The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [136]
Unlike most blockbuster movies these days, Chris shot most of the amazing stunts in the film not with CGI but with real stuntmen because he wanted a sense of reality. So in our movie, when Batman flies, a hook explodes from his sleeve and fixes on a roof and a wire pulls him up. It imparts a sense of the possible rather than being pure fantasy – and it really works. Of course there is CGI – the scene where Christian and I are filmed with a million bats, for instance – but most of the special effects are real.
For the exterior shots we travelled to Chicago. Chris had chosen to film Gotham City in Chicago because although the skyline is as spectacular as New York’s, it’s not quite as well known. Shakira and I had never been to Chicago and we absolutely loved it. We celebrated my birthday there, just the two of us, and had a fantastic meal at Sullivan’s Steak House. We enjoyed every minute of it – especially the birthday special. They bring the biggest slice of chocolate cake you have ever seen with a candle on top and then all the waiters come over to sing ‘Happy Birthday’. But this is a big and very busy restaurant and so they cut the song short: ‘Happy B’day to you’, and sing it in record time – I think the whole thing took less than ten seconds before they rushed back to work!
When I finally got to see the finished film, it was every bit as good as I’d hoped. And then – as always happens – I got sent out on the publicity trail. It kicked off at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills and we did what is known as ‘round tables’, in which the cast is split up into pairs and sent from room to room to do twenty-minute interviews with a dozen or so journalists. I was paired with Katie Holmes, which was great as we had played scenes together and got to know each other pretty well. We were well used to the formula and so we did what we had to do and it seemed to go down OK. We had just finished and were walking out of the press room together – when suddenly, outside in the corridor, Tom Cruise appeared. I couldn’t work out what on earth he was doing there – but Katie knew all right and she rushed into his arms. I stood there dumbfounded, with the press all crowded behind me. ‘We’re in love,’ Tom announced to the throng. ‘I can see that,’ I said – and that was the first time the news of the relationship broke. I had been with Katie on the movie, been with her on the publicity tour and she had never let on – not for a minute. After that, Tom joined Katie on the publicity tour in New York, London and Paris. They had a ball, we had a ball, but the only problem was that they sometimes got more attention than the movie . . .
After my new outing as a butler, I returned to the part I was beginning to make my own: the father. I played Nicole Kidman’s father in Bewitched and then went on to play Nicolas Cage’s father in The Weather Man. Neither movie was a big hit – and although I was a bit miffed not to see my name on the poster for Bewitched, when I saw the dire reviews it got I was very relieved. Of course it didn’t start out like that. The director, Nora Ephron, had directed Sleepless in Seattle and When Harry Met Sally. On the first Sunday evening we got together she cooked a great chicken curry for all the cast, which was a first time experience for me from a Hollywood director . . . We shot the movie in the old David O. Selznick studio in Los Angeles and it was great to be back in Beverly Hills, and even greater to be working with the person who was responsible for bringing me there in the first place, Shirley Maclaine. It all seemed to augur so well . . . Why it didn’t work is one of those great movie mysteries – although watching it the other day it did occur to me that brilliant though both Nicole and Will Ferrell are individually, there’s just no chemistry between them.
Batman Begins, on the other hand,