The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [134]
It’s always disappointing not to win, but in this case I really felt I had given my best. Philip Noyce, a great Australian director, guided the film brilliantly and Brendan Fraser, who plays the well-intentioned American, Alden Pyle, for whom my character’s mistress Phuong leaves me, gave a great performance. With them, a brilliant new actor I hadn’t come across before, Rade Šerbedžija, who played Inspector Vigot, and a script by Christopher Hampton – not to mention the quality of the original novel – I felt I had a chance of getting as close to my own standards of perfection as I possibly could; a chance to reach the limit of my own talent, a chance to improve my work. Great movie actors make themselves and the acting disappear and you only see the character. If you sit there and say – isn’t he a wonderful actor? – then he isn’t a wonderful actor at all. You shouldn’t see the actor in the movies; that’s for the theatre . . .
When I was young, I read something somewhere that urged Olympic athletes to ‘go for the dream, not for the competition’ and this line has stayed with me all my professional life. In fact I have absolutely no sense of competition whatsoever. What other actors do or don’t do has never been of the slightest interest. It’s the same with critics. I am my own most severe critic and far harder on myself than any film critic could ever be. I do find the opinions of the better and more thoughtful critics interesting – and some of them are very helpful – but so many of them have been wrong so many times that I’ve found it’s best to ignore all of them, the good and the bad! I learnt two lessons about critics, one at the beginning of my theatre career and one at the beginning of my movie career. When I was in rep, I met the local newspaper critic and asked him what experience he had – and he admitted that he had none. The person who was the latest into the office during the course of the week, he explained, got assigned the theatre review as a punishment. Mind you, remembering some of the performances – including my own – in my first rep company in Horsham, I am inclined to think the punishment wasn’t severe enough . . . The first review I read for Alfie commented that, ‘a potentially good film is ruined by the terrible performance of Michael Caine as the central character.’ After that, I decided, I was on my own – and nothing I’ve experienced since has made me change my mind!
21
Batman Begins
As I sit in my hotel room in Beverly Hills beginning this chapter, I am on standby, working on a film called Inception. I say working, but that’s not strictly true – at least not in the way I would normally think of it. I’ve got two days’ work here in Los Angeles, but with no dialogue, and I have already done one day’s shooting on this picture in London with the star of the film, Leonardo DiCaprio. It’s a tiny role, but I’m doing it as a sort of good luck gesture for Christopher Nolan, the director of Batman and I’m delighted to be doing it, because the Batman films have become for me some of the most important movies I have ever done.
Every so often, something comes along and you just know that it’s going to be a turning point. Since Goldmember and The Quiet American I had done a couple of films, including The Statement, which reunited me with old friends like Frank Finlay, with whom I had toured back in 1959 in The Long and the Short and the Tall, and Alan Bates, in his last role before he died of pancreatic cancer in 2003. Second-Hand Lions, which followed, took us back to Austin, Texas, which was still working hard to keep it weird. Although they were fun to do, neither of these movies were huge box office hits and so I returned to Surrey and my garden, content to wait.
In the end I didn’t have to wait that long. One sunny Sunday