Over the course the course of his career of almost half a century,
Michael Caine has, by his own estimation, been the lead in 80 to 85 movies —
this on top of nine years of near-exclusive work in the theater. So when the
actor — now 74, but still sprightly and intellectually playful — holds forth on
the differences between comedy and drama, or Hollywood then and now, it’s with
a considerable insight born of a unique combination of talent and experience. If
it seems like Caine could conduct a master class on acting, it’s not without
good reason; in fact, he already has, in the form of a best-selling DVD called Acting in Film.
Master Class on BBC2, which is the more esoteric channel,”
recalls Caine in a recent one-on-one interview, “and they asked me
for two years to do this thing on cinema. But I said, ‘I
don’t know how to tell you anything about it. I could do movie acting of a
certain standing, but I don’t know how to tell you how to do it.’ They said
well why don’t you try? So they gave me four cameras and four young actors, all
of whom were doing my roles in the theater — it was Sleuth, Educating Rita, Alfie and one other. And so
they then did their stage performance, and I had to change it to a movie
performance, and that’s what I did. That’s sold lots of copies in
and it’s just been released in
and is doing very well there. …There are some good tricks in
there that one can use.”
They’re tricks that have continued to serve Caine well throughout
his own career, even though his theater work — something a lot of younger
actors of today lack — gives him a rooting and structure that he finds
invaluable, especially in comedy. “I can’t think of how you do comedy in a
movie without the sense memory and timing of a live audience,” Caine says. “No
one can laugh in the studio. So I will deliberately rehearse in front of the
unit to see whether they laugh at certain things, and I’ll do it very loud. But
if you’re doing it for the camera and the crew laughs, then you’re doing it too
big.”
“Big” is just the opposite of Caine’s latest film, Sleuth, a slick, slippery,
intimate two-hander in which he, a cuckolded novelist, and Jude Law, a
struggling actor, wage psychological warfare against one another, all in the
pursuit of a woman. If it sounds familiar, it’s because Caine played Law’s
role, opposite Laurence Olivier, in a 1972 production from filmmaker Joseph
Mankiewicz. Directed by Kenneth Branagh, this Sleuth is a from-the-basement-up re-imagining of its
concept, rewritten and reconceived from Anthony Shaffer’s stageplay by legendary
scribe Harold Pinter. Caine, for one, is tickled pink over the chance to tackle
the role he always regarded as best anyway. “I like this part, it’s a good part,”
he says with a grin. “I don’t want to play the other one — anyway, Jude’s
prettier than I am. It would be very hard to do a story where I took a wife
away from Jude, you see what I mean?”
For the full interview feature, from FilmStew, click here. Meanwhile, for Caine’s thoughts on The Dark Knight, click here.