The Elephant to Hollywood - Michael Caine [93]
The movies I worked on in 1984 were taken on, more with the new conservatory at Rectory Farmhouse in mind than their critical reception, but in November I went to New York for a film that would come to mean a great deal to me. Woody Allen was a director I had long admired and never worked with so I was very excited to be starting on the filming of Hannah and Her Sisters.
Woody comes attached to many movie myths, most of which are untrue. I’d always heard that he never gives actors the script until the day of shooting – and even then he only gives you your part. I got the script of the whole thing weeks before we began with the only proviso being that I didn’t reveal it to anyone, which seemed fair enough. And it was a great script, I could tell that straight away. Woody works on the dialogue for months before a shoot and yet his films always have a very natural atmosphere, almost as if the actors were ad-libbing, which is absolutely not the case. And as an actor himself, Woody brings something very different to the role of director – and he notices everything. Once, he stopped a take and asked me why I had not moved my hand the way I had done in the rehearsal a few minutes before. I had had no idea I had even moved my hand at all, let alone in what way, but he had spotted it, liked it and we repeated the take to get it in.
It takes a great deal of skill to achieve the levels of naturalism that Woody does. In Hannah and Her Sisters, Mia Farrow plays my wife (she was Woody’s partner at the time) and we shot the film in her apartment. It really was a family affair: some of Mia’s large brood of children played our children in the film, and when she was not required on ‘set’ (her own flat!), Mia could be found in the kitchen doling out food to the others. Being directed by Woody and doing a love scene with Mia in her own bedroom gave an added piquancy to the whole business, too – especially when I made the mistake of looking up at one point only to see Mia’s ex-husband André Previn watching the proceedings . . . As well as having her partner, children and ex-husband around, Mia’s real mother, Maureen O’Sullivan, was playing her screen mother and we were also occasionally visited by a little old man who used to wander in and try to sell us watches, who turned out to be none other than Woody’s dad. It was a bizarre and unforgettable experience!
Of course it’s hard not to look back at the filming of Hannah and Her Sisters and look for the signs of the bitter split between Woody and Mia that was to come. It seems extraordinary now to think that two such vastly different people ever got together in the first place, but at the time we all accepted the set-up and, eccentric though it was, it seemed to work. Perhaps there was one indication that not all was well. At one point in the film I have a row with Mia and say the line (scripted, remember, by Woody), ‘I hate the country and I don’t particularly like kids.’ At the first rehearsal Mia pulled a face, which puzzled me at the time – I think I now know why.
My nomination for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for Hannah and Her Sisters came in 1986. It was a surprise on two counts: first, I’d never been nominated in this category before, and second, Woody Allen was very publicly anti-Oscar. In fact he was so opposed to the whole idea of the Awards that he was always publicised playing his clarinet with his group in New York during the broadcast of the show, even when he got nominated himself. The film had also been released in February the previous year during the whole Oscar run-up, so I had assumed it had been long forgotten.
In fact, I was so sure I would not be nominated, I hadn’t even bothered to put the date of the Oscars in my diary and