The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [76]
For me, as ever, one of the great pleasures was having Shakira along on the shoot. In fact it turned out that it was just as well she had joined me. On the night before we began, John Huston told us the news that the girl due to play the part of Roxanne, the beautiful Arabian princess, had dropped out at the last minute. He seemed to be casting his eyes around the room rather helplessly looking for inspiration, but I couldn’t help noticing that his gaze kept returning to my beautiful wife. Shakira had noticed it, too. ‘No,’ she said firmly. ‘Absolutely not.’ John shrugged and smiled enigmatically. ‘Of course not, honey,’ he said smoothly.
I spent most of the night trying to persuade Shakira to have a go, but she was adamant and eventually I gave up. I didn’t blame her – it was not what she had signed up for and I could understand her reluctance. She turned up loyally on set, though, to watch us start shooting and I saw John go over to where she was standing, during a break. After just a moment she started smiling, after a few more minutes she was actually laughing and just before we began shooting again John announced that Shakira had agreed to play the part of Princess Roxanne. I’ve never managed to find out what he said, but I’d like to know!
Shakira was very nervous about stepping in to the role at such short notice and with so little experience, but John was a brilliant director who inspired confidence in all of us. I was probably more nervous than Shakira was herself and John eventually told me to make myself scarce during her scenes unless I was actually in them, because I was not helping matters. In the end she played her part magnificently – including a very difficult scene in which she had to go into a strange sort of fit or trance, something which would have been hard enough for a very experienced actress let alone a beginner.
In The Man Who Would Be King, John Huston lived up to every inch of his reputation as a great director. Throughout the making of the movie he addressed Sean and me as ‘Danny’ and ‘Peachy’, even off set, and he was somehow able to convey with the minimum of fuss or explanation exactly what he was looking for in a character. He didn’t tell you much, he just watched you very closely and you knew you were doing it right just by looking at him. He held the view – rare among directors – that good actors know what they are doing and should be left alone to do it if at all possible. I said to him once, ‘You don’t really tell us much, do you?’ And he said, ‘Two things, Michael. The art of good direction is casting. If you cast it right you don’t have to tell the actors what to do. Also,’ he went on, ‘you’re being paid a lot of money to do this, Michael. You should be able to get it right on your own – you don’t need me to tell you what to do!’ He only ever stopped me once mid-take, when I had to tell Christopher Plummer (who was playing Rudyard Kipling), what Danny and I were up to. Kipling warns us that what we were planning was very dangerous and Peachy replies, ‘We are not little men.’ I put the emphasis on the word ‘not’, but John held up his hand. ‘We are not little men,’ he said. I shrugged and did it his way and when we finished the take I saw he was smiling. He was right. We were not little men – under Huston’s direction we became giants.
Working with Sean was another great pleasure. He is one of the most generous and unselfish actors I have ever worked with and because we trusted each other – and because John trusted both of us – it meant that we could risk some improvisation and experiment, which I think paid off in the finished film. Off the set, Sean and I were not seeing as much of each other as you might have thought. He was a fanatical golfer – he’d had to learn the game for the James Bond movie Goldfinger where there’s a scene in which James Bond and the arch-villain Goldfinger have to play golf with each other – and he was