Blowing the Bloody Doors Off

by Michael Caine

  I was still using the difficulty even on my most recent film, at the age of eighty-three. King of Thieves is based on the true story of five old men who commit a massive bank robbery in London’s diamond district over an Easter holiday weekend. The youngest of them, who was not arrested with the others, was said to be in his sixties. When, in court, the other four were asked why they had let him take all the stolen gold, one explained: “He was the only one who could carry the bag.” My difficulty was that I desperately wanted to visit Brian Reader, the character I was playing, in prison, so that I could hear his voice. The police wouldn’t let me, but the screen writer had interviewed Reader’s daughter about the film and had told her that her father was to be played by Michael Caine. “Oh, my father, represented on screen by a British icon, how wonderful!” she did not say. What she did say, apparently, was, “Oh, Michael Caine, he’s much too common.” Insult piled on difficulty, but I used it. It meant I didn’t have to adopt a thick Cockney accent in the movie, and everyone, even Americans, would be able to understand the dialogue.

  As I’m writing I’ve just heard that another imprisoned member of the gang, Terry Perkins, played by Tom Courtenay in the movie, has died in his sleep. He had just been told, as they all had, that if they didn’t return the money, their sentences would be increased. Terry Perkins used the difficulty. But don’t try this at home.

  And my latest big break—literally. Early in 2018, I was trying to settle down to writing this book but, of course, I was often distracted with other work or social occasions. Pottering about in the garden one weekend after yet another snowfall, I slipped and fell and managed to break my ankle. I was in terrible pain, and confined to bed or a wheelchair for weeks. It was in many ways hellish, especially for my wife. But I used the difficulty. Since I couldn’t really go out, or do anything very much, I sat at home and got on with writing.

  Blessings (and curses) in disguise

  Disasters are not always as bad as they first appear. Some of my biggest knockbacks turned out to be for the best.

  In 1961, I did a two-week run of a play called Why the Chicken? (no, I don’t know either) written by John McGrath and directed by Lionel Bart, who had become a good friend. I was then very disappointed not to get the part of Bill Sykes when Lionel Bart went on to do Oliver!. It would have been a great part for me, and steady work, at a time when work was hard to come by. Two years later I took one of my worst knocks when I messed up my audition and was turned down for the part of Alfie in the London stage play.

  I soon came to see both of these disappointments as blessings in disguise. The stage play of Alfie ran for three weeks in New York, and although it managed to transfer to the West End in London it was not a huge hit. The film on the other hand…well, it was a triumph. Oliver! was still running six years later, the day I drove past the theatre in my Rolls-Royce, fresh from my U.S. publicity tour for Alfie and feeling like a star. I shuddered as I drove by. That actor’s name had been up there in lights since 1961: six years. I would have missed out on so much.

  I was disappointed again to have to turn down Troy Kennedy Martin’s offer to put me in his new TV series, Z Cars. Two years previously I’d have jumped at the chance, but now I was in the movies. Troy said, “OK, I’ll write you a film, then.” He used the difficulty. And he wrote a little film for me called The Italian Job.

  Apparent triumphs can be deceiving too.

  One of the worst pictures I ever made—and there is healthy competition for that title—was The Swarm. It was 1977, and since the success of The Man Who Would Be King, I had done my usual thing: a series of films that each fell short in various ways.

  I was to play alongside a stunning cast, all brilliant actors and extremely experienced movie stars: Henry Fonda, José Ferrer, Olivia de Havilland, Richard Widmark and Fred MacMurray. The director, Irwin Allen, was a friend and had just produced The Towering Inferno with Steve McQueen, Paul Newman and a galaxy of other big names, earning eight Academy Awards and the highest box office of 1974. I was a young foreign actor overcome by the glamour of Hollywood. Of course I said yes.

  When it was released in 1978 The Swarm quickly gained a reputation as the worst movie ever made. Irwin Allen was a brilliant producer but brilliant producers do not always translate into brilliant directors. The script, which I had hardly bothered to read in my excitement, was dreadful. And if I’d taken even a little time to think it over I would have seen that a burning skyscraper is high-stakes visual drama, whereas a swarm of bees is—well, it turns out it’s just ridiculous. And messy. Shooting our first scenes with the bees, we noticed little black dots appearing on our clothes. The bees were shitting on us. Sadly, they weren’t the only ones. When the film was released the audiences and critics did the same.

  None of my co-stars seemed to care. I realised that, although they were all huge stars, they were also old stars, and I wondered: had they reached a point in their careers when they would have said yes to anything for the money.

  I was disappointed. This was only my second Hollywood film. I’d made other movies but none in Hollywood itself. But I used the difficulty. Whenever I was not in a scene, instead of going to my dressing room I sat on set for hours, watching these Hollywood legends and absorbing as much as I could. One of the techniques I learnt on that movie was the power of stillness. These actors did not fidget around all the time. They kept very still, and their gestures, when they made them, were clean and deliberate. I also noticed how calm and relaxed they kept themselves, and how unafraid they were of trying things and making mistakes.

  Richard Widmark wanted to impart to me one very specific piece of advice, which I now, in the spirit of paying it forward, pass along to you. I was on set with Richard and Henry Fonda. We were waiting around for our scene and Richard said to me, “Take care around the special effects, Michael, especially in the cowboy movies.”

  “Why, Dick?” I asked. I didn’t really understand what he meant.

  “What?” he replied. “Could you stand on the other side of me and say that again?”

  “Why is that, Dick?” I said, louder, into his other ear.

  He said, “You know when the cowboy looks out from behind a rock and a bullet pings past him and he ducks back and then there’s a great big rock explosion? Well, now that cowboy is deaf in one ear.”

  “What’s that he’s saying?” said Henry, squinting and cupping his ear with his hand.

  “You did a lot of Westerns, too, didn’t you, Hank?” I shouted into the cupped ear.

  “Yeah, I did,” said Henry.

  You would have thought I would also have learnt never to pick a film with stars in my eyes. But sadly I made that mistake several more times. Just a year later I was offered a part in an action adventure movie set in Kenya called Ashanti. My co-stars were to be William Holden, Rex Harrison, Omar Sharif and Peter Ustinov. What could go wrong? Everything. The director left. The female lead left. The script was rewritten. We were all contractually obliged to finish the picture and we did. Never heard of it? Good.

  In 1990 I made a movie called Bullseye with my great friend Michael Winner directing and my great friend Roger Moore co-starring. We had a lot of fun making it but nobody had any fun watching it, if indeed anybody actually did. Bullseye turned out to be the most inappropriate title for a film ever. We didn’t even hit the target.

  I grew up in England, where the autumn is cold and rainy and the winter is colder and rainier. And then I lived for a number of years in Los Angeles, where every day of the year the sun shines and it’s 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Now, I love Los Angeles. I was very happy living there and I still have a lot of good friends there. But I prefer England. In the end, I missed the seasons. Here, we see the first daffodil of spring and we appreciate it. We think, We’ve earned that. We think, Isn’t God good, giving us the spring again?

  Bad things happen to all of us at some point in our lives. We lose our jobs, or our parents, or our health. We are disappointed at work, or in love, or in front
of the mirror. You can choose to dwell on the knockbacks. Or you can choose to embrace the opportunities that are still available to you.

  Someone once asked me the secret of my success and my answer was “survival.” I’m still here. I’m still going, even if sometimes I’m going through hell. In the end, success is survival.

  4.

  Doing the Right Things

  “It’s not who you are underneath. It’s what you do that defines you.”

  Batman Begins, 2005

  IF YOU MAKE IT in your universe, it’s because you keep doing enough of the right things. It sounds simple. It is simple, really.

  Just say yes

  I can’t think of a single example of an opportunity that, taking everything into account, I have regretted taking. I don’t like to look back with regret: what’s the point? And I can always find something good for me even in bad situations. If the script was terrible, maybe the location was fun. If the location was a steaming jungle or a frozen wasteland, maybe the director was a genius. If the director was dialling it in, maybe my co-stars made it interesting. If all else fails, I can always learn from whatever mistake got me there in the first place.

  I also can’t think of a single example of an opportunity I turned down, then wished I hadn’t. That’s for different reasons. That’s mainly because my approach has always been to grasp every bloody opportunity that appears in front of me. So, it’s hard to remember any opportunity I turned down, and if I did, it was to take a different one. And I never regret taking opportunities. QED.

  Success comes from doing. The best way to keep doing enough of the right things is to keep doing a lot of things. Even if some of those things end up being flops, you’ll be building up your experience, building relationships, building confidence, opening up opportunities, keeping life fresh and learning your craft. So long as enough of them are good enough, you will be allowed to keep going.

  When I was struggling to get work, saying yes to anything that came along was the obvious thing to do. I didn’t just need the experience, I needed the money. The offers were so thin on the ground that I had to go one further than saying yes. Most of the time, there was nothing on offer to me at all, so it was up to me to go out and make someone say yes to me.

  That’s how I came to get a part in Johnny Speight’s 1961 tense TV two-hander The Compartment, set in a railway carriage. Somehow I happened to be in the producer John McGrath’s office (he of Why the Chicken?) and John mentioned a script on his desk that was going to be his next TV show. He left the room, for some reason, and I picked it up. There was a part in it that was perfect for me (really the only part—it was a two-hander but essentially it was a forty-five-minute monologue): a vulgar Cockney, who eventually goes mad with frustration at his travelling companion’s snobbish refusal to talk to him, and kills him. It was a bigger, more difficult part than I had ever played on television but it wasn’t going to be a stretch for me to work myself up into a frenzy about a posh git, and I begged John to give me the part. And he did.

  The Compartment was my first chance to demonstrate that I could carry a show, and it brought me to the attention of all sorts of important people, including Dennis Selinger, who agreed to become my agent and steered me towards Next Time I’ll Sing To You and ever onwards; Troy Kennedy Martin, who later wrote The Italian Job; Bill Naughton, who later wrote Alfie; and Roger Moore, who was to become one of my closest friends. It was another of those little breaks that added up to the big breaks. Another of those little steps on the staircase, those little pieces in the jigsaw puzzle.

  But even after Alfie had propelled me into a different world—one in which I never had to do an audition or a screen test, or beg for a role again—I couldn’t shake the idea that every movie was my last. I never felt confident that the good times would last. So I just kept on saying yes, kept on doing. Even though I never had a contract with a movie studio that wasn’t torn up after my first movie, I conducted my whole career as if I was on a 1930s-style Hollywood contract: I did as many films each year as I could. Between Alfie in 1966 and The Italian Job in 1969, I did Gambit, playing a con-man opposite Shirley MacLaine; Funeral in Berlin, a second Harry Palmer picture; Hurry Sundown, where I premiered my Deep South accent opposite Jane Fonda; Tonite Let’s All Make Love in London, a documentary about London’s pop culture directed by Peter Whitehead, who invented the music video, and featuring Edna O’Brien, Vanessa Redgrave, Julie Christie, David Hockney and Mick Jagger; Billion Dollar Brain, a third Harry Palmer set in Finland and, I think, a really atmospheric and underrated picture; Woman Times Seven with Shirley MacLaine again; The Magus, about which the less said the better, and that’s easy because I still have no idea what it was about; Deadfall, written and directed by my old friend Bryan Forbes, in which I played a jewel thief; and Play Dirty, a war film initially to have been directed by René Clément but taken over by André De Toth.

  And, yes, my approach did mean that, over the course of my career, I made a lot of bad movies—because I made a lot of movies. But for the same reason—because I made a lot of movies—I also made a lot of good movies. On the TV shows where they selected the year’s best and worst films I was usually on both lists. Did I regret the bad ones? Well, it didn’t feel good when the critics ripped into me, but they paid just as well as the good ones. The point is, there is no sure-fire way to tell in advance which ones are going to flop. So the best way to do a lot of good work is to do a lot of work. Don’t overthink it. Don’t agonise. Just go ahead and do it, and enjoy it, and learn from it.

  Success comes from doing. Don’t wait for your chances: go out and take them. Don’t spend your life sitting off to the side, waiting for the perfect part in the perfect script with the perfect director at the perfect fee. Don’t wait passively, patiently for the perfect project to deliver itself to you wrapped in a bow. Or even the perfect man or woman. Say yes, and make this one the one you’ve been dreaming of. Learn the confidence you can only gain through experience. Achieve the relaxation you can only gain through confidence. Give the performance you can only give when you’re relaxed enough to access all your resources.

  Whatever it is, give it 100 per cent

  On your way up, that might mean spending time on things you think are below you. Taking work that you think is below you. Watching others—maybe your contemporaries, maybe your friends—becoming successful while you are still on the bottom rung. Watching others settling into married bliss while you are still kissing frogs. Keep doing it anyway. If you sit around waiting for the big part, then how are you going to be ready for it when it finally comes along? It’s the small-time experience that adds up to the big-time ability.

  My advice to any actor is, your part may not be the most important part in the movie, but it is the most important thing to you. Your contribution is what you can control so, however big or small it is, you have to make it as good as it can be. That doesn’t mean doing silly things to attract attention. Don’t twitch away or neurotically worry at insignificant details or constantly try to catch the director’s eye. All of that is just annoying and makes you look needy. Just make it real, make it true and make bloody sure you know your lines. Treat your small part as if it’s the main event—because, for you, it is. Approach the small part you’re playing right now as the most important thing there is right now. Give it everything you’ve got.

  The same goes whatever you’re doing, in whatever walk of life. However scaled down your role is, do not make that a reason to scale down your effort. If the part falls short of what you wanted, don’t let that be a reason for you to fall short of what the director wants. You are not making it up to yourself: you are doing yourself down.

  In fact, in some ways, small parts are more difficult, so you have to work even harder to pull them off. You have one thing to do, all eyes are on you when you mess it up, and if you don’t have a second line you don’t get a second chance. So don’t think you can multi-task. Don’t use the time you will inevitably be hanging aro
und to clear emails, take a nap or catch up on the news. Go through your lines (or line). Go through them (or it) again. And again. Think about your character. Stay alert to what’s going on around you and what you can learn from it. Stay in the moment of this role, this task. If you’re in the right business for you, it will be more fun than Candy Crush, and it will pay better too.

  These days, I love small parts. They can be much more interesting and I don’t have to get up at six thirty in the morning to learn pages of dialogue. My motto at this stage in my career is: “It doesn’t matter how small it is, so long as it’s deep.” But no matter the size of the part, I would never get caught giving less than 100 per cent. Why do anything if you’re not going to do it as well as you possibly can?

  Learn your craft

  I can’t emphasise this strongly enough. You have to learn your craft. Whatever it is you want to do, you have to put in the hours to learn everything you’re going to need, starting with the basics. Because if you’re confident in your craft—be it cooking, plumbing, selling, whatever—then when the next challenge comes along, you’ll feel able to say yes, and you’ll be able to give yourself to it, 100 per cent.

  How do you learn? There is no single way. Learn from classes, if you can, but don’t worry if you can’t. I would have loved to spend three years studying voice and movement and the classical repertoire at RADA, but that option wasn’t open to me. And, anyway, the alternative course I accidentally took instead, with no choice in the matter, is one I would highly recommend.