Blowing the Bloody Doors Off

by Michael Caine

  Take my advice…

  Part of the skill of taking direction is knowing who to listen to, and when, and who to ignore. Unfortunately an awful lot of advice is not worth hearing. People will give you advice at the drop of a hat: people who don’t really know you, people who don’t really know what they’re talking about, people who are really giving themselves advice, not addressing you or your problems. Not to mention the critics. The best and most thoughtful critics will sometimes say some helpful things, but so many of them are so wrong so much of the time that on the whole I would advise taking criticism from your trusted circle, and from yourself—I am my own most severe critic—and ignoring the rest.

  Most of the advice I received in the first thirty years of my life can be very quickly summarised: “Give up.” So I formed a habit of ignoring any advice that came my way and following my own path. That worked out fine, as it happens, but I’ve changed that habit now. Now I would recommend searching out a small group of people—mine is made up mainly of agents, close friends, my wife and, of course, a very good accountant—who know you well, who know what you want, who have your interests at heart and who know more than you do. Listen to them. Look to them for advice and direction. Tune out everyone else—especially the critics.

  A good agent will guide, protect, advocate and champion. Most of us have these people in our lives, even if we don’t give them the professional title of agent and 10 per cent of our earnings. Choose your agent well: they can have a profound impact on your career.

  My first, Jimmy Fraser, had impressive offices on Regent Street. I was too small a fish for him, he never seemed hugely keen on me and he dropped me as soon as he saw the finished film of A Hill in Korea, telling me I would never get anywhere. Sound familiar? I heard it a lot. Mind you, Jimmy did get me that film in the first place so I have to thank him for that. And he was right: I was terrible in it.

  My next was the wonderful and dogged Josephine Burton. Josephine was one of the first professionals who ever believed in me. But she struggled to find me work (this was the era of Joan Littlewood and endless small TV and theatre roles). When she died unexpectedly, and much too young, during a routine operation, it was an immense personal and professional blow.

  It was another couple of years before I struck agent gold. I had written to Dennis Selinger, the top actors’ agent in the UK, asking him to take me on, but he had declined. Then, in 1961, he saw me in The Compartment and changed his mind. It was a key moment in my career. Dennis was the perfect agent. He had wonderful contacts and wonderful judgement. He was kind and gentle, not a shouter and screamer. He was very commercial but he was not greedy. And he was savvy and far-sighted enough to know that at that point I needed critical as well as commercial success: I had to appear in the right shows, and come to the attention of influential people, not just do whatever would make the most money.

  Later, when I made my first real money, four thousand pounds, on Zulu, and promptly burned my way straight through it, it was Dennis who persuaded me to open a bank account (which consisted of a thousand-pound overdraft) and get an accountant. It was Dennis who flew out to Las Vegas to give Shakira away when we got married in 1973. The night my daughter Natasha was born, I went straight from the hospital to Dennis’s house to tell him the good news. Over the following two weeks, when she became dangerously ill, I stayed with Dennis, who was a tower of strength. He became my closest friend and most valued mentor. He died in 1998 and I miss him still.

  Dennis was UK-based, and when I arrived in Hollywood I needed a local guide. I was immensely fortunate to end up as the least-known client of the fierce and fiercely loyal Sue Mengers, Hollywood’s most powerful agent at the time. Sue held extraordinary and much sought-after get-togethers in Hollywood. It was usually meatloaf on the menu, and she always instructed us to be out of her house by ten thirty. The fun was seeing who else would be there because Sue cast her dinners like she would cast a movie: the night we turned up and found Barbra Streisand, Sting and Sheryl Crow around the table was not unusual. Another memorable night featured Princess Margaret, Jack Nicholson, Clint Eastwood and, by special request, Barry Manilow. Sue loved her food almost as much as she loved her clients, and after her death Bette Midler starred in a one-woman show about her called I’ll Eat You Last: A Chat with Sue Mengers. When I went to see it, I enjoyed every moment but one. At that point Bette Midler answers the phone, sighs, turns to the audience and puts the phone down again. She says, “Michael Caine just left me.” An audience of six hundred people turned and looked at me with utter malice. It’s true, I did leave Sue once. I can’t remember why. Anyway, I soon realised my mistake because my new agent got me a role in Steven Seagal’s On Deadly Ground, shooting in Alaska. I made it up with Sue and went back to her.

  Dennis was irreplaceable and Sue was a unique human being, but I landed on my feet again.

  When she retired Sue Mengers strongly approved of my move to the passionate, driven and determined Toni Howard, another giant of the Hollywood scene. Toni has believed in me, loved me and protected me for well over twenty years now. Since 1994 she has guided my career beautifully and she is now the one person I listen to when I’m making big decisions. She is a dear friend too, almost family, in fact. Shakira and I think of Toni, her husband David, her sister Wendy and Wendy’s husband Leonard as our Hollywood family. Meanwhile, my agents in England, for the last few years the wonderful Kate Buckley-Sharma, have found me amazing British projects that I was able to do without leaving home.

  An actor also needs a talented and loyal press agent, a ruthless lawyer and a wise business manager. I have been fortunate enough to have all of these. Like a director whose secret ingredient is casting, I sometimes think my secret ingredient is the people I choose to put around me.

  I couldn’t end this chapter without mentioning the friends who have stayed with me through thick and thin, often offering great advice at just the right moment. Shakira and I have a wonderfully supportive group of friends, from within the industry and outside it: friends to have dinner with, and friends, like Dorrit Moussaieff, married to the former President of Iceland Ólafur Grímsson and Natasha’s godmother, who we know we could call in the middle of the night and she would be there for us. But if I could pick out one, then the one friend whose advice changed the course of my life was Jack Nicholson. Not everyone’s idea of a fairy godmother, I grant you, but for me, Jack will always be holding a magic wand and wearing a tiara. He persuaded me to come out of my first retirement and, in Blood and Wine, he also gave me the vehicle to do it with. It was a turning point in my career when I was down and almost out. But that’s for another chapter.

  10.

  The Big Picture

  “It’s a very difficult job and the only way to get through it is we all work together as a team. And that means you do everything I say.”

  The Italian Job, 1969

  THE AWARD-CEREMONY SPEECH in which the big star thanks a great long list of people “without whom none of this would have been possible” is by now a cliché. But making a movie really is a tremendous team effort: the makeup artists, the set designers, the caterers, the sound engineers, the lighting technicians, the camera operators, the producers. The list goes on and on. Everyone has a role to play. Everyone is as much of an expert in what they do as you are in what you do. No one is more important than anyone else. And everyone is focused on the same thing: making the best movie possible.

  In every movie, I think of the whole team as my temporary family and my route to success, so I don’t ever put myself above anyone else, and I don’t put myself in competition with the other actors. Instead, I try to understand what other people in the team can do for me, and what I can do for them, to help everyone make a better movie.

  And it’s not just movies. It was the same for me in the restaurant business, and I bet it’s the same in any other enterprise. I might have been the owner but it takes the whole team—every chef, every waiter, every cleaner and washer-upper—doing th
eir jobs and doing their best to send the customers away happy at the end of their dinners.

  Don’t put yourself above anyone else

  When you’re referred to as “the talent” and when you arrive on set in a chauffeur-driven limousine, only to become the prime focus of a swarm of charming hair and makeup artists, and when electricians are scrambling up on scaffolding to re-set the light so there is a lovely glint in your eye, it’s easy to start to believe the hype. Don’t. Yes, everyone is trying their best to make you feel happy and relaxed. Yes, everyone is focused on helping you to look and sound your best. But that is not because you are more important than they are. It is because they want to get the best performance possible out of you, for the good of the team. Try to remember that the runner holding an umbrella when you take a walk in the rain is there for the costume, not for you.

  I try to establish friendly and relaxed relations with everyone from the moment I walk on to the set. It’s the right thing to do, and it makes everything go better, for the movie and for me. If the crew are feeling fabulous they will do their jobs better. If you are good to everyone on the unit, chances are they will be good to you. Anyway, if you try to work out who is “important” and who is not, and treat them accordingly, you’ll be caught out by your own prejudices.

  John Huston was a strapping great man’s man, and his writing partner was a little old lady called Gladys Hill. She looked like a secretary but she was actually very influential. It would have been easy to overlook her, but it would have been wrong. I find it easier just to treat everyone the same. At least until they give me reason to do otherwise.

  What can I do for you?

  To understand what other members of the team can do for me, and what I can do to make their lives easier, it helps if I understand the whole process of film-making, not just my little part of it: the commercial process and the creative process, the financial and the technical.

  In any walk of life it will usually be worthwhile to take the time to understand where others are coming from and what their priorities and requirements are.

  Understanding the process, I’ve found, can be much more important than understanding the piece itself. I can’t tell you how many plays and movies I have appeared in that I didn’t fully understand, from R.U.R., the obscure Karel Čapek play in which fourteen-year-old me made his debut as a robot, to Chris Nolan’s Inception and Interstellar, via everything by Harold Pinter: I appeared in his first play The Room and his last work, a re-make of Sleuth.

  But what I always keep in mind as a basic commercial consideration is that anything an actor does that introduces delay is going to cost the production time and money—and probably you your next job. So, as you probably know by now, prepare yourself well and turn up on time are my first rules in life.

  It is also crucially important that actors understand the technical requirements of the camera operators, the sound engineers, the lighting technicians, the continuity folk and so on, so that they can prepare their own contribution with those in mind. For example, it’s no good thinking up some complicated physical mannerism if you’re not going to be able to repeat it exactly, shot after shot, possibly over several days. In movie-making you will usually need to repeat any sequence at least three times: once for the long shot or master shot, once for the medium shot and once for the close-up. If you fiddle around in the long shot you will have to be able to repeat that fiddle exactly in every shot—or the long shot will have to be shot again. For the sake of the continuity folk, I keep my mannerisms and actions simple, precise, planned and logical, so that I can execute them effortlessly and accurately again and again. You can think of the continuity folk as terrible fusspots or, as I prefer to, as your indispensable best friends on set. You can’t do the second take without them.

  Camera operators are less fussy. You’d be surprised by the places I’ve seen cameras put when really necessary. It’s useful to know this. It means that when I’m rehearsing I’ll move to wherever seems right for me, and wait to be told if that is going to cause a problem. Of course, sometimes the director says, “I don’t want a discussion about it. You need to end up exactly there.” And then I do. There are also various things you can do to help the camera operator help you. If the director tells me to run from right over there, towards the camera and then past it, I run like hell when I’m far away, then slow down as I approach the camera. Otherwise I go by too fast and I’m just a blur. I learnt that from James Cagney. And if I’m sitting down for a close-up and have to stand, I do that slowly too, and on cue, to give the camera the chance to follow me. In close-up, any sudden movements and I’m out of the frame.

  Sound technicians are never happy so their unhappiness can to some extent be discounted. However, if you want to avoid a boom being “accidentally” dropped on your head, make sure the sound technician knows in advance when you’re planning on switching from a whisper to a roar. In one of the many features in which I played some kind of gangster in the early stages of my career, I was supposed to creep up to a guy, whisper, “Time’s up,” and shoot him in the back. The sound technician, listening through his big headphones, had his equipment turned up to full volume so he could hear the whisper, and was all set to turn it back down low for the shot. I did my walk, then forgot to say the line and just fired the shot. The sound engineer took the rest of the day off.

  Since we actors very much want to stay alive, I also make a point of understanding a little bit about the world of stunt artists, so I’m not afraid to draw the line. Sometimes we all have to be our own health and safety officer.

  If you look at it from other people’s point of view it will become clear why you should never do a dangerous stunt on the last day of a picture. The change in attitude to your personal well-being is a bit like the change you encounter from a salesperson before and after you sign that piece of paper, or from a company that has been trying to woo you before and after you accept their job offer.

  I learnt this from Stanley Baker, the producer of Zulu. It was not the last day of the movie but the second, but a similar principle applied. You may remember from an earlier chapter that on those first days of shooting my horse and I did not see eye to eye and I spent a great deal of time lying on the ground, or in water, in the various undignified positions into which my horse had thrown me. I was a bit aggrieved that no one seemed bothered about my back at the end of the first day’s filming, or my knees at the end of the second. Everyone seemed concerned about the horse, the sun, even my costume—was it ripped? Was it dirty?—but not a word about whether I was OK. I brought it up with Stanley Baker and he explained, with a grin. “Simple,” he said. “You’ve only done two scenes and at this point we could easily replace you—probably more cheaply than we could replace the horse.” I opened my mouth to protest but he went on, “The more shots you’re in, the more careful we’ll be about you. Towards the end you will become extremely precious to us and we will overwhelm you with fuss, care and attention. Until the final scene, when, once again, we won’t give a shit. Golden rule, Michael: never do a dangerous stunt on the last day of a picture.” And I never have. In fact, I prefer to leave the stunts to the stunt artists. I don’t want to do them out of their jobs, and I don’t want to do myself out of a limb.

  Billion Dollar Brain, my third Harry Palmer movie, was shot on location in Finland, a beautiful and inconceivably cold country where we spent days filming on the melting ice floes, hoping they wouldn’t crack and, meanwhile, standing in three inches of melting ice water. At one point the director, Ken Russell, was asking me to jump into a hole in the ice. It’s the kind of thing Harry might do but it wasn’t the kind of thing I much fancied doing. I had a Finnish stand-in, though, and I thought he probably wouldn’t mind. I wandered up to him and said, “How would you like to earn a bit of extra money? Could you just warm up in the sauna and then jump into that hole in the ice?”

  He gave me a long look. “What?”

  “You know, jump in the ice. Like Finnish people
do.”

  “No, we don’t. We would have heart attacks.”

  Neither of us jumped into the ice.

  Stunt artists save our lives—literally. Editors do it metaphorically. Skilled editing can make an enormous difference to a performance, finessing poor timing and removing awkward movements. A cut to a great reaction shot can make a bungled line seem much stronger than it actually was. But, of course, an editor can also cut you out entirely and kill your performance completely.

  Sometimes an editor will “kill your darling” or edit out your favourite moment. It’s painful but they’re generally right. It happened to me on Without a Clue, the 1980s movie in which I played Sherlock Holmes. When I saw the edited version of the sword fight at the end of the movie I said to the editor, “You cut the funniest moment in the entire film—the slow reaction I did at the end.”

  “I know exactly the look you’re talking about,” said the editor. “It would have been very funny. But the reaction took five seconds and at this point in the movie we need pace. Look, this is what it would look like with your reaction in there.” He fiddled about for a minute, then ran it back for me, and I saw he was right. Careers are made and broken by editors, and funny moments are killed, but you can be sure that they’ll be doing what is best for the film as a whole.

  In a movie (and, by the way, it’s a completely different story in the theatre—which emphasises how important it is to understand the industry you’re in and the precise way it works), the people whose performances I’m least concerned about are those of other actors. At least, I try not to be concerned. I have to admit that the one thing that can steal my focus on set is terrible acting. It fascinates me and distracts me. But it isn’t my concern. If another actor isn’t giving me what I want, I try to act as though he is. I try to put in my own best possible performance and act and react as if I’m getting the ideal performance back. I try to trust that the director has a plan and will make it right: perhaps the other actor will end up on the cutting-room floor. Critiquing my colleagues or interfering with their performances does not count as teamwork.