The Elephant to Hollywood

by Michael Caine

  Unlike most blockbuster movies these days, Chris shot most of the amazing stunts in the film not with CGI but with real stuntmen because he wanted a sense of reality. So in our movie, when Batman flies, a hook explodes from his sleeve and fixes on a roof and a wire pulls him up. It imparts a sense of the possible rather than being pure fantasy – and it really works. Of course there is CGI – the scene where Christian and I are filmed with a million bats, for instance – but most of the special effects are real.

  For the exterior shots we travelled to Chicago. Chris had chosen to film Gotham City in Chicago because although the skyline is as spectacular as New York’s, it’s not quite as well known. Shakira and I had never been to Chicago and we absolutely loved it. We celebrated my birthday there, just the two of us, and had a fantastic meal at Sullivan’s Steak House. We enjoyed every minute of it – especially the birthday special. They bring the biggest slice of chocolate cake you have ever seen with a candle on top and then all the waiters come over to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. But this is a big and very busy restaurant and so they cut the song short: ‘Happy B’day to you’, and sing it in record time – I think the whole thing took less than ten seconds before they rushed back to work!

  When I finally got to see the finished film, it was every bit as good as I’d hoped. And then – as always happens – I got sent out on the publicity trail. It kicked off at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills and we did what is known as ‘round tables’, in which the cast is split up into pairs and sent from room to room to do twenty-minute interviews with a dozen or so journalists. I was paired with Katie Holmes, which was great as we had played scenes together and got to know each other pretty well. We were well used to the formula and so we did what we had to do and it seemed to go down OK. We had just finished and were walking out of the press room together – when suddenly, outside in the corridor, Tom Cruise appeared. I couldn’t work out what on earth he was doing there – but Katie knew all right and she rushed into his arms. I stood there dumbfounded, with the press all crowded behind me. ‘We’re in love,’ Tom announced to the throng. ‘I can see that,’ I said – and that was the first time the news of the relationship broke. I had been with Katie on the movie, been with her on the publicity tour and she had never let on – not for a minute. After that, Tom joined Katie on the publicity tour in New York, London and Paris. They had a ball, we had a ball, but the only problem was that they sometimes got more attention than the movie . . .

  After my new outing as a butler, I returned to the part I was beginning to make my own: the father. I played Nicole Kidman’s father in Bewitched and then went on to play Nicolas Cage’s father in The Weather Man. Neither movie was a big hit – and although I was a bit miffed not to see my name on the poster for Bewitched, when I saw the dire reviews it got I was very relieved. Of course it didn’t start out like that. The director, Nora Ephron, had directed Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally. On the first Sunday evening we got together she cooked a great chicken curry for all the cast, which was a first time experience for me from a Hollywood director . . . We shot the movie in the old David O. Selznick studio in Los Angeles and it was great to be back in Beverly Hills, and even greater to be working with the person who was responsible for bringing me there in the first place, Shirley Maclaine. It all seemed to augur so well . . . Why it didn’t work is one of those great movie mysteries – although watching it the other day it did occur to me that brilliant though both Nicole and Will Ferrell are individually, there’s just no chemistry between them.

  Batman Begins, on the other hand, was a huge success and after it came out Chris Nolan called me to suggest another project. We had developed a really great working relationship, so I was pleased to take on The Prestige, a movie about magicians in which I played the guy who actually makes the tricks. I was working with Christian Bale again, along with Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson. I had never met Scarlett before, but it only took about two minutes of conversation for us to become firm friends: she’s talented, clever, funny and beautiful – what more could you want? We were standing together waiting to do a scene when I suddenly realised I was looking down at her from quite a distance. ‘How tall are you?’ I asked. She gave me a funny look for a moment and said, ‘You mean, how short am I, don’t you?’ She’s five foot four and that’s her all over: gets right to the point, with no mucking about! I had a bit of a warning for her. ‘You’re going to have big sons,’ I said. ‘How do you know?’ she asked. And I said, ‘Because my mother was five foot one and my brother and I are both six feet two . . .’

  The Prestige is the ultimate example of cinematic sleight of hand. You watch it, and then you lose the thread and you think, what’s going on here? Chris Nolan leads you by the nose right the way through the movie and then you discover that the whole thing is a trick. It really appealed to me, because it demanded a lot from me as an actor. Of course I’d read the script and I knew what was going to happen and where all the illusions and double meanings lay, but I had to put all that to one side. As an actor you know what’s going on, but you have to remain with the character and stay with the reality of his experience. I found it very interesting, because my character was holding the centre of the picture together: my job was to explain things (or that’s what you’re supposed to think) and that was really testing.

  I’ve always been fascinated by magic, first as a little boy and later by shows in Las Vegas such as Siegfried and Roy, but I’ve never been much of a magician myself. When we were on the set of Zulu, I remember that the director, Cy Endfield, turned out to be a fantastic magician. He invented card tricks – I mean, it’s hard enough to do them, let alone invent them. He used to keep us enthralled night after night. But he never revealed his secrets. And the magicians who taught Christian and Hugh the tricks they perform in The Prestige? Well, they never really explained how they did it, either. I found it hard to learn tricks myself – both for this and for the more recent film Is Anybody There? in which I play a retired magician – because my fingers just don’t work quite as well as they used to.

  From all the razzamatazz of a huge international blockbuster movie, I went back into the much quieter world of the British film industry. Well – it was quieter when I went into it, but when we released Sleuth in 2007 all hell was let loose. The picture got slammed by the critics in an almost maniacal frenzy of personal attacks on Jude Law – who played the character I had played thirty-five years previously – and its director Kenneth Branagh. I came out of it relatively unscathed, but the other two really copped it.

  Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes we made with the movie was not billing it as an original work by Harold Pinter; there isn’t a single line of Anthony Shaffer’s previous script in the film. (It turned out to be Harold Pinter’s last work – which made it all the more special for me as I had been in his first play, The Room, at the Royal Court in 1960. Harold died just after the movie was released.) This Sleuth is very different from the first version. Ken was always very clear that it wasn’t a remake. It was a movie based on the plotline of Sleuth, he said, and we happened to have stolen the title, but it’s a different concept entirely. Whereas the original was set in an English country house with all those mazes, this was all minimalist marble and glass – it’s a much cooler effect. And although I’m playing the role Olivier played all those years ago opposite me, there’s a very different feel to that, too. I deliberately didn’t go back and watch the movie again – not that I could play the character the way Larry did (I didn’t want that little black hairy caterpillar stuck on my face for a start), but I didn’t want any confusion, either. In any case, the Pinter script was so different that the whole movie felt completely fresh to me.

  Unlike the critics, I really admired Jude’s performance and, having often been mauled myself, I felt great sympathy for him – not that he needed it, as, like me, he has a very successful career despite the carping! I once complained to David Lean about the unfair treatment by the critics of
a film I had just made and he said, ‘You have to go through the envy barriers, Michael. Once you are through the other side, they know they can’t harm you any more and the personal stuff just stops.’ I’m through that barrier now (I suspect age has something to do with it – go on long enough and everyone loves you), and Jude and Ken have gone on to even greater success. Jude’s acclaimed portrayal of Hamlet at the Donmar Warehouse in London’s West End in 2009 was, I thought, outstanding, as was Ken’s raved-about performance in Ivanov at the same venue the previous year, not to mention his BAFTA-winning performance of the Swedish cop Wallander in one of my favourite ever TV detective series.

  After we had all picked ourselves up and dusted ourselves off, I was pleased to know that my next film would be back to the world of the blockbuster. When we had finished Batman Begins, I’d asked Chris Nolan what the next one would be like. He’s famous for never giving anything away, so all he said was, ‘Darker . . . much darker.’ And how right he was . . . I thought the first film was brilliant, but The Dark Knight, which finished filming in 2007, is even better – in fact I think it is one of the best action movies I’ve ever seen.

  When I read the script for the first time, however, I could see a problem. Jack Nicholson had been such a fantastic Joker in the earlier Tim Burton Batman movie that it was difficult to see how anyone could follow that performance, let alone top it. But when I called Chris to ask him who he wanted to take the role and he said he wanted Heath Ledger, I immediately stopped worrying. Quite what we would get I didn’t know – but I knew it would be something original.

  We were back in the big airship hanger at Cardington and the Chicago set was still standing. The unit had been shooting since February and it was the end of April by the time I joined them – I could never get used to the schedules on these enormous pictures – and in fact I actually only shot on this movie for ten days out of eight months. But for me, one of those days was unforgettable: it was the first time I came face to face with Heath Ledger’s Joker.

  The scene was a cocktail party in Batman’s flat and as the butler I was masterminding the event. The flat was enormous – it was actually the lobby of a grand Chicago hotel – and I was greeting guests as they came in from the elevator. Eventually a group of guests were going to arrive and with them would be the Joker who would terrorise the whole party. I’d never met Heath before, and I didn’t have any dialogue with him during the scene, but we chatted between shots quite casually, with me trying not to let him see how disturbing I found his make-up. Any worries I might have had about him competing with Jack Nicholson vanished the moment I saw his face: it was truly horrific – it almost looked as if he was rotting from the inside. Jack was a great Joker; Heath was not a joke at all – he was a nightmare. He went in a completely different direction and I knew from the moment I saw him that it would work. In contrast to his sinister appearance, he was completely charming and so relaxed about his work that I had no inkling of what would happen when those bloody lift doors opened . . . Alfred thinks he’s letting friends in, but instead the Joker has killed them all. I was standing there and suddenly Heath burst out at full throttle and took over not just the party, but almost the entire film – I tell you, I was so terrified, if I’d had any lines, I’d have forgotten them . . .

  When I’d finished my bit on the film, I packed up and went home to enjoy the rest of the summer of 2007. I knew work was continuing on the movie, but I couldn’t have been more shocked to hear the following January that Heath had died of an accidental drugs overdose. It was the most terrible waste not only of a great talent, but of a gentle and thoughtful person. It was hard to watch the finished film and see all the vitality that Heath exudes, knowing that he was dead, and inevitably much of the publicity surrounding the premiere in July 2008 was centred on the tragedy of his death – try as we might to steer journalists away from that.

  It was a great moment when Heath won a posthumous Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. We had all predicted he would win it, right from his first scenes, and it wasn’t just me – everyone on the unit thought he deserved it. It was a stand-out performance – the opening and closing monologues alone, let alone all the other scenes – and I thought it was very important for his family as well. I was a bit surprised that neither the film itself nor Chris Nolan were even nominated for an Academy Award, though, because The Dark Knight is an extraordinary piece of film-making. For an action movie it has great depth and real drama – and a serious message, if you want to find it. It’s got great comic moments, too – even Heath, who is playing a complete homicidal psychopath, gets laughs. At one point the Joker sees Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Heath just reaches up and very delicately, almost in a feminine way, brushes back a couple of strands of his stringy hair: it’s genius. My butler gets laughs, too, and I’ve been discovered by a whole new set of teenage fans who often stop me in the street, but there’s real tenderness there between Alfred and Bruce Wayne. It’s back to that father figure again: I’ve gone from Alfie to Alfred, so I guess you could say I’ve become more dignified over the years!

  Taking on the role of an old man with Alzheimer’s might not be everybody’s idea of dignified, but Is Anybody There? was one of those challenges I couldn’t resist. When I get a script, one of the things I ask myself is: is this more difficult to do than the last one? And this part certainly was. I drew on my experience of Doug Hayward’s dementia and so it was very sad for me – in fact I think it’s the saddest film I’ve ever made. Shakira didn’t like it at all because my character actually died of dementia; we persuaded Natasha who was pregnant at the time not to see it because we thought it would upset her. My family were reacting like that because it was me lying in that hospital bed, but what I completely forgot to factor in was how harrowing it would also be for an audience to watch – so it didn’t exactly do Star Wars numbers at the box office. But it got great critical attention and I’m proud to have done it.

  22

  Back to the Elephant

  I once saw a documentary in which scientists put several hundred rats in a very big comfortable roomy nest and fed them well. The rats all lived very happily alongside each other until the scientists gradually started to decrease the size of the nest, so that the rats had less space. The rats began to show aggression; that was followed by fights – followed by killings. Sound familiar? It does to me. It describes the pattern of social housing in this country, which produces the most violent sections of our society – and it’s the section that I came from.

  In 2009 I went back to my roots and the soil was so shallow, there seemed little chance of it ever producing a healthy plant. The reason I went was a film called Harry Brown and it was a movie I just had to do. We filmed on location on a massive council estate that was due for demolition, back at the Elephant and Castle. It’s my home patch and we were working just round the corner from a mural depicting Charlie Chaplin and me (not that I’d compare myself with the great man, it’s just that we came from the same area). I’ve been in many council flats before in my life, but I had forgotten just how tiny these living spaces are, and when I saw the size of the flat that was supposed to be my ‘home’ I immediately thought about that documentary. People need space to live together, and this flat would hardly have had enough room for a dining table that could seat a family to eat, which is something I think is of the utmost importance in bringing up children.

  Not only were the flats tiny, but the blocks were accessed by the most dangerous and threatening entrances, exits, stairs and lifts you could imagine. The only conclusion I could draw was that the architects who had designed these monstrosities had complete contempt for the people who would be living there. Still, I thought, at least they were being pulled down. The whole area is now being gentrified and I asked an official I met where they had re-housed the tenants. ‘As far away from each other as possible,’ was his rather enigmatic reply. But not everyone was pleased to be getting out. While we were there, we came across a small BBC team filming the last fe
w residents. To my astonishment they said that their documentary was about the terrible loss of community spirit the tenants suffered when they began to pull down the estate. I looked from them and then back at this eyesore. It was hard to believe . . .

  The last time I’d been back to the area I grew up in for professional reasons was in autumn 1985 when Bob Hoskins asked me to take a cameo role in his film Mona Lisa. I’d first got to know Bob when we were in Mexico together on The Honorary Consul and we’d become great friends – a friendship that had flourished in the slightly less testing surroundings of The Hamptons on America’s East Coast, filming Sweet Liberty with Alan Alda earlier that summer. Bob had invited me to his production office to discuss the part but as I sat in the car getting further and further into the depths of the south London streets I’d grown up in, I began to wonder what I was letting myself in for. I knew it was a small-budget movie, but Bob’s office – a huge, dark run-down Victorian building – didn’t bode well. ‘It was a hospital years ago,’ he said cheerfully as he led me through the maze of corridors, ‘before it became a lunatic asylum, St Olave’s.’ I remember stopping dead in my tracks. ‘But I was born here!’ I said. There can’t be many movie actors who end up discussing their role in a film in the very hospital they were born in.

  I know only too well how tough it is to grow up in an environment like the Elephant and I’m aware that I, too, could easily have gone bad – but I took a different course, and the longer we spent in the neighbourhood, the more I wanted to find out why. Quite a bit of Harry Brown was shot at night and that gave me the opportunity to talk to some of the gangs of youths – black, white, British-born and immigrant – who were hanging about. I got to know them and began to win their trust a bit and I was first astonished and then pleased that they were prepared to talk to an old white man on an equal basis. As they opened up, it dawned on me that although we’d had nothing as kids, I had had a life of luxury compared to the young men I was talking to. Our pre-fab house was small, but it was self-contained: it had a twenty-foot-square garden, a garden fence, a front door and a garden gate. It was the first house I’d ever lived in with electricity and hot water taps and an inside toilet and a bathroom. And this house was only a thousand yards from the monstrous blocks where these boys had grown up.