The Elephant to Hollywood

by Michael Caine

  But the house was only part of it. I had a loving family with a father who stayed with us and a mother who cared for us. Most of these boys came from one-parent families – or none. It’s not that single parents can’t do a great job raising their children – after all, there were many kids in my generation whose fathers had been killed in the war – but it makes it much harder, and if they are poor as well, it’s an extra handicap. I was lucky, too, because I had a good education – at least at Hackney Downs and Wilson’s Grammar School. A lot of these boys were bright but seemed to have opted out of school completely. I’m not saying they should be learning Shakespeare or doing Latin and Greek at Cambridge, but on a more practical level, they could benefit from real education and a sense of possibility. One guy I met told me he likes to build things, likes doing woodwork. It doesn’t mean he has to be a carpenter – although that would be a good start: he could be a sculptor or a wood-carver. Kids need to have a direction for their talents, otherwise they won’t know where to go.

  And then my generation didn’t have to deal with drugs and the violence that follows in their wake – or at least not on the same scale. Half the time these kids are so drugged up they have no idea what they’re doing: there was constant activity from the police on this estate while we were filming. I remember one day in particular when we wasted half the day on retakes, because every time we were finishing a shot with dialogue, a police siren would come along and ruin it. But even more than that, these kids had nothing to do, and nowhere to go, and that, I think, is essential. I had Clubland, the youth club and the drama class and that was where I found the thing I wanted to do more than anything else, the thing that, in the end, set me on my future course.

  If it hadn’t been for the Reverend Jimmy Butterworth, who ran and founded Clubland, I would probably never have made it out of the Elephant. He was a tiny little man – he was only about five foot – and referred to himself as a ‘little Lancashire Lad’, but he was a giant to me. He built that youth club out of nothing but determination and an extraordinary ability to persuade wealthy donors to back the project. It was through this that I met my first real star – Bob Hope. Bob was a very generous man and always gave a lot to charities, but somehow Jimmy had managed not only to persuade him to donate the proceeds of his entire two-week run at the Prince of Wales theatre to the club, but to come and talk to us as well. He made a great impression on me, but I had no reason to think that he had even noticed a gangly teenager hanging on his every word and I didn’t mention it when, years later, I appeared on the Bob Hope Show during the publicity for Alfie. I should have known better . . . When I got back to England, my agent called to find out if the fee for the show had gone direct to me rather than via him as would have been normal. It hadn’t – and a week later I got a call from Bob himself. He had sent the money straight to Jimmy Butterworth at Clubland. ‘You owe them,’ he said. And I do.

  On Harry Brown, I saw for myself the difference that involvement with something creative can make to the lives of kids who have nothing much to do. The director, Daniel Barber, used a number of the young men who had been watching us on the shoot in the movie. It was late one night and as I stood there watching them rehearse, I thought to myself that he had bought himself some real trouble – I assumed they would get bored very quickly and all be gone by take three, which would mean he would have to reshoot. I was completely wrong. As I watched Daniel directing these kids it dawned on me that here was proof of what was lacking in their lives. They were doing something they really wanted to do, they were interested enough to want to know how to do it well and they were responding to an authority figure who knew what he was talking about and was treating them with the dignity and respect their lives were lacking. By take five, they were completely into it and making their own suggestions – I loved watching the way their confidence grew by the minute. Daniel was happy to let them ad lib and the only direction I heard him give was, ‘You can only say “fuck” twice each and no one can say the “C” word or you’ll get us an X certificate!’

  The art of directing kids from the street wasn’t the only thing I learnt on Harry Brown. I was also introduced to the art of ecological film-making. There’s one scene where I have to take a gun away from a guy and throw it into the canal, which took about five or six takes to get right. Now, I’m used to throwing guns in canals and there’s always a diver standing there to go in and get the gun at the end of it. So by the time Daniel called ‘print’, I’d thrown about six guns into the canal and I asked the special effects guy where the diver was. ‘There isn’t one,’ he said. ‘Well, how are you going to get the guns back?’ I asked. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘it’s a new thing – they dissolve within two hours!’ You see? You think you know everything and then they surprise you with dissolving guns . . .

  Harry Brown was a real wake-up call for me and I wanted it to be a wake-up call for others, too. I had gone into the film thinking that we should just lock up these violent offenders and throw away the key, but I completely changed my mind during the course of it. Prison doesn’t solve the problems that come with the sorts of backgrounds these kids come from. The fact is that we are failing them. If they are brought up with violence they have no option but to join a gang – most of them join for protection, not because they are naturally violent themselves. I did it myself when I was their age, but although we were rough and tough, compared with the gangs now we were like Mary Poppins. In my day it was alcohol and fights, not drugs, guns and knives.

  When it came out, some critics compared Harry Brown with Death Wish, because the protagonists in both films end up killing the killers of someone close to them. That wasn’t our intention, and it’s not how I see it at all. Our film is about violence, but it never celebrates violence; Harry Brown never becomes a willing perpetrator, he always remains a victim, and that was very important to me. It works because it’s about a fantasy that I think everyone shares to some extent, of being able to scare the people who scare you – and that is what daily life is like on some of these estates.

  Apart from Clubland, which gave me something to aim for, I think I was also helped to a certain extent by national service. I wouldn’t recommend the two years I had to put up with, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend being sent into combat as I was but, as I’ve said before, I do think that six months or so in a disciplined environment – particularly if there’s some training and education involved – would help. All the members of the gang I was in had to do our national service and we all emerged at the end of it very different. I was on an aeroplane once and the pilot came out and introduced himself and it was a guy I’d grown up with. ‘You can’t be a pilot,’ I said. ‘You’re even stupider than I am! I couldn’t fly a plane – how the hell can you manage it?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, they sent me to flying school.’ When we were kids he was in the same Teddy Boy gang as me, on the street.

  It was for this reason that I backed the new Prime Minister David Cameron’s proposal for a National Citizen’s Service, which would be a two-month summer programme for sixteen-year-olds. I’m not a party political animal at all – I’ve voted Labour and I’ve voted Conservative in the past – but I was impressed by Cameron’s pledge to give young people like the ones I met round the Elephant a second chance. I felt I did have a rapport with those kids, and I felt my own history very strongly when I walked round the area I came from, and I wanted to put something back. I’ll be watching carefully how the plans develop – because with the downturn in the economy, these kids are going to need all the help they can get.

  To me, it’s important, always, to remember where you came from. Walking round the Elephant after the last day of filming on Harry Brown, I felt no great sense of closure, just a sense of satisfaction that I had made it and gone from there to Hollywood – the place I had always dreamed of. I no longer want to make movies back to back as I did in my younger, hungrier days – there were eighteen months between finishing Is Anybody There? and Harry Brown – but t
he business still fascinates me as much as it did then. But as I stood in front of the mural, paying my respects to Charlie Chaplin and marvelling, yet again, that my picture was up there alongside his, I was happy to know that shortly a car would come to pick me up and take me back to my Surrey paradise. If another script comes along that I really want to do, then I’ll take it on: if not, I won’t. I’ve always said that you don’t retire from the movie business, it retires you – and when it retires me, I tell you now, there won’t be any fanfare or public announcement. I’m an old soldier, like Harry Brown, and I will just fade away from my long public life into the embrace of my family. In the end, they mean more to me than the whole lot put together.

  23

  What It’s Really All About

  With longer and longer gaps between films I’ve been able to spend more time on the other pleasures in life – the family, friends, my garden and cooking are just some of these, but one of the greatest has been travelling. I’ve been all over the world on location and seen some wonderful places (and some bloody awful ones, too), but when you’re working you can’t be as relaxed about sightseeing as when you’re on holiday. So with a less hectic schedule, Shakira and I have been making up for lost time. It’s been a chance for us not only to revisit our favourite spots, but to explore some new ones, too – and one of the most exciting for us was the trip we took to India in 2005.

  Like everyone else, I had pre-conceived notions of what India would be like, both good and bad. I thought I would be outraged by the extraordinary wealth of the few and the grinding poverty of the many, but it wasn’t like that – well, it was in some respects, but in others it wasn’t. Yes, we saw examples of extreme wealth and extreme poverty, but this was a country in which many of the richest people really do have a sense of caring for their poorer neighbours and it’s a country on the move, with a burgeoning middle class, a highly educated workforce with tremendous IT skills, and a real sense of enterprise.

  We were travelling in august company. With us was the President of Iceland, Ólafur Grimsson, and his wife Dorrit, both friends of ours, who were there on an official visit, and also Irina Abramovich, the ex-wife of Roman Abramovich, the owner of Chelsea Football Club. It turned out that my claim to fame in India is as the husband of Shakira – although I did hear a rumour that they have remade Get Carter and The Italian Job in Hindi, so maybe the next time I go I will have achieved some status of my own.

  Because we were with such a high-powered group, we were treated like royalty. Our first dinner was in the penthouse suite in the Taj Palace Hotel in New Delhi as guests of Mrs Sonia Gandhi, the leader of the Congress Party, and the following day we were invited to have tea with the President, Dr A. P. J. Abdul Kalam. His palace, which had been built by the British, was unbelievably grand and stood at the end of an enormous boulevard. All I could think of as I gazed at it was what confidence, insanity and conceit the British must have had to build such pompous edifices to an endless future, surrounded, as they were, by some of the poorest people on the face of the earth. Society in India has changed for the better since those days, but buildings like that still look out of place to me.

  The President himself was particularly interesting to me on two counts: first, he was a Muslim, despite the fact that only twenty per cent of India’s population is Muslim, and second, he was a scientist who had played a major part in India’s nuclear missile programme. After tea he showed us round the enormous rose garden. It occurred to me that it occupied a huge amount of space in such an overcrowded city and, perhaps unwisely, I pointed out the injustice of it. He smiled at me innocently. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘The British built it.’ ‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Of course.’ I was put politely in my place.

  The following day we had tea with the Prime Minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, and got another surprise: he was a Sikh, the first non-Hindu Prime Minister of India. Sikhs are an even smaller religious minority than the Muslims and it was a Sikh who had assassinated Mrs Gandhi. I didn’t speak to the Prime Minister much – it was well above my pay grade – and left most of the talking to Ólafur, but I did reflect on the strides India had taken in religious tolerance since Independence – the leader of the Congress party, Sonia Gandhi, is an Italian Catholic by birth, the President of India is a Muslim and the Prime Minister is a Sikh. And all this in a country where eighty per cent of the population is Hindu.

  One of the most remarkable days we spent in New Delhi was being shown round the former home of Mrs Indira Gandhi, who had been killed by her own Sikh guards in her back garden. The house and garden, which are relatively modest, have been kept exactly as they were on the day she died, as a monument to her. Only two items on display relate to the tragedy of the Gandhi family: the clothes Mrs Gandhi was wearing when she was assassinated, and the clothes worn by her son, Rajiv, when he was blown up by a female suicide bomber as she knelt down to kiss his feet in a gesture of respect. After we had been round the house, we were taken out into the garden. The guide led us along a path and then stopped, pointing down to a small bridge with water running underneath it. At his feet there was a fresh flower. ‘This’, he said, ‘is the spot where Mrs Gandhi was shot.’ And then we walked another twenty or thirty paces further along the path and he said, ‘And this is where Mr Peter Ustinov was standing.’ Peter? None of us had ever heard that Peter Ustinov had been there. ‘What was he doing there?’ I asked, completely confused. ‘He was interviewing her for the BBC,’ said the guide. ‘That was why Mrs Gandhi had come out to the garden in the first place.’ A complete surprise to me.

  My next surprise was the following day. We were visiting the gardens of a temple when a monkey leapt out of a tree and stole the glasses right off my nose. It’s a big shock, I can tell you, having your glasses stolen by a monkey, but now I always carry a spare pair just in case there are monkeys around.

  After Delhi, we travelled to Agra by car. It took six long hours, but it was extraordinary to see the other side of India gradually unfold in front of our eyes as we left the city behind. We did indeed have to drive round a cow that had decided to sit in the middle of the road and we also had to stop at a railway crossing for a train to go by and, yes, people really did travel on the roof and cling on to the sides of the carriages. But all this was just preparation for something I had been looking forward to ever since my father – who had been a soldier in India – had told me tales of it: the Taj Mahal. We were staying in a beautiful hotel, Amar Vilas, which boasts that you can see the Taj Mahal from every room. I can vouch for this, although I would have preferred not to. I had obviously eaten something that disagreed with me (not, I hasten to add, from the hotel restaurant) and found myself confined to the toilet one afternoon. And, yes, you could even see the Taj Mahal from there . . .

  That evening, Shakira and I strolled out onto the lawn for a first look at the Taj Mahal by moonlight. It really was one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen – and certainly the most romantic. To add to the magic, along a road by the side of the hotel came a wedding celebration, singing beautifully as they proceeded with a full band, and illuminated by a thousand bright electric lights. Having had some experience with lighting problems back in my first job at Frieze Films, I immediately looked for the source of the electricity and eventually along it came, right at the end of the procession – an elephant pulling a huge electric generator. We were loving India!

  The following morning we made our first visit to the Taj Mahal. You think you know what to expect – after all, it must be the most photographed building in the world – but nothing can prepare you for your first close-up sight of this monument. It is more breathtaking than any picture could ever capture. For the ladies of the party, Dorrit, Irina and Shakira, there was one place of pilgrimage they were determined to visit: what is now known as ‘Diana’s bench’ – the bench on which the troubled Diana sat during her last official visit as Princess of Wales. Each of them sat on it in turn while I took a picture of them, then one of the three of them together and then
a passer-by took one of all of us. Honour being satisfied, we then walked through the beautiful garden and into the building itself. Its sombre atmosphere comes as a surprise, but of course the Taj Mahal is a mausoleum to Mumtaz Mahal – the most loved wife of Shah Jahan – who died in childbirth with their fourteenth child. It was an unforgettable experience.

  From Agra, we went on to Jaipur, stopping off at temples every now and again. While the others admired the carvings, I used the opportunity to say prayers of thanks for surviving the journey to the temple and to ask for protection as we travelled on to the next. Riding in a car in India can be a shattering experience for a European . . .

  Jaipur seems to me to be exactly what India should look like: a big fortress, a grand palace and streets teeming with women in bright multi-coloured clothes and elephants everywhere. We were invited to dinner by the then chief minister of Rajasthan, Vasundhara Raje Scindia, a charming woman who invited us to call her ‘Vasu’, much to my relief. She played us a gramophone record of a chant to keep you calm in stressful situations, which consisted of a deep-voiced male singer chanting ‘Ooooooommmm’ over and over again. If you do it right, it vibrates right through your body and calms you right down. Shakira was very interested in it and seems keen for me to practise . . .