stay out of the fucking shade, then,” suggested the AD.
Shooting a movie can be physically and mentally gruelling and you have to be prepared for a long, tough haul. There might be night shooting—four pages of dialogue at three in the morning—followed by a dawn call for hair and makeup the following day. The location might be freezing tundra, a dripping jungle or a dull, cold, unfriendly city with nowhere to get a decent meal. Your shoes might pinch: costume shoes never seem to fit properly. There will almost certainly be a lot of waiting around, expending nervous energy, before you’re suddenly needed, hitting all the right notes perfectly and first time out.
Most things in life that are worth doing require similar mental or physical reserves, so build up your stamina and your resilience. Be prepared for boredom and discomfort, and find ways to manage them. Don’t complain about the less glamorous bits of your job. Don’t fret if you’re all dressed up with nowhere to go: believe that your moment will come, stay ready for it and keep thinking about your next move.
Everyone has their own strategy for dealing with “dead time.” Some people sleep. But watch out: you don’t want to appear groggy and slow when you come round. Some get lost in their smartphones, but don’t become so engrossed in the world of your phone that your real role in the real world starts to feel like a distraction. Sylvester Stallone used to do sit-ups if he got a five-minute break, sit-ups and push-ups if he got ten minutes. I lost weight just watching him. In the longer breaks, Sly would disappear off to his trailer. I wondered whether he had a woman in there, or perhaps a personal trainer, and finally I asked him what was so attractive about his trailer. “I’m writing Rocky III,” he said. I don’t like to split my attention like that. Guess what I do in my trailer? I prepare my next scene. I go over my lines. Occasionally a technician asks me, “Don’t you get bored, just hanging around?” They’re making the same mistake I made back in Lowestoft. I’m not just hanging around. I’m hanging around preparing for what’s coming next.
When stuff happens, be flexible
Despite all the preparation you will have done, things will not go to plan. Maybe the writer’s lines don’t work in the set the scenic designers have come up with, or the writer didn’t take into account the physical reality of the shoot location, so the lines have to be changed. Maybe the director has had a genius new idea overnight and is bursting to try it out. Maybe he has decided to throw the script out of the window.
The director Sidney Furie literally set fire to his script on the first day of the shoot for The Ipcress File, announcing to the assembled cast and crew, “That’s what I think of that.” I suppose he was telling us that we were not going to be tied to the script. We all stood around, stealing worried looks at each other, baffled as to what we were going to shoot. Then Sidney turned to me and said, “Oh, what the hell. Give me your script.” I handed it over. No problem, of course, because I knew my lines. “Now let’s get to work.” Once everyone had taken a breath we got on with the shoot, including a fair amount of improvisation, and made what turned out to be one of Sidney’s best movies.
Stuff happens. Try not to react to any of it with blank horror. Panic is prohibited. Whatever it is, you have to take it in your stride—which you will be able to do because, of course, you’re so thoroughly prepared. You have practised and prepared several interpretations. You know your lines so well that adding in a couple more or fiddling about with one or two is child’s play. Your mind is hanging loose enough to make the leap to where it needs to go.
Staying focused
When you’re on, you’re on, and it’s crucial that you stay in the moment. Because the camera picks up everything, it is enormously important to maintain total concentration during your take, especially during a close-up. To listen and react truthfully, to find the real emotion, your brain will be working double-time. If your attention strays even for a moment—if you hesitate over your line for just a fraction of a second, if your eyes flicker because off-camera someone walks across your sight-line, if you’re thinking about what you’re going to have for lunch, or the last shot, or the next shot—the camera will catch it.
One of the times I found it most challenging to concentrate was when we were shooting Alfie. I had to run out into Notting Hill Gate, a busy street in west London. These days Notting Hill is full of creative types but this was pre-gentrification and Notting Hill was a lot more earthy back then. My line was “Darling! Come back! I love you!” and the people who had started to gather round to see what was going on in their neighbourhood evidently found this quite amusing. They started to heckle me, quite creatively. (Maybe there were more creative types round there back then than I realised.) The director told me to carry on and he would post-synch the sound in later. I just had to block it out, and keep my focus.
But most of the time I don’t have any difficulty concentrating. I have trained myself to think only about the shot and to be completely in the moment, isolated from whatever madness might be going on around me. It’s hard to give instructions for how to do this, to articulate what is going on in my brain when I’m blocking out everything else, except that, like most things, it gets better with practice.
In life, as in front of a camera, your audience will know when your attention strays. When you’re only half concentrating on the meeting. When you’re only three-quarters listening to your partner. In life, as in front of a camera, if you focus completely on what you’re doing right now, you will stay truthful and have more impact.
Relaxing and having fun
Don’t forget that, while you’re achieving this intense focus and concentration, you also need to be achieving relaxation. It is this combination that will allow you to give your very best performance.
I was not always a relaxed performer. I have already mentioned the bucket I used to have to keep in the wings when I first started performing on stage. Later, when I first got tiny parts in movies, the deafening silence that followed the call of “Quiet!” on a movie set used to throw me into such a state of nervous collapse about my one line that to my intense mortification I often messed it up.
Come to think of it, I was also extremely nervous on my first big movie. My first day shooting dialogue on location for Zulu was not designed to put me at my ease, and if I want to summon up a sense memory of nervous exhaustion and near-hysterical tension, I go back to that time. My heavy wool uniform was hot and uncomfortable under the intense South African sun. The upper-class Bri
tish accent I had assured Cy Endfield would be no trouble at all was taking up half of my focus. The horse that had spent the previous day playing silly buggers was delighted to see me again, and had thrown me in the river three times, each time requiring a change of clothes. Staying on his back was taking the other half of my focus. Finally I managed to walk the horse up to Stanley Baker and get out my line: “Hot day, hard work.”
“CUT!” shouted Cy. “Michael, why is your voice so high?”
I protested that this was just my normal voice, like I’d used in rehearsal, so he had the sound technician play it back. Then I heard it. I was so nervous that my shoulders had tensed and my throat had tightened and as a result I had transformed myself from an effete but convincing tenor to a shrieking soprano. The horse and I had to cross that river one more time, I had to force myself to relax—which, as anyone who has ever been urged to “just relax” will tell you, is extremely difficult—and finally I nailed the line.
Now I’m always relaxed on set. So much so that occasionally I even fall asleep. Alan Arkin likes to tell the story of being on set and walking past me dozing off like a pensioner on a deckchair. It must have been a slight worry for the director, Zach Braff, seeing one of his stars comatose. Or maybe he didn’t spot me. Because what Alan also says is that the next thing Zach was yelling, “Action!” and off I went like a bomb. “There was no transition. He went from snoring to being 120 per cent ready. I just couldn’t believe it. It was like a thoroughbred at the starting gate.” I don’t know about thoroughbreds. Some might say I’m not far off the knacker’s yard. But I do still know my way around the racetrack.
In general I would say relax, but don’t get so relaxed you fall asleep. If you’re asleep on the job, you can’t expect the audience to stay awake.
Some actors work out of tension rather than relaxation. It’s OK for them, I guess, but it does put a strain on everyone around them. They get everyone wound up and upset and then they’re ready to go. I’m the opposite. I’m laughing and cracking jokes until the last minute, even if in the scene I’m going to cry. Then I finish the scene and I’m back to cracking jokes.
My top tip for dealing with nerves? Preparation, of course. Experience helps too. Knowing you’ve done it before, tackled difficult things in the past and got through them, gives you confidence that you can do it again. (The importance of experience was brought home to me recently when I was asked to do a poetry reading in Westminster Abbey. Even thinking about it brought me out in hives. I was back to my old stage fright and the bucket in the wings. It wasn’t the grandeur of the building or the occasion. It was my lack of experience. I had barely ever read a poem and certainly had never recited any in public. I said, “Thank you very much for asking but I’d rather not have a nervous breakdown in Westminster Abbey.”)
I usually do relaxation exercises before difficult scenes as well. Take a deep breath in, then bend over with your arms dangling loose and your legs a little bit bent and enjoy the blood rushing to your head. Straighten up slowly while you breathe out. Take three deep breaths. You should feel more relaxed, more focused and more in control. The only time I wouldn’t do this is if I’m supposed to be nervous in the scene. Then I skip the relaxation exercises and have a double espresso instead.
When I was in Sleuth with Laurence Olivier, the most difficult scene was the one when my character thinks that Larry’s character is going to kill him, and begs for mercy, beside himself with terror. I had starred in a lot of films by this time, but playing opposite Laurence Olivier was somewhat nerve-racking so I was actually more nervous than usual and I deliberately, for this scene, did not try to calm my nerves. My disintegration into a jabbering mess, begging for my life, was pretty convincing, including to me. And, evidently, to Lord Olivier. As we walked back to the dressing rooms, Larry came up and put his arm round me. “When we started this film,” he said confidentially, “I thought of you as a talented assistant.” He left a dramatic pause, à la Olivier. “But now I see that I have a partner.” I don’t think I have ever received a compliment that has meant more.
I only once resorted to alcohol to deal with nerves and it was a special case. I was doing Deathtrap, the 1982 Sleuth-like thriller in which I played opposite Christopher Reeve as his lover and the two of us plotted together to kill my wife. There was a scene in which we had to kiss each other passionately and never having kissed a man before—except my dad, on his cheek—I was finding it hard to psych myself up to it. I tried convincing myself it was an honour to kiss Superman. I was nervous as hell. In the end we got through it not with breathing exercises but with a bottle of brandy between us. We nailed the kiss but were both so drunk we couldn’t remember our lines.
I do like to laugh. I remember Roger Moore, years ago, saying to me, “Cheer up. You’d better have a good time because this is not a rehearsal, this is life—this is the show.”
Taking the work seriously doesn’t mean you can’t have any fun. Quite the opposite. I usually find things go better when everyone’s having a good time. Some actors are always worrying, always complaining. They’re what I call “losing the light” actors. For them, if it isn’t perfect, it’s all spoilt. It’s a bad script; or a good script but the director doesn’t know how to treat it; or the script is OK and the director’s great but the other actors have all been miscast. And, incidentally, the lighting is all wrong and they don’t have enough lines. I come from another school of thought. In this school we have more fun, and we get more done. We’re invigorated and entertained by the challenges that each day brings. We take pleasure in either moving the inevitable stumbling blocks out of the way, or finding a way to dodge around them. We feel so privileged to be part of the game that we keep playing long after all the light has gone and it’s time for bed.
Doing serious work doesn’t mean you can’t have any fun either. Making a comedy can turn into a gruelling slog if you get actors and crew with the wrong attitudes; but by the same token, with the right people, making a serious piece can be a scream. Anthony Hopkins told me that he had never had more laughs on set than when he was making the terrifying horror film The Silence of the Lambs with Jodie Foster.
It’s hard for me to narrow down which movies I’ve had the most fun making. The Man Who Would Be King was wonderful fun because Sean Connery and I had such good on-screen chemistry and John Huston gave us the freedom to run with it. The atmosphere on set was very special. However, the chronic diarrhoea I suffered throughout the shoot in Morocco did reduce the spring in my step a little. I had a party making Bullseye, with Roger Moore and Michael Winner, but a terrible hangover when the movie came out and flopped. A very strong contender would have to be Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, shot in my dream location within close reach of many excellent restaurants and beaches. There was one scene with Glenne Headly, a terrific actress who sadly died at just sixty-two, that we had to shoot fifty times: we just couldn’t stop laughing.
It’s also important to be able to laugh at yourself. Take your work seriously, yes, but don’t whatever you do get all pompous and start taking yourself too seriously. It’s fortunate that this has never been a problem for me. Peter Sellers started taking the mickey with the “Not many people know that” line. He was obsessed with gadgets and he had one of the first answering machines. I phoned him one day and his message was an impersonation of me saying, “Dis is Michael Caine speaking. Peter Sellers is out. Not many people know that.” Little sod. Then in about 1972 he did it on Parkinson, which was the most popular chat-show at the time. I got in on the joke myself in Educating Rita, where my character said the line, kind of as an in-joke. Not many people know that. It was also me going “My name is Michael Caine” on the 1984 Madness track “My Name Is Michael Caine.” My daughter Natasha, who was eleven years old at the time, really liked Madness and she persuaded me to do it.
Paul Whitehouse did a rip-off of me as Harry Palmer in Harry Enfield’s Television Programme, going, “My name is Michael Paine, and I am a nosy neighbour.” A
nd now Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan have revived it all again in The Trip when they bicker with each other about who can do the best Michael Caine impressions. I think it’s bloody hilarious. Although the best Michael Caine impression I’ve heard is Tom Hanks’s: he did it on Saturday Night Live. I was surprised because I know Tom Hanks and—unlike almost everyone else I ever meet—he’d never done the impression for me.
Luckily I don’t ever get tired of people quoting myself at me. So long as it doesn’t make me sound like too much of a moron. In fact, these days, I quote myself back again. I can do an excellent Michael Caine impression. “My name…is Michael Caine.” See?
Can you ever have too much fun at work? I can think of a couple of ways. If you’re laughing so much you can’t get any work done (in acting we call it corpsing) the director is going to shut the party down pretty quickly.
And you don’t want to have too much of the wrong kind of fun with your leading lady. Or any other cast member. Movies are notoriously bad for marriages. First of all, you’re away from each other for long stretches. There’s a saying in the movies, “Location doesn’t count,” but look at the movie divorce rate and you will see that this rule does not always apply. You go away on location for three months, maybe somewhere exciting and glamorous, and your partner stays at home, and when you get back you’ve had a great time and made a load of new friends, and she’s had a great time and made a load of new friends, and you’re kind of strangers. That puts a strain on a marriage. Then in the movies you’re often being paid to kiss and cuddle your fabulous new friends, or even to get into bed and pretend to make love to them. This is where you have to abandon method acting, and keep things extremely professional. It will save your marriage and it will save the movie. The point goes more widely, of course: in any walk of life, don’t confuse having fun with being unprofessional or disrespectful of your colleagues, and don’t act in a way that might allow your professional reputation to be undermined by unwelcome gossip.
Blowing the Bloody Doors Off Page 10
