The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [126]
The film was shot in Austin, the capital of Texas. Austin is a very rich town with a massive university and a lot of steak houses. The most famous one at that time was Sullivan’s and it was here that the then governor of Texas and his cronies always ate: we saw George W. Bush there every time we went. Everything in Texas is big, including the onion rings. Benjamin and I were at Sullivan’s one lunchtime and just about to start eating, when we saw a woman approaching us with a smile and a camera. It happens all the time when you are well known: not only is your meal interrupted with the photograph, but attention is drawn to your table and so everyone else thinks it’s OK to interrupt you, too. Anyway, as she came over, we both put a brave face on it and prepared to pose, but she completely took the wind out of our outraged sails by saying, ‘Can I take a picture of your onion rings? The folks back home just won’t believe how big they are!’ With a sigh of relief, we both said yes . . .
Austin is a strange town – and the citizens know it. I have a souvenir mug that says ‘Keep Austin Weird’, and they are doing a pretty good job. Sandra was going out with Bob Schneider around the time we were making the film and she took a group of us to see him play. When he came on, the young female fans at the front lifted up their blouses and flashed their breasts at him. Sandra said that they always did that to him as a greeting. It would have made my day back when I was fourteen, but it seems a pretty odd business to me now.
The weirdest thing I saw in Austin was from the window of our hotel, which was on the banks of the Colorado river. Shakira and I arrived back at the hotel late one afternoon and the receptionist told us rather mysteriously to go out onto the balcony of our room at precisely six o’clock and look at the bridge over the river on our right. We did exactly as she suggested and saw that there were crowds of other guests standing on their balconies, too, and a host of people standing below, all with cameras ready, waiting for something to happen. Not wanting to miss anything, I rushed back inside to get my camera and got back just in time to witness one of the most extraordinary sights I’ve ever seen. At dead on six o’clock, two million bats flew out from under the bridge in their nightly search for food. There’s no other word for it – weird.
My next film couldn’t have been more different. Last Orders was a tiny, low-budget British picture and although I only had a small part and the money was modest, I wanted to do it because not only was the great director Fred Schepisi involved, the cast included actors I liked and admired including Helen Mirren, Bob Hoskins and, from way back in the Sixties, David Hemmings and Tom Courtenay. Ray Winstone was playing my son, as well, so this really was the Best of British Talent. I suppose I always knew I’d end up playing my father at some point or other: my character, Jack Dodds, was a battler, just like my dad, a man who’d been born and bred in Bermondsey. But even though I was only on the set for about ten days out of the nine or so weeks of shooting, I found that playing a character like Jack Dodds alongside so many of my contemporaries, and watching Bob and Ray, the next generation of working-class actors like us, if you like, almost felt like watching the life I could have had play out on screen.
You couldn’t have had a greater contrast with that cameo role than the small part I took for the fun of it in the third Austin Powers movie, Goldmember. Again I was playing the father (well, by now I was getting used to it . . .), but this time it was the father of Mike Myers’ Austin Powers himself. Nigel Powers, the rakish super spy, gave me every chance I could ever have wanted to send up the whole business of the Sixties man about town, and I adored it. It was an honour to be invited to play a bit part which was really a tongue-in-cheek send-up of my own on-screen image.
I loved Goldmember from start to finish. Mike Myers