The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [139]
When I’d finished my bit on the film, I packed up and went home to enjoy the rest of the summer of 2007. I knew work was continuing on the movie, but I couldn’t have been more shocked to hear the following January that Heath had died of an accidental drugs overdose. It was the most terrible waste not only of a great talent, but of a gentle and thoughtful person. It was hard to watch the finished film and see all the vitality that Heath exudes, knowing that he was dead, and inevitably much of the publicity surrounding the premiere in July 2008 was centred on the tragedy of his death – try as we might to steer journalists away from that.
It was a great moment when Heath won a posthumous Oscar for Best Supporting Actor. We had all predicted he would win it, right from his first scenes, and it wasn’t just me – everyone on the unit thought he deserved it. It was a stand-out performance – the opening and closing monologues alone, let alone all the other scenes – and I thought it was very important for his family as well. I was a bit surprised that neither the film itself nor Chris Nolan were even nominated for an Academy Award, though, because The Dark Knight is an extraordinary piece of film-making. For an action movie it has great depth and real drama – and a serious message, if you want to find it. It’s got great comic moments, too – even Heath, who is playing a complete homicidal psychopath, gets laughs. At one point the Joker sees Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Heath just reaches up and very delicately, almost in a feminine way, brushes back a couple of strands of his stringy hair: it’s genius. My butler gets laughs, too, and I’ve been discovered by a whole new set of teenage fans who often stop me in the street, but there’s real tenderness there between Alfred and Bruce Wayne. It’s back to that father figure again: I’ve gone from Alfie to Alfred, so I guess you could say I’ve become more dignified over the years!
Taking on the role of an old man with Alzheimer’s might not be everybody’s idea of dignified, but Is Anybody There? was one of those challenges I couldn’t resist. When I get a script, one of the things I ask myself is: is this more difficult to do than the last one? And this part certainly was. I drew on my experience of Doug Hayward’s dementia and so it was very sad for me – in fact I think it’s the saddest film I’ve ever made. Shakira didn’t like it at all because my character actually died of dementia; we persuaded Natasha who was pregnant at the time not to see it because we thought it would upset her. My family were reacting like that because it was me lying in that hospital bed, but what I completely forgot to factor in was how harrowing it would also be for an audience to watch – so it didn’t exactly do Star Wars numbers at the box office. But it got great critical attention and I’m proud to have done it.
22
Back to the Elephant
I once saw a documentary in which scientists put several hundred rats in a very big comfortable roomy nest and fed them well. The rats all lived very happily alongside each other until the scientists gradually started to decrease the size of the nest, so that the rats had less space. The rats began to show aggression; that was followed by fights – followed by killings. Sound familiar? It does to me. It describes the pattern of social housing in this country, which produces the most violent sections of our society – and it’s the section that I came from.
In 2009 I went back to my roots and the soil was so shallow, there seemed little chance of it ever producing a healthy plant. The reason I went was a film called Harry Brown and it was a movie I just had to do. We filmed on location on a massive council estate that was due for demolition, back at the Elephant and Castle. It’s my home patch and we were working just round the corner from a mural depicting Charlie Chaplin and me (not that I’d compare myself with the great man, it’s just that we came