Michael Caine, Kenneth Branagh Interview, Sleuth

MoviesOnline sat down with Kenneth Branagh and Michael Caine to talk about their new film, "Sleuth,” a stylish and suspenseful cat and mouse thriller based on a delightfully witty and satirical screenplay by Nobel prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter. Caine and co-star Jude Law deliver spot-on performances that show both actors at the top of their game in a savvy film full of sharp dialogue, unexpected twists and surprises. In Branagh’s 2007 remake of the 1972 classic, Caine plays the betrayed husband opposite Law’s young rogue (Caine’s role in the original) who stole his wife away.

Jude Law, who both produces and stars in it, had proposed the idea to Michael Caine several years earlier and Caine had agreed in principle that it might be fun to do "Sleuth” as a movie again, this time playing the role taken by Laurence Olivier in 1972. "I was fascinated by the whole idea from the start,” says Caine, "but especially when I saw the Pinter script. Although the basic plot is the same and the title is the same, Pinter’s writing is completely different from Anthony Shaffer’s. It’s not the same movie.”

With Michael Caine signed up for Pinter’s script, Law recognized that the moment had come to find a director to "Lead the party and settle all of our visions into one.” Amongst the directors under consideration was Kenneth Branagh, the Emmy award winning and Academy Award nominated actor and film director perhaps best known for his adaptations of the work of Shakespeare.

"My manager called me one day and said "There is a new version of ‘Sleuth’ which Jude Law is producing and Michael Caine will appear in and the new version has been written by Harold Pinter,” recalls Kenneth Branagh. "That seemed like a very, very exciting combination of people. Then I read the screenplay and I couldn’t put it down.”

Branagh explains, "Printer somehow lifts the observation of that which is familiar and loads it – sometimes with humour, sometimes with menace, sometimes with great poetry. In "Sleuth,” he takes a marvelous piece of theatrical and cinematic mechanics and brings to it effortlessly his own fascination with what also emerges from Shaffer’s play: this psychological drama, this testosterone-fueled gladiatorial combat between two, in their different ways, sophisticated and intelligent men. It seemed such a great way to enjoy a rip-roaring thriller and an illumination of the vulnerabilities and the posturings of apparently masculine, almost macho types as they fight over a woman. I guess I just had a gut feeling that it was going to be bloody good.”

At our Los Angeles press day, Kenneth Branagh and Michael Caine went by mistake to an empty room which delayed their arrival. When they eventually found us, it was obvious they hadn’t lost their sense of humor. Here’s what they had to tell us about their recent collaboration:

Q: The room was empty? I bet that didn’t make you feel very good.

CAINE: (laughs) No, I thought, this is not very good, is it?

BRANAGH: Not much of an audience there.

CAINE: I expected a bigger turn out.

BRANAGH: Exactly, and more microphones.

Q: Has it ever happened to you where you’ve gone somewhere and nobody showed up?

BRANAGH: It’s a slightly depressing thought to consider, I don’t think so.

CAINE: A couple of Monday nights in repertory when I was a young actor. That was something I learned in repertory, that an invited audience never laughs, they don’t laugh. I did a comedy when I was in Rep and we didn’t have any tickets sold for the Monday night in Rep, so we invited people like nurses for a little evening out, and nobody laughed at anything. And it completely threw us the second night because we had the paying audience in and everybody laughed at everything, and we didn’t know when the laughter was going to come. And it’s true, a non-paying audience never laughs, I don’t know why that is.

Q: Speaking of a little frivolity here –

CAINE: We could do with a bit a frivolity –

Q: Do you think that Jude Law is trying to be Michael Caine?

CAINE: No, he’s trying to be Jude Law. But I do know what he’s doing in a way. Jude Law is a very handsome young man, and he, like a lot of handsome young people, is saying, ‘I am not just here on my looks, and I will show you.’ And I think he has shown us, he’s not here for his looks. The Inspector wasn’t very nice looking (he laughs). And I think that’s what he’s doing. As a young actor, I did that a bit, I wasn’t as good looking as him so I didn’t have to do it so extreme, but I did that. I was always trying to be an actor rather than a nice looking young film star who gets the girls and all that. And now I’ve succeeded, I’m a really ugly old actor.

Q: Jude also did Alfie.

CAINE: He’s only done two things, and one of them doesn’t count – this one, because it’s not the same part, because there isn’t a single line in this script that was in the other one. It’s completely different. There’s nothing. And so I couldn’t look at Jude, when we were acting, and say, ‘Oh I did that line better than he did,’ because he didn’t say a single line that I said in the first one. It’s so utterly different, there’s no comparison.

Q: Did you constantly keep flashing back on the old one?

CAINE: What, the old Sleuth? Oh it never came into it. You have to remember, none of us has seen it for 30 years. Harold Pinter, who wrote the script, had never seen it, he’d never seen the movie or the play, he just got this play from Jude as far as he was concerned, and Jude said, ‘Will you write the screenplay from this?’ And Harold read it and said, ‘Yes, but I don’t want any of the dialogue or anything, I’ll just use the plot. The plot is great.’ And he’s right, the plot is great. And so he just rewrote it completely for himself. I regard it as an entirely new film, there’s nothing, nothing – I mean, in every sense of the word there’s nothing, the technology that we use in it never existed in 1972.

Q: The camera work was very good

CAINE: (looking at Branagh) He did that, not me.

Q: Aren’t you finding that the camera work in a lot of movies these days is swinging back and forth too much and the close-ups cut off half of the head.

BRANAGH: You hope that filmmakers are trying to find horses for courses, the right kind of technique for the right movie. Here, we had a read through really early on where we started to, as Shakespeare would say, we started to hear the play, and when you heard this particular play, you couldn’t hear a close-up for about 10, 12 minutes, but you saw wide shots where the beginnings of this relationship was established, and where with two great actors you have them full-length, they can act with their bodies and they can interact with this third character that we create, which is the house. And so we took advantage of that so that we could then be economic but very powerful with the first close-up, for instance, where Michael Caine sits down.

CAINE: I remember saying to a director in a comedy, he was coming in close on me like this, and I said to him, ‘Have you seen what I’m doing with my hand down here? This is a comedy bit that’s going on. I was doing something weird with my hand, whatever it was and getting a laugh and he was tracking in for a close-up. Close-ups are not important, especially in comedy, and a lot of this is body language, and that’s what you use.

BRANAGH: Yeah, exactly.

CAINE: Like a dance for the first 12 minutes.

BRANAGH: People and things, people and color, people and objects, people in the frame, people relating to size and also is there somebody else watching, we tried to create this idea of a surveillanced household where there might be somebody else weird watching it. All of that helped to create the arena in which basically this essential story, two men fighting in a room about a woman we never see, could be even weirder still.

Q: You were nominated for an Oscar for the original Sleuth.

CAINE: And so was Larry (Laurence Olivier).

Q: And you’ve won a couple of Oscars since then, does it change your life?

CAINE: Yes it does, yeah, yeah. The respect notch goes up quite a bit, the money sometimes goes up, and the quality of scripts you get definitely goes up. People start to look at you in a different way, not because they thought you were a bad actor, but they look at you from a point a view of versatility. They say,’Oh Christ, he doesn’t have to just play that, he’s not really Alfie. Maybe he could play an officer in a Zulu war or something, which you’ve already done but nobody noticed. So the Oscar reminds them you’re dealing with an actor, not with some nincompoop.

Q: Did that go to your head?

CAINE: No, nothing goes to my head. I’m a social communist, I think we’re really all equal. By the way, that’s the only way I am communist, I’m not communist in any other way. But I am absolutely adamant about any kind of snobbery, class or anything, I really am a communist – I think I’m a bit of Nazi, because I really kill people who practice snobbery. I’d like to kill some snobs.

Q: This is basically a two hander, so the table read was not very crowded, I think of some of the work you’ve done in directing where there’s a density of characters, there’s so much going on, do you find when you have a spare set and a spare cast like this that your directing technique changes?

BRANAGH: I love the spareness of it and the simplicity of it. Listen, Harold Pinter’s screenplay, two great actors, and a chance to see if you could have any impact in making it better. That was a great, great joy. I learned so much as an actor from watching Michael here, particularly Jude, also sensational, and I felt as a director that the burden was off me, I felt that four heavyweights were doing this. Listen, if I had a problem about where to put the camera, I could say to Michael, ‘What would John Huston do here?’ I could say to Jude, ‘What would Spielberg do here, what would Scorsese do here,’ between them with Pinter, Joe Losey doing The Servant and Accident, it was like I had a movie reference library and I only had to look at three faces who were about two feet away from me. So the help that I had as a result of that, and also the knowledge that spare as it was, a 24 second close-up in profile on Michael Caine after he’s fired the gun at Jude Law was going to hold as a movie moment like few other things possibly could. No music, no special effects, no sound effects, no explosions, no horses, no battles, just Michael Caine looking in the direction he just fired the gun, and my jaw dropping with the kind of riveting sort of magnetism of it, I thought this is a beautiful way to approach this kind of work, and to do something so spare like that I found was thrilling and a great release.

Q: But at the end of the day this was a three man band, and it makes it very personal, what did that dynamic feel like?

CAINE: You don’t get a day off, that’s the first thing. No days off. But from my point of view it’s all about humanity. Someone said to me the other day, ‘It’s very theatrical, it’s only two people in a room.’ I said, ‘Most of the world is two people in a room. How many people do you want in a room to be real?’ It’s two people in a room, most conversations you see are two people in a room. I said, ‘If you get a crowd of sixty thousand, there aren’t sixty thousand people there, there are six hundred and they double it up with CGI.’ (he laughs) So that’s more theatrical than two people in a room talking to each other, which is absolute reality. And what happens is that the concentration is extraordinary because there’s nowhere to go, there’s nothing to distract you, and you’re just in on the other person, and you’re listening and watching every single thing that they’re doing, especially in this as we are both suspicious characters having done wrong, or about to do wrong, we’re not two clergymen standing there. So you are watching and reacting and thinking the whole time, and it’s such a joy to do. Oh it’s wonderful when you’ve been standing there, like in some movie and you’ve got one line like, ‘The Germans are coming,’ and then all the countryside blows up, and you go home and you say, ‘I said that alright, didn’t I?’ And the soundman says, ‘No, you didn’t, you said, ‘The Germans are crumming.’

BRANAGH: I’ve just been in this movie with Tom Cruise, "Valkyrie,” which is an enormous production and hugely enjoyable and fantastic people involved with it, but rather like Michael says, you know, you’re in my case enjoying it beautifully being a smallish cog in a massive machine and by contrast being with the other three boys, Harold included, in this place where the camaraderie was intense and fun. I mean I just found it fun.

CAINE: It was great. Yeah. We were so close the four of us with the lunches getting more and more boozy because in the rehearsals we approached Christmas.

BRANAGH: Yeah, the last one was just before Christmas. We rolled out of there quite late in the day, I have to say.

CAINE: Quite late in the day.

BRANAGH: But we felt brilliant all day.

Q: I just saw ‘As You Like It’ and I just saw ‘Hamlet.’ The 2-disk just came out. I’ve been watching a lot of your stuff I can’t think of a better director adapting stage to screen, particularly Shakespeare. What’s the secret? When other people do it, it’s so stale. Great material is just leaden on the screen.

BRANAGH: Well that’s partly what Michael says is to look at it from a different perspective. Two guys in a room arguing about a woman who isn’t there is not a bad premise for a piece of drama, you know. If you build it, they will come as it were. And simple things, when the story is there, when the characters are recognizable, when the situation is familiar to people, here in the search of Sleuth, sexual jealously. I’m afraid we all probably have some experience of jealousy. Would we take it to the irrational, crazy, desperate extremes that these men do? I don’t know. But there’s a sort of vicarious thrill at the prospect that we might. So that need not be treated in the first instance as though theatrical. That’s just human. If you can put it on screen, it’s great. I feel the same way about Shakespeare. Try and find the center of what you think that drama is and if it connects to the ordinary experience of human beings, then that’s already your ‘get out of jail’ card. It’s not a question of a record of a historical event, but what is the humanity that you’re trying to put on the screen, and then trying to get the other things out of the way -- funny voices, silly physical things, and any sense that you are cleverer just because his name’s on it that it’s somehow better. No, it’s got to earn its place out there in the cinema or in the theater for the reality and the insight into human behavior it offers and hopefully thrills and spills and humor.

Q: Could you tell us what is that one line that is duplicated from the original movie?

CAINE: There are two lines.

BRANAGH: One of which is ‘It’s just a game.’

CAINE: ‘It’s just a game.’ And the other one is about tendalini.

BRANAGH: ‘It’s like a little bell.’

CAINE: Those are the only two lines.

Q: You mentioned the film that you’re doing with Tom Cruise, is that finished? Can you talk a little bit about it?

BRANAGH: Nearly finished. My work’s done on it and Tom Cruise is brilliantly cast as Claus von Stauffenberg who led this assassination attempt on Hitler on July 20^th, 1944. All the events that led up to it were extraordinarily compelling and suspenseful. They so nearly did it and the course of 20^th century history would have changed if it had occurred and although you know the outcome, when I read this script by Chris McQuarrie of ‘The Usual Suspects,’ and Nathan Alexander, Bryan Singer who directed has kind of this encyclopedic knowledge of that period plus a great gift for the world of the thriller. It was a real pleasure to be on and all my stuff was with Tom Cruise and he was an utterly delightful creature so I think it’s going to be…I’m cautiously optimistic.

Q: What about filming in that same location?

BRANAGH: I think we found so much of…I mean we shot in some of the houses where the bombs had been hidden on their way to trying to get rid of Mr. Hitler. The commotion about ‘Oh, do the Germans want Tom Cruise here’ was largely exaggerated, it has to be said. A week into our shooting the man who had led much of the noise that had been made rang up deeply apologetic and said, ‘I’m so sorry, I’ve just read the script. It’s fantastic. I did not understand. I am sorry.’

Q: Can you tell us about ‘Batman’?

CAINE: I finished on ‘Batman’ and they’ll be filming in Hong Kong now. They’re just finishing. I thought that "Batman Begins’ was the best Batman that I had ever seen. I think this will be better. The big worry about Batman, the Joker, because you go, ‘Oh! You’ve got Jack Nicholson. How’re you gonna do that?’ We have Heath Ledger who is extraordinary, absolutely extraordinary. And you’re going to get the shock, not the surprise, the shock of your life when he comes on screen. He’ll scare the daylights out of you.

Q: Was Katie Homes in it also?

CAINE: No, her part was taken by Maggie Gyllenhaal. Maggie did that. She’s very funny. It’s like this here with a round table, not broadcast, but print with Katie a couple years ago on this and I got the biggest surprise. We got up from the table, there were 20 journalists in a bigger room than this, and I was with Katie and we went outside and I opened the door and there was Tom Cruise standing there. I didn’t know anything about anything and he just said to me, ‘Where’s my girl?’ and the whole table of journalists went silent. They went, ‘Tom Cruise, what’s he doing here?’ And I said, ‘Who’s your girl?’ He said, ‘Katie.’ And it was quite extraordinary and they were all dumfounded. No one picked up a camera or anything. And then he came right into the room with 20 journalists and he gave her a big kiss on the cheek. I loved Katie. She was smashing.

Q: You were funny in our room. You were going, ‘I saw them kissing.’

CAINE: I know him very well. We went like a football hunch. He said, ‘We’re in love. We’re in love.’

Q: If only you’d had a couch, he would have jumped on it.

CAINE: Yes, yes, he would have jumped on it. He would have jumped on one of these.

"Sleuth” opens in theaters on October 12^th