Wednesday, Aug 20, 2008
Michael Caine talks about playing an aging Nazi in "The Statement," why he hates nude scenes, what he learned from Laurence Olivier, and whether he'll ever win that best-actor Oscar he wants.
Dec 15, 2003 | Over the years, Michael Caine has played everyone from Cockney womanizers to Oxford professors to New England doctors -- and, heck, he's even played Austin Powers' father -- but in Norman Jewison's "The Statement," this great man of the modern screen plays something he's never played before: a French Nazi.
Even Caine admits that the role was "a bit of a stretch" for him. But Jewison says that as soon as he read the script, he thought of Caine for the role of Pierre Brossard, an old religious zealot on the run from what appears to be a group of Canadian Jews hoping to kill him to avenge the cold-blooded murder of seven Jews during World War II. (Tilda Swinton and Jeremy Northam costar as a judge and a colonel, respectively, who are trying to track Caine down before his would-be murderers do.)
"I immediately felt that he was the only one to play this, because he's such a confident actor," Jewison says. "Brossard is not an important man. The people manipulating him are important, but he himself is a failed individual. Bigoted people, who hate people they don't even know, are very small people. They're very sad. And I knew Michael was someone who could really bring that out."
Caine recently sat down with Salon at a New York hotel to discuss his role in "The Statement," his long acting career, his rocky relationship with the British press, his knighthood and, oh yes, his aversion to nudity -- his own or other people's.
I was just talking to Norman Jewison about you ...
Hello! Did he say lots of bad stuff?
He said great stuff. He was talking about your courage in choosing this role.
It wasn't particularly courageous. What it is, is it's my fascination with doing tougher and tougher work and testing myself. Because, I mean, I can play a Cockney gangster in my sleep, you know. But to play a French Nazi, that's a bit of a stretch. It's not exactly my normal, everyday life. And so I give myself these difficulties and then I have little treats, like I play Austin Powers' father or do "Miss Congeniality" or Batman's guardian [i.e., Bruce Wayne's butler Alfred], which is my next thing. I think to keep audiences interested over the period of time that I've managed to, I first of all have to interest myself. I can't just get up and say, "Oh, I'll churn out this same old boring thing, I'll get a few quid, I'll make some money and I'll go home."
You know, I'm 70 years old. I have to get up at 6 o'clock in the morning and go do a load of rubbish with a load of people I don't like. I do it to stimulate myself. One of the next things I'll do next year is a remake of a picture I did called "Sleuth" with Laurence Olivier. I'm going to do that with Jude Law. And I'm going to play Olivier's part, obviously. I'm the older man. That's what I do. It's a challenge. Everything's a challenge, and I like it.
So you chose to play Brossard because it was something you hadn't done before?
Well, and also I think it was the message, as it were, in "The Statement." This whole generation of young people, I think, every now and then, we should give them a little jog and a reminder about things. I don't think it hurts. Because, you know, I was talking to some of my youngest daughter's young friends, and I mentioned Bette Davis, and no one had ever heard of her. It's like, wait a minute. You have to be aware that it all goes by and you think everybody knows what's going on and they don't.
Plus, you have a very good script from a very good book and, from a movie point of view, a chase-thriller in a way. The only thing is, it's the slowest chase in the world with an old guy in a rental car. [Laughs.] It's a chase at 48 miles an hour!
Yes, it is sort of slo-mo for a chase movie. What about how unsympathetic Brossard is? Obviously, you've played all sorts of different characters. Is it more interesting to play an unlikable character?
It's more interesting, but it's also more difficult. I've never played someone who I've disliked so much. It's usually a bit of gangster who's a bit funny and sometimes his villainy is amusing, you know? There's always a bit of a funny side to everybody. This is the first person I have ever played to whom there is no funny side whatsoever. There's not a laugh, a titter; there's nothing. He's just totally unlikable. And my only fear was that, being as it's me, I would engender some kind of sympathy for a character like this. I think people like him are pathetic and sad and so that's what I made him.
But a couple of people I talked to said, "Well, I know he's a scumbag, but I kind of felt sorry for him." And I said, "Well, it's because I made him pathetic. Also, he's a fugitive, on his own, and it's a natural human instinct to go with the loner being hunted. Plus, he was sick; he had a heart condition." You just take the "sympa" off, and he's pathetic. He's pathetic without sympathy.
Plus, he kicked the dog. Killing people is one thing, but kick a dog and the audience will never forgive you.
That's the thing. He kills these people and they go, "Boy, what a scumbag." And then he kicks a dog and "Jesus! What a --! How terrible!"
Do you feel like you learned anything about yourself making this film?
I got a surprise that I've never had before in a movie. Because I disliked the character so much, I developed a kind of selective amnesia. At the end of each day, I couldn't remember what I'd done with it. At the beginning of the day, I knew exactly what I was going to do, obviously, as one would. But I couldn't remember. And at the end of the picture, I couldn't remember any of the performance at all. I think I tried to switch myself off. I think there was a sort of guilt in having played it at all, you know? And then I went and saw the movie, and I realized for the first time in my life what it's like for someone to sit there and watch Michael Caine on screen doing something.
Because I've never done that. I always knew what was coming. You know, you usually say, "Well, there was this scene where I did this and I wish I had done that." This time, I didn't know what was coming, couldn't remember a single thing. And I was very happy because I never saw me. All I ever saw was Brossard. I saw the character and that was it. So I was happy with what I had done. He worked. You believed he was who he was, and that's all I can do as an actor.
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