The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [129]
I was at a table in the Connaught Hotel in London one Sunday evening many years ago, having dinner. We were making a film nearby and I had rushed over between takes – as the only person on the set wearing collar and tie (it was my costume, actually, not my own clothes) and therefore allowed into the place, I was eating alone. Suddenly a shadow fell across my table. I looked up and thought, ‘Oh, shit!’ It was Graham Greene and I was aware that my recent film of his book The Honorary Consul was not very good. Sitting there, looking up at him and feeling guilty anyway, he seemed very tall and threatening, but as I stood up to greet him I realised he was only my height. We introduced ourselves and shook hands, and then he said, ‘I didn’t like the film, Michael, but I did like your performance.’ He was notorious for hating the films of his books, but I think he was probably right about the film – and I was flattered by his assessment of my part in it.
The film – which was eventually and mysteriously released in America in 1983 as Beyond the Limit – also starred Richard Gere and, the first time I had worked with him, Bob Hoskins. Bob was very much ‘what you see is what you get’ from the first moment I met him, and we have gone on to make several pictures together since. Richard Gere, on the other hand, is a much more intense actor, although some of the intensity of his concentration during the making of that film may have been down to the appalling dysentery he suffered on location in Mexico. I wasn’t surprised when I walked past the café at which he and his girlfriend had eaten – I hadn’t seen a plague of rats like it since Korea. However careful you were, it was impossible to escape the bug and eventually the entire cast and crew all fell ill – all except me. I had devised the perfect preventative: before every meal I downed a straight vodka and followed it up with wine and finally a brandy (this was in my younger days, you understand). I figured that no germ could survive an onslaught like that; the problem was that it nearly finished me off, too . . .
No matter how much I drank off the set, I was always meticulously careful about never being drunk on set; I have too much professional pride for that. I was playing a drunk, too, and that, of course, requires complete sobriety. My character, the Consul, was not only a drunk, but also addicted to aspirins and I was given handfuls of dummy pills to chew. I had to chew away in the first scene, but unfortunately there had been some mix-up and I really was handed a fistful of aspirins. They had an extraordinary effect: I began to feel very odd, started swaying far more than the Consul was supposed to and eventually collapsed and had to be carried off the set. I recovered back at the hotel and was fine for the rest of the shoot. In fact I was the only member of the team who didn’t succumb to dysentery, so maybe my bizarre diet of aspirins and heavy duty evening drinking stripped my system bare of any rogue germs – I wouldn’t recommend it, though . . .
I felt that justice had not been done to the genius of Graham Greene by The Honorary Consul and so in 2001 I leapt at the chance to put things right with The Quiet American, which charts the start of American involvement in the Vietnam war. I had waited a long time for this sort of role and I was looking forward not only to a story of this quality, but also to filming in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, as it was named after the war.
It was not exactly how I had imagined it. Shakira and I arrived at the hotel at Sunday lunchtime and we were starving. I asked if we could eat in the restaurant, which I could see