The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [142]
Harry Brown was a real wake-up call for me and I wanted it to be a wake-up call for others, too. I had gone into the film thinking that we should just lock up these violent offenders and throw away the key, but I completely changed my mind during the course of it. Prison doesn’t solve the problems that come with the sorts of backgrounds these kids come from. The fact is that we are failing them. If they are brought up with violence they have no option but to join a gang – most of them join for protection, not because they are naturally violent themselves. I did it myself when I was their age, but although we were rough and tough, compared with the gangs now we were like Mary Poppins. In my day it was alcohol and fights, not drugs, guns and knives.
When it came out, some critics compared Harry Brown with Death Wish, because the protagonists in both films end up killing the killers of someone close to them. That wasn’t our intention, and it’s not how I see it at all. Our film is about violence, but it never celebrates violence; Harry Brown never becomes a willing perpetrator, he always remains a victim, and that was very important to me. It works because it’s about a fantasy that I think everyone shares to some extent, of being able to scare the people who scare you – and that is what daily life is like on some of these estates.
Apart from Clubland, which gave me something to aim for, I think I was also helped to a certain extent by national service. I wouldn’t recommend the two years I had to put up with, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend being sent into combat as I was but, as I’ve said before, I do think that six months or so in a disciplined environment – particularly if there’s some training and education involved – would help. All the members of the gang I was in had to do our national service and we all emerged at the end of it very different. I was on an aeroplane once and the pilot came out and introduced himself and it was a guy I’d grown up with. ‘You can’t be a pilot,’ I said. ‘You’re even stupider than I am! I couldn’t fly a plane – how the hell can you manage it?’ And he said, ‘Well, you know, they sent me to flying school.’ When we were kids he was in the same Teddy Boy gang as me, on the street.
It was for this reason that I backed the new Prime Minister David Cameron’s proposal for a National Citizen’s Service, which would be a two-month summer programme for sixteen-year-olds. I’m not a party political animal at all – I’ve voted Labour and I’ve voted Conservative in the past – but I was impressed by Cameron’s pledge to give young people like the ones I met round the Elephant a second chance. I felt I did have a rapport with those kids, and I felt my own history very strongly when I walked round the area I came from, and I wanted to put something back. I’ll be watching carefully how the plans develop – because with the downturn in the economy, these kids are going to need all the help they can get.
To me, it’s important, always, to remember where you came from. Walking round the Elephant after the last day of filming on Harry Brown, I felt no great sense of closure, just a sense of satisfaction that I had made it and gone from there to Hollywood – the place I had always dreamed of. I no longer want to make movies back to back as I did in my younger, hungrier days – there were eighteen months between finishing Is Anybody There? and Harry Brown – but the business still fascinates me as