So, I focus completely on the shot we’re taking now and try to get it right first time. For similar reasons, I never watch the rushes. Why ruin today worrying about yesterday? Much better to spend that time getting it right today and preparing for tomorrow.
Rushes are the bits of film from one day’s shooting that are processed and “rushed” back for the director and others to look at, to check things are going as they should. Although, these days, there is no processing or rushing. Everyone can just head round to a little van behind the camera and view the footage as soon as it has been shot.
I learnt my lesson about not watching rushes very early on. When I was making Zulu, my first big movie, we were shooting on location in South Africa and the film had to be sent back to England to be processed. So, we had been shooting for two weeks by the time the first rushes came back. (The rushes took so long they really should have been called meanders.) The stakes were high as the entire cast and crew crammed themselves into a screening room and the projectors whirred into action. My heart was pounding and my palms were slick with sweat. The screen flickered and was filled with a huge pink face, which I realised to my horror was me, while someone (also me) started droning on in a ridiculously clipped British accent. Behind me I heard a titter and then, “Who told that silly bastard to pull his hat down over his fucking eyes?” The hat thing had been a carefully planned piece of characterisation. I had decided to wear my old-fashioned peaked military pith helmet low, shading the top half of my face, for most of the time, and to tip my head back to allow the sun to catch my eyes when I wanted to make a particular point. Bitterly disappointed that my career was going to be over so soon, I ran out of the room and threw up.
I wasn’t involved in shooting the next day, so I spent it tying myself in stomach-clenching knots. That evening I decided I had to face the music and go down to the hotel bar to let Cy Endfield and Stanley Baker tell me I had been fired. By the time they arrived back from the day’s shooting I was a couple of drinks in, with a couple more lined up on the bar. “Hey, not bad, kid,” said Stanley, as they breezed by. “Don’t worry—you’ll get better.” I just stood there and looked after them with my mouth open.
So, no more rushes for me. I don’t want to screw up today’s work and tomorrow’s worrying about yesterday’s. And I don’t want to focus on what it looks like on the outside when the performance has to come from within me. I want to be in the moment, now, getting it right from the inside. And it’s not just that. When the rushes go well, that can be an unhelpful distraction too. You have to remember that just as all I saw in the Zulu rushes was my own big sweating head, everyone else was seeing only their work. If you ask Makeup how the rushes were, they’ll say, “Wonderful. Her eye liner looked amazing.” If you ask Costume, they’ll say, “Amazing. The colour on that shirt really pops.”
And actors can get so fixated on the rushes that they start performing for each other. Harry and Walter Go to New York was a 1976 comedy starring James Caan and Elliott Gould, with Diane Keaton and me supporting. Diane was like me, she didn’t go to the rushes, but we would sometimes sit together in tense silence outside the screening room, straining to hear whether there were any laughs. All through the shoot, everyone was so pleased, because everyone in the screening room never stopped pissing themselves. They would come out almost sick they had laughed so hard. But when real people saw it, there wasn’t a single laugh. James and Elliott had been cracking each other up and having a great time, but no one else seemed to get the joke.
Everyone can convince themselves that because they have done their best work or their co-star cracks them up the movie is going to be a smash. But it doesn’t work like that. All too often people buy their yachts after the rushes and go bankrupt at the premiere.
Plus, if you don’t go to the rushes, you get home earlier. The moment I hear, “Cut!,” “Wrap!” I’m off and away.
No regrets
I never regret anything. I always said that when I’m old, I want to be sitting there regretting the things I did, not the things I didn’t do. And now I’m old, it turns out I don’t regret anything at all. Every project I’ve done has brought me something and has added to the richness of my days. I had fun, and I’m still having it.
There’s no point looking back on a flop and thinking, If I knew then what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it. I didn’t know then what I know now. I couldn’t have. I made the decision in good faith, for reasons that made sense at the time. And probably I know now what I didn’t know then only because I went ahead and did what I wouldn’t have done if I’d known it. So I’ve learnt something.
If I was given the chance to live my life all over again I would do everything the same and remake every single one of my movies, from Alfie to The Swarm. I had fun, I made wonderful friends, I went to exciting places and I worked with some of the most talented people in the business.
About the only regret I allow myself is that I never got to make The Dresser with Orson Welles. In 1963, I was playing the lead in Next Time I’ll Sing to You, a theatre role that indirectly played a key part in the launch of my film career by bringing me to the attention of Stanley Baker. It also attracted other interest. One night when I was on stage I couldn’t help noticing very strong loud laughter coming from the middle of the stalls. I was so struck by it that I tried at one point to look out into the auditorium to see if it was someone I knew. All I could make out in the gloom was a rather heavy middle-aged man sitting on his own.
After the show I was in my dressing room and there was a knock on my door. I shouted, “Come in,” and turned round to find the great filmmaker Orson Welles standing in the doorway. He said some kind things about my performance, which I found somewhat overwhelming, and off he went. We stayed in touch, and many years later Orson approached me about a project he thought we should do together: a film, based on a stage play, about the relationship between a hammy old actor (to be played by Orson) and his devoted gay dresser (me). I knew and loved the play and said yes immediately. I could see that it would be a tremendous vehicle for both of us. Alas, it never happened. Albert Finney and Tom Courtenay had already bought the rights and they made it into a wonderful movie, for which they were both nominated for Academy Awards. Just a few years ago it was remade for the BBC with Anthony Hopkins as the old actor and Ian McKellen as the dresser and it was wonderful all over again. I still sometimes think wistfully of the Orson Welles/Michael Caine version that never got made as the best film I never did.
Don’t let the past control your future
When you hold a grudge, you’re allowing your past—or, worse, what someone else did in the past, for reasons that might have nothing to do with you—to dictate your future. What’s the point? What a waste.
Alfred Hitchcock and I became friendly when I was making Gambit at Universal Studios in the mid-1960s. Our bungalows were next door to each other (at Universal you didn’t have dressing rooms, you had bungalows) and, of course, we were both south Londoners: his family had a shop on the Tower Bridge Road where my maternal grandfather had had a fruit stall. But the friendship didn’t last. Alfred offered me the part of a serial killer in a movie called Frenzy and I turned it down. It was so brutal and disgusting I just didn’t want to do it. Alfred made the movie in 1972 with Barry Foster in the lead role and it did very well but he never spoke to me again.
It wasn’t just that we lost touch, as happens with lots of movie friendships. A couple of years later I was filming in Berlin and was walking down the Kurfürstendamm when I saw Hitchcock walking towards me with a group of people. He saw me, he looked at me, and he very deliberately turned his head away and kept walking.
I didn’t think about it much at the time, but it came back to me a few years later. As I mentioned before, when we were living in LA in the 1980s one of our favourite restaurants in Beverly Hills was that great Hollywood meeting place Chasen’s. A great place to name-drop. One Sunday evening Shakira and I were having dinner there with Frank Sinatra
and his wife Barbara, and Gregory Peck and his wife Veronique. I looked across to the table just to the right of the door and there was Alfred Hitchcock. I smiled at him and raised a hand in greeting. He saw me, he looked at me, and he very deliberately turned his head away and kept eating.
I kept glancing at Alfred, sitting on his own, through the rest of the evening. I reflected then that in Hollywood, and elsewhere, if you stop talking to everyone who disappoints you (Vanessa Redgrave and Helen Mirren also turned down parts in Frenzy) you’re deliberately compounding the disappointment and you certainly don’t end up at many dinner parties.
I’m very careful about the grudges I hold. I would never dream of holding a grudge for such a thing. Look at Irwin Allen, who directed me in The Swarm and Beyond the Poseidon Adventure—talk about disappointments! But I would never let a professional disappointment come in the way of a personal friendship. Irwin became a very dear friend to Shakira and me. He was a generous, warm, fabulous human being, and while we lived in LA we used to eat at Chasen’s together most Thursdays.
For me it’s about trust. If you break my trust, we can’t stay friends, and we can’t work together. If I’m going to let something from the past control my future, if I’m going to cut someone out of my life—and I occasionally do—it will be about trust. Because once there’s a little weakness in that particular cloth, it may tear at any moment.
Beware of retreading old ground
Remaking movies is a form of looking back that, in general, I would not recommend. Several of my movies have been remade in the last couple of decades, with limited success.
In 2000, my friend Sylvester Stallone remade my 1971 gangster film, Get Carter, with Sly himself starring in my original role as Jack Carter and with the action transposed from Newcastle, in the rainy north-east of England, to Seattle, in the rainy north-west of the United States. Sly asked me to come and do a walk-on part for a day as Cliff Brumby—the “big man” played in the original by Bryan Mosley—which I did, thinking it would be fun. It was, but reading the reviews was not.
In 2003, F. Gary Gray did a good job of remaking The Italian Job with Mark Wahlberg in the role of Charlie Croker and Charlize Theron (the very beautiful and talented actress who I had worked with on The Cider House Rules) stealing the reviews in a new role. And in 2004, Charles Shyer remade Alfie, starring Jude Law. Jude is a wonderful actor, whose 2009 Hamlet was one of the best I’ve ever seen (I love Hamlet, and have seen a lot, including Richard Burton’s in 1964). He did a terrific job with Alfie but there were a couple of problems. The 2004 audience was less forgiving than the 1966 audience of Alfie’s immature and selfish antics. And at the end of the movie Alfie says, “What’s it all about?” My Alfie looks bewildered but Jude’s Alfie was more intelligent and self-aware than mine. The moment you see him, you can tell that he knows exactly what it’s all about. The movie did not make money and its reviews were mixed.
Despite these red flags, I got involved with the remake of Sleuth in 2007, because in my mind this was not really a remake, it was a complete reinvention and, what was more, with a brilliant writer (Harold Pinter), a brilliant director (the wonderful Kenneth Branagh) and a brilliant co-star (Jude Law again). Harold completely rewrote the script, with not a single line of Tony Shaffer’s original remaining in his version; and Jude completely reinvented the part I had played in the 1972 original, while I deliberately did not go back and re-watch the movie before taking on the Olivier role. The plot, the characters, the setting and the ending were all changed. We worked our hearts out but the critics were disappointed that it did not improve on the 1972 version and slammed it. We would have been better off moving just a little further away from the original and billing it as an entirely new Pinter piece.
Although it is tempting, for obvious reasons, to remake big hits, I have concluded from painful experience that it’s the wrong approach. In remaking good movies you’re putting yourself in a no-win situation. The remakes of Get Carter, Alfie and Sleuth were all disappointments, as was the 2012 remake of Gambit, my 1966 movie with Shirley MacLaine, which, despite great writers and a terrific cast, went straight to DVD. They could hardly fail to be: they had a lot to live up to.
In contrast, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, the Frank Oz movie I made with Steve Martin and Glenne Headly in 1988, was a huge hit. It was a remake of the 1964 movie Bedtime Story, starring Marlon Brando, David Niven and Shirley Jones, which, despite its excellent cast, had been a flop. It just hadn’t been funny. That meant the remake could not be a disappointment: added to which, we reaped the benefits from everything the writers, Stanley Shapiro and Paul Henning, had learnt from what didn’t work the first time around. And, by the way, I had an absolute blast making it. Great director, great co-stars, great script, terrific location.
You should really only remake bad movies. It’s easy to improve on failure.
When to break the rule and look back
I do make some exceptions. I have allowed myself recently to do a little looking back.
More and more I have been bumping into old friends and reflecting on the journeys we have each taken to bring us to these spots.
When I was young and doing my first TV I played a bit part in a police series called Dixon of Dock Green opposite another struggling actor, a wonderful young Canadian called Donald Sutherland. Donald was a terrific and charismatic actor and great fun to be around. A few years later, as my career was just starting to take off, I was cast as Horatio in a BBC TV production of Hamlet. The director, Philip Saville, mentioned to me that he had finally, after some difficulty, managed to cast Fortinbras. He explained that though Fortinbras is a small part, who only comes on at the end when everyone else is dead, he has to command the show: in other words, to be a star. “It’s very difficult to find an actor with the right star quality who is prepared to play such a small part,” he said. I asked who he’d found and he told me, “Donald Sutherland.”
Fast forward another ten years and I was making The Eagle Has Landed with John Sturges, a great Hollywood director, and a wonderful British cast including Jenny Agutter, Donald Pleasance and Anthony Quayle, plus a great American actor, Robert Duvall. And my co-star was Donald Sutherland who, by then, had starred in M*A*S*H; Klute, opposite Jane Fonda; and Don’t Look Now, opposite Julie Christie. We did, I admit, take a moment to look back on where we had come from and to celebrate where we had both come to. (My friendship with Donald was typical of how things work out in the movie business. You get to know people and become very close for a short time, then, because of the way the business works, you don’t see each other for years. It is friendship by time and location.) So it was a nostalgic moment when, very recently, I was walking along the street in South Beach, Miami, with my friend and heart doctor, Richard Berger, and I pointed out to Richard the block of flats where I used to live. “Do you know who lives there now?” he said. “Donald Sutherland.”
In my latest movie, King of Thieves, I appear along with many old friends: Ray Winstone, Michael Gambon, Jim Broadbent. But maybe the one who gives me the most pleasure is Tom Courtenay. We were young working-class out-of-work actors together in the 1950s and 1960s. Tom broke through with “angry young man” Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, Billy Liar and Doctor Zhivago just as I was breaking through with Zulu, Alfie and The Ipcress File. We came together again in Last Orders in 2001, and here we were now, with a knighthood each, playing a couple of thieves.
The older I have become, the more moments like this have arisen, and the more I have been tempted by opportunities to look back. And the biggest temptation of all came in the form of My Generation, a documentary about Britain in the 1960s and the people who made it. Doing the interviews for the documentary was a great opportunity for me to reconnect with old friends, like Paul McCartney and Twiggy, who I hadn’t seen since the 1960s. We had all pursued our fabulous new lives and lost touch, or died. One old friend I regretted not being able to include in the documentary was George Harrison.
He lived just down the road from us near Henley at one stage, and we used to go to each other for dinner. One time he brought his guitar and we all sat there eating our dinner in a state of great excitement, thinking he was going to sing for us. After dinner I said, “I see you brought your guitar, George.”
“No, it’s not a guitar, Michael.”
“Well, what is it, then?” I said, “I saw you bring something in.”
“It’s a ukulele,” he said. “I’m the president of the George Formby Society.” And then he gave us a whole concert as George Formby. George Harrison in my dining room doing “Leaning on a Lamp Post” and “When I’m Cleaning Windows.”
But, more than that, it was important to me to document this moment in history, when the British working class became their own masters. At the time we didn’t have a plan, we weren’t organised, we didn’t feel part of a movement. We just did what we wanted to do, took no notice of people who said we couldn’t, and it turned out, for me and people like me, to be a liberation. It was the best decade ever: it was when everything changed and everything became possible, and I wanted to try to capture all of that, before those who spent the 1960s Looking Back in Anger got too old to remember. This is the kind of looking back that I do allow myself, to make sense of the past and of everything that has happened.
15.
Getting Old and Staying Young
“I’ve grown old without understanding how I got here.”
Blowing the Bloody Doors Off Page 18
