Michael Caine Interview, Is Anybody There

MoviesOnline had the pleasure of sitting down with Sir Michael Caine to talk about his new film, "Is Anybody There?," a charming story about growing up and growing old, and the unpredictable adventures that happen along the way.

The Academy Award winning actor gives one of the finest performances of his career playing a retired magician who reluctantly enters a family-run old age home. The film which premiered at the 2008 Toronto Film Festival is directed by John Crowley whose critically acclaimed stage and screen credits include “The Pillowman” and “Boy A.”

Set in a seaside English town circa 1987, “Is Anybody There?” charts the unlikely friendship that develops between Caine’s proud, acerbic old performer and the death-obsessed young son (Milner) of the home’s overwhelmed owners. Written by Peter Harness, who draws from his own experience growing up in a retirement home, “Is Anybody There?” brings a rich humor as well as a rigorous honesty to its portrait of different lives colliding under one roof. The supporting cast includes Anne-Marie Duff (“The Magdalene Sisters”), David Morrissey (“The Deal”), Rosemary Harris (“Spider-Man”) and Leslie Phillips (“Venus”).

We took the opportunity to ask Sir Michael if director Christopher Nolan had spoken to him about reprising his role as Alfred in the next Batman which is rumored to be in the works for Summer 2010. He also talked to us about what his friend and co-star Heath Ledger’s Academy Award win for Best Supporting Actor in “Dark Knight” meant to him. And he described his surprise when he heard about his friend and fellow actor Christian Bale dropping the f-bomb on the “Terminator Salvation” set last summer.

Michael Caine is a fabulous person and we really appreciated his time. Here’s what he had to tell us:

Q:  Did you relish this role and the performance you gave in it?

MICHAEL CAINE:  Yeah, I loved it, I loved doing this. I fell in love with the script. David Hayman, he brought the script to me, he’s the guy who produces Harry Potter. I mean, it’s not a big movie like that, so he brought this, he wanted to do it, and he gave it to me. I was reading it and I got halfway through and I rang him and I said, “I’ll do it.”  He said, “Did you like it?” I said, “I haven’t finished it yet.” He said, “Well why are you calling me before you finished it?”  I said, “Because I’m crying and I wanted something to do.” And it had made me cry halfway through and I just wept. No script had ever done that to me before, and I don’t cry easily, believe me, honestly.  And I just thought it was a wonderful thing to do, and also, it stretches me. When you’ve been an actor as long as I have, you’re trying to get better and be better and better.  It’s just, the only reason to go to work really is to try and prove to yourself that you’re better, than you were the last time.  So that’s what it was about.

Q:  I would imagine that you had a say in who played the little boy and you had to have a rapport with him…

MICHAEL CAINE:  I didn’t have a say who had to play the little boy, but I did say to David, if the little boy is no good, we’re in trouble.  And then he brought Bill in, and Bill was fabulous, because he, Bill wasn’t from a stage school. He hadn’t done any professional acting before. I think he did one little thing, but he was from an amateur dramatic society, and most important of all, he didn’t have a stage mom.  He had a very ordinary, when I say ordinary, very nice, very sweet woman, which is his mother. She wasn’t peddling her thwarted ambitions through him or anything, and so he was just a natural, a very natural little boy, and I thought he was wonderful. 

Q:  What did it mean to you personally working with someone that’s so young and so talented?

MICHAEL CAINE:  Well, for me, it was first of all, I don’t like working with bad actors, (Laughs). I know some actors, stars, who like to work with bad actors, so they look good.  I like to work with the best possible actors because that pushes me on.  And Bill, I never got the sense that Bill was a little child actor working.  I just looked at Bill as someone who was just the same as me, and we were just friends, you know, we’re very good friends. And one reporter said to me, he said, “Did you give him any advice?” I said, “No, he didn’t need any. He never looked like he needed any help.”  He was just wonderful I thought.

Q:  Have you ever had that close rapport either now with somebody that young, or when you were that young with somebody older?

MICHAEL CAINE:  Yeah, I did.  I had a very close rapport with my head mistress in a little school in the country, who I now realize was a lesbian, and I was her sort of surrogate son, and I didn’t realize. I was seven and she taught me to play poker when I was seven in the evenings.  She did.  And it was a little country school, and I remember her name was Miss Linton, and so I had a relationship with someone much older than me who wasn’t a relative.  And it was very similar to my thing with the boy, but what happened with the boy is I’m there to take care of him. Eventually, he’s there to take care of me and he learns from doing that. 

Q:  Could you talk about your character who is a retired magician? Have you ever thought about retiring?

MICHAEL CAINE:  In life, no.  Because I think films retire you -- sometimes if you’re unfortunate, after your first film.  (Laughs)  This is about my 101st film.  No, what happens is that you say I’m going to retire, and then David Hayman turns up and gives you this script.  So you’re not retiring anymore, because you say, oh do this one.  And then they just did it again, I didn’t work for fifteen months after this picture.  This was made quite a long time ago.  They saved it, they wanted it to come out this April, I don’t know, whatever they’re doing, is I don’t know.  But then I’ve just done a picture called “Harry Brown,” in which I played the lead, which is unusual for someone my age. You’re usually a character, like I am in Batman. I’m the butler, I’m not Batman.  (laughter)  So these things turn up and you just can’t refuse them.  I mean, I don’t have my next movie, I mean I’m not looking for it, someone will give me a script possibly, and I will work again. If someone doesn’t give me a script I want to do, I’m retired, but there won’t be some great announcement or fanfare of trumpets.  I just won’t do anything.  I’ll stay at home and do what I do there, which is cooking, gardening and writing and traveling.

Q:  Did you learn any magic tricks while doing “The Prestige”?

MICHAEL CAINE:  No, I didn’t play a magician in “The Prestige,” you see, I played the guy who made the tricks.  It was Hugh and Christian who were the magicians.  No, but in this, the first thing I saw that I’d got right, was before we ever started shooting the movie, I decided to part my hair in the middle.  And then I had to meet the real magician to learn the tricks, the technical advisor, and he came in, and his hair was parted in the middle and I thought I haven’t even started the movie and I’ve got something right.  (Laughs)  And I said to another magician, who I met later, I said, I told him that story I said, and he had his hair parted in the middle, and he said a lot of magicians have their hair parted in the middle.  And I said, “Why is that?”  He said, “Houdini.  Houdini parted his hair and all the young magicians copied him.” 

Q:  How difficult was it for you to learn magic tricks to pull off some sleight of hand for the film?

MICHAEL CAINE:  Quite difficult, you know, especially when you’re my age, and I’ve got fingers that don’t work quite so.  Billy got that one, quicker than I did, you know, bringing the card ‘round his fingers.  (Laughs)  But it’s quite difficult to do.  The other things, of course, are tricks and machinery and gadgets and things, so they’re not so bad. 

Q:  The screenwriter, Peter Harness, is in his early thirties, do you think he got it right and did you have any input into the script?

MICHAEL CAINE:  I never input anything into it, just my performance.  I never changed anything.  He actually grew up as Billy, in a house for old people.  I mean, he said, “Unfortunately, a magician never came into my life (Laughs) to cheer me up,” he said, but his mother and father owned the old people’s home. 

Q:  Did the character of Clarence give you any insights into aging or the aging process?

MICHAEL CAINE:  It gave me insight into why other people age, not me.  But there was a sad part of it, where for the dementia and the Alzheimers, I was technically perfect, because my best friend just died of it.  And so I knew, I’d just spent five years with it, Doug Hayward, my tailor, who was also my best friend, and so I knew exactly about Alzheimers and what happens and the confusion and stuff.  So I was very experienced like that, but when you get older, you have friends like that. I just played a guy who had emphysema, and my other best friend has emphysema, so I had the technical knowledge from him of what happens.  It’s quite weird.  (Laughs)  But I’m trying to carve a way right through the middle, without getting anything.

Q:  You’ve been asked what knowledge you imparted to Bill Milner, but what did you gain from working with the young actor that maybe colored your performance?

MICHAEL CAINE:  I’d gained the fact that how lucky I was to work with this boy, who was so skilled and so natural, and I just thank God everyday that he was there.  Because it can be so difficult working with children, I mean on The Cider House Rules, I worked with 150 of them.  (Laughs)  So I know how difficult some can be and how brilliant he was.  I learned I didn’t have to do anything to help him.  That was great.

Q:  You talk about when Hollywood chooses to retire an actor.  Why do you think it hasn’t retired you?

MICHAEL CAINE:  I have no idea, I have no idea, you don’t, you don’t know when your time is up so to speak.  It just goes a period of time when the right scripts don’t arrive.  And it hasn’t happened to me yet, I mean, it might have happened now. I finished this last picture as I said, I don’t have another picture to do, and if a script doesn’t come, then I won’t do anything, and I’ll be retired, but there won’t be any announcement or anything.  I remember MacArthur saying, “Old soldiers don’t die, they fade away.”  (Laughs)  Well old actors don’t die, they fade away. 

Q:  Are you not expecting there to be a third Batman picture especially after the success of “Dark Knight”?

MICHAEL CAINE:  Well, Christopher is doing a picture called “Inception,” with Leonardo DiCaprio, which I saw on the internet, so I imagine another Batman is quite a long way away. 

Q:  Is your Harry Brown character the kind of answer to this epidemic that you spoke about crime in the U.K.?

MICHAEL CAINE:  Yes, what it is, it’s about a very old ex-marine, a tough guy, but away from all that, a very gentle soul, who lives on one of these, what they call in America, projects, you know,the very poor, we call them counselor states in England, and it’s an absolute cesspit.  And the old people are afraid to go out, and it’s true in England, I don’t know what’s it’s like in America, it’s true.  And his best friend is killed, and he becomes a vigilante and starts to wipe out the gang.  It’s very far from Is There Anybody There?  He’s a very, very tough guy.  Someone said to me on the picture, he looks like Jack Carter, he got old.  (Laughs)

Q:  Did you enjoy making that type of movie?

MICHAEL CAINE:  Yeah, and it was weird for me, because we went back to these projects, which fortunately, are being torn down. That’s why we filmed it because there were just a few people left, but they were the projects where I came from myself.  And there is a mural on the wall with me on it, in this project, and Charlie Chaplin, who came from there as well.  It’s just me and Charlie Chaplin on the wall in this project.  But they’re not going to pull the mural down.  (Laughs)  They’re going to leave it.  And it was quite weird, because I was there, with the young guys who were on the streets there, and they were talking to me. Some of them are quite scary (Laughs).  Like I was old and they were young and some of them were black and I was white, but they treated me exactly the same as though I was one of them.  Because the first thing they said was, “Where did you come from here?,” and I said, “800 yards over there.” And I saw them change.  And they said, “He’s one of us.”  And then I talked to them a great deal, and they all had ambitions and they’d all been let down by us, the government, the educations, the family, as children.  They’d all been let down. 

Q:  What kinds of films and roles are you drawn to at this point in your career?

MICHAEL CAINE:  It’s just the writing, like Dark Knight, I chose a long time ago because it was Batman Begins, but that was because of Christopher Nolan, but also, on this film there’s John Crowley, who is a brilliant young Irish director, who I saw two small films that he did.  And I loved them.  And then on Harry Brown, there’s a young English director called Daniel Barber, and I saw a small film that he did, he actually got nominated for an Academy Award for that film, and I forget the bloody title [The Tonto Woman].  And I like working with younger directors, as I’m going to do these small films. A younger director can get a chance in a small, cheap film.  He can’t get a chance at a big one. 

Q:  Weren’t you signed for three Batmans?

MICHAEL CAINE:  Oh yes, oh yeah, if they do another one, I’ll probably be the butler. (Laughs)  I hope I’m still alive.  But Michael Goff, who played Batman before me, the last time he played Batman, he was 84.  The butler, he was 84. 

Q:  Didn’t Christopher Nolan do this the last time also because he wanted to make another film in between?

MICHAEL CAINE:  He did, I was in that, too. The Prestige.  Christopher doesn’t make pictures without me.  (Laughs)

Q:  Do you think he’ll come around to doing a third one?

MICHAEL CAINE:  I would imagine so and that will be probably The Riddler. 

Q:  When you look back on your entire career, and you’ve been in both American and British cinema, so much has changed over time obviously in terms of different styles of filmmaking. People like to glamorize the films of the sixties and seventies or think of them as part of the last golden era, like real true gritty cinema. Do you miss that and do you see something missing today?

MICHAEL CAINE:  No, I’ve never seen anything missing. I would go with what I want to do at any given time and it’s still there for me. I mean, I can’t sit here having done this picture and say I never get offered any good scripts.  I don’t get offered many, because I’m a bit old now for the lover and all that.  I say, “I don’t get the girl anymore, I get the part.”  (Laughs) I remember the change in that, you know. I got a script a few years back and I sent it back to the producer. I said, “Well, the part’s too small,” and he sent it back to me.  He said, “It wasn’t for the lover, it was for the father,” and I looked in the mirror. I said, “Oh my God, I’ve got old.”

Q:  Out of all of your performances, do you have a favorite character that you’ve played?

MICHAEL CAINE:  Well Alfie had to be the one, because it was the one that made me a star, and it broke open the American market for me, came to America, and then I got my first nomination for an Academy Award for it.  So that was, apart from being favorite, was important.  But my favorite character of all was in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels.  ‘Cause I enjoyed that, Dr. Sheffhouse, and I liked him very much. 

Q:  What did Heath Ledger’s victory at the Oscars mean to you and, in your eyes, to his legacy?

MICHAEL CAINE:  I thought it was very important for his family as well.  I was a big fan of his from the first time I met him. I’d never met him before, and I met him on the set, where he invades our party we’re having, and I’m standing by the lift and I expect to greet people and there, all his gang’s behind him, and he came in.  But before that, I’d met obviously on the set and we were chatting. He had this makeup on, and I was saying how fantastic I thought it was, and we were just chatting quietly and then they said, we’re ready to shoot.  And I had never seen the performance, we were just talking, and then he came out of the elevator and I was absolutely stunned by that, the way he did it and the energy that went into it.  And then when I saw the movie, there’s an opening monologue and a closing monologue that he does, which I felt, if anybody’s going to better that, and get an Academy Award above him, I will pay good money to see that.  And nobody did beat him.  I’m so pleased.

Q:  That will be a tough act to follow for anyone who plays The Riddler though.

MICHAEL CAINE:  Yeah, I thought it would be a tough act to follow The Joker after Jack Nicholson.  (Laughs)  You know what I’m saying?  And now Heath is The Joker.  We’ll see, we’ll see.

Q:  Your producer on this, David Heyman, also does the Harry Potter movies, is there any chance of you showing up in Harry Potter 6 or 7?

MICHAEL CAINE:  Yeah, David, yeah. Me?  No, I think I’d have been there before if they’d wanted me.  No, I mean it’s, I think they’re all set in their ways, so David and I have this little station, we do the little ones.  I hope he gets another script like this, not like this, but this type of thing.  But David’s mother is a very close friend of mine, and so I’ve known David since the day he was born. 

Q:  Have you seen Dirty Rotten Scoundrels on Broadway?

MICHAEL CAINE:  No, I missed that. I was never there. I hear it was very funny.  And John played it, John Lithgow.  He’s a wonderful actor, and he’s a friend of mine. 

Q:  Do you have a favorite director that you’ve worked with?

MICHAEL CAINE:  John Huston, yeah. 

Q:  When you were growing up, was there a film that you saw that made you want to go into the business or that really changed your life and made you realize how important films could be?

MICHAEL CAINE:  Yeah, the very first one.  I was five years old at the children’s cinema, and I saw Lone Ranger.  I wanted to be The Lone Ranger.  And I wanted to be a movie actor from that time on.  And I’m a great movie fan, but my favorite film of all time is Casablanca.  

Q:  You’ve done three films with Christian Bale, and he caught some attention recently?

MICHAEL CAINE:  Yeah, that stunned me, that did, ‘cause he’s not like that at all.  I mean, I’m more like that than he is. You’re liable to get a volley off of me if you walk around during my takes. (Laughs)  But I mean, I would never imagine Christian doing that.  It’s completely out of character.  I was stunned when I saw it on the news. 

Q:  Is it fairly business as usual on a movie set, whether it’s Christian or not, that when something like that happens, everyone gets over it later?

MICHAEL CAINE:  Oh sure, I lost my temper on a movie, years ago. I was doing a movie called The Last Valley and James Clavell was the director, and I’m not a very good horseman and I told him. And they put me on this horse that they knew was a killer and it ran away with me for two miles.  And I brought it back at a slow pace.  And then I got off, and all the unit were laughing, and then I started.  And I outdid Christian by about thirty minutes and with more language than he knew and James Clavell broke the crew for an hour, and he said, “Let’s have a cup of tea.”  And so we went and had a cup of tea.  And James Clavell was captured in Hong Kong, when he was fourteen, by the Japanese, and spent the first part of his life in Japanese prison camp.  And he said to me, “The way I survived,” he said, “is I became a Japanese in mentality.  And so I knew where they were coming from and their treatment of us, and I knew where I should be and everything,” he said. “And the one thing the Japanese never do, is they never lose their temper,” he said, “because anger is an emotion that you should never show to strangers, because you expose too much of yourself.”  He said, “You must never expose yourself like that to strangers.”  And he gave me this long lecture on the Japanese and anger, and I have never lost my temper on a set since.  I go home and scream at the kids. (Laughs)  But I have never lost my temper on a set since. 

Q:  Did you reach out to Christian?

MICHAEL CAINE:  Well I haven’t seen him since.  No.  When I meet him, I’m going to say, “What the fuck are you doing?”  (Laughs)

Q:  What would you like to have the audience take away from this picture?

MICHAEL CAINE:  I would like them to take away a moving experience about life that they didn’t quite have before about the relationships between children and adults and youngsters and the aging.  It goes both ways, you see how an older person can help someone young and bring them around, and you see how a younger person should treat an older person.  So I think that understanding between the two ages is very important in this picture.

Q:  One of the relationships that is palpable, even though it’s not seen on screen, is that between you and the wife, and a lot of it has to do with dealing with the sense of regret and guilt.  What was your inroad into reaching that dramatically and tapping into that?

MICHAEL CAINE:  Well, it was something that you would imagine, if you’d done to your own wife and what that would be like.  I’ve never of course done that to mine.  And I’ve had a very happy marriage, but you can imagine, and I can imagine my reaction if that had happened to me.  And I have seen it with other people who’ve had regrets about what they did when people died.  Everyone does about different things.  But I’ve never had any regrets about anybody I knew who died because I don’t treat people like that.

Q:  You’ve been knighted and you’ve won an Academy Award, is there anything that you haven’t achieved yet?

MICHAEL CAINE:  I’ve won two supporting actors, I’ve been nominated seven times for leading actor, and I’ve never won that.  So that would be an ambition, wouldn’t it?  To do that.  And I’ve got two Academy Awards, and it would look better with another one in the middle.  (Laughs)  You know three, it would look nice, wouldn’t it?  

Q:  Where do you keep your Academy Awards?

MICHAEL CAINE:  In my office.  There’s a big row of shelves behind me, and above on the top shelf are the Academy Awards.  So, when you come in the door, you look at me, you look straight up and you see two Academy Awards and three Golden Globes and three BAFTAs. 

Q:  What are the big summer movies you’re looking forward to seeing?

MICHAEL CAINE:  The big summer movies?  I don’t know what they are!  I’ve just come from Surrey in England.  You don’t get a lot of Hollywood news out there.  We don’t know what’s coming.  There is one I read about.  I want to see the one with Christian.  The Terminator!  Yeah!  I saw a trailer for that. 

Q:  Thank you.

MICHAEL CAINE:  Thank you very much.

“Is Anybody There?” opens in theaters on April 17th.