Michael Caine is not a mincer of words. “When they said they wanted to remake
Sleuth, my first thought was, ‘Why make it at all?’ ” Caine, 74, has already
been the victim of three remakes of his famous films. Two were disasters –
Alfie, three years ago, and Sylvester Stallone’s Get Carter – though the
update of The Italian Job was an enjoyable affair. “I do not like remakes,”
Caine says. “It shows a lack of imagination. But once I saw the script for
Sleuth, I realised it wasn’t a remake at all. It’s a brand-new movie.”
The screenplay is by Harold Pinter, who insists he has seen neither the
original play by Anthony Shaffer nor the 1972 film. This time, Caine plays
the Laurence Olivier role, with Jude Law taking on Caine’s old character, as
he did with Alfie. He was also co-producer and the inspiration behind the
remake, persuading Kenneth Branagh to direct. But it was not until Caine
agreed to appear that financial backing was put in place. “We stole the
title and plot, and little else,” he says. “I thought about it, and ‘Why?’
eventually changed to ‘Why not?’ ” So, Caine now plays the bestselling
detective author Andrew Wyke, confronted by Law’s struggling actor, Milo
Tindle, who arrives at Wyke’s house because he is having an affair with the
writer’s wife, and she wants a divorce. As in the original, Tindle becomes
the victim of a cruel cat-and-mouse game in the first act. He returns,
pretending to be a police officer, to turn the tables on Wyke. The third act
is a standoff to the bitter end. The difference this time is that Wyke is a
gadget freak, living in a minimalist mansion kitted out in leather and
steel. The language is harder, the actions are more brusque, and nearly an
hour has been sliced away. “My character just says, ‘I hear you are f***ing
my wife,’ ” Caine says. “It sets the tone.” The film was made in record
time, too. “The first one took 16½ weeks,” he says. “This one took four or
five.” His unblinking blue eyes give a smile behind the gold-rimmed glasses.
“I am still trying to figure out what we did with those extra 12 weeks on
the first film.”
Caine is in relaxed mood. His dangerous and acerbic performance has drawn
complimentary reviews at film festivals in Venice and Toronto. He has the
knighthood and two Oscars (for Hannah and Her Sisters and The Cider House
Rules), like Olivier all those years ago. He is officially Britain’s biggest
film star, in terms of box-office success and international fame. He does
not, at long last, have anything to prove to doubting critics.
We meet in London, where he is about to start yet another film, Is There
Anybody There?, which I calculate to be his 100th since his breakthrough in
1964’s Zulu. He looks remarkably sleek for a man in his mid-seventies, in
black bomber jacket and jeans. The stories, as ever, roll forth, some
familiar, though he has a knack of making them sound freshly minted.
There are new tales, too, prompted by talk of Sleuth and its history. Caine is
typically blunt about those memories. “I first knew Pinter as an actor who
called himself David Baron, 50 years ago,” he says. “He then changed his
name back to Harold Pinter and wrote his first play, The Room. I was in it
at the Royal Court. He became this famous writer, and I was one of his
biggest fans. He carried on writing for half a century – and never offered
me another bloody thing.” What was Pinter like in those days? “The same as
now – irascible,” he says. “You could never change a line. In The Room, I
played an ordinary working-class husband. A black man comes into his house,
with a white walking stick. I look up, take the stick off him and beat him
to death. In rehearsals, I said, ‘I can’t quite understand this. Why do I
beat him to death?’ And Pinter says, ‘How the hell do I know?’ ” Nothing has
changed. Branagh tactfully remarks: “Several times in rehearsals, I had to
suggest things to Harold that he probably was not thrilled about. He will
say so with all the vigorous and sometimes adversarial intellect at his
disposal. When he makes his point, he makes it with some intensity.”
Caine’s earlier encounter with Pinter came at a low point in his life. He was
an unknown, separated from his wife, the actress Patricia Haines, and baby
daughter; his mother had had to give him a loan to prevent him going to jail
for nonpayment of support. Then his first film role, in A Hill in Korea, was
a disaster. His agent sacked him. “I moved in with my best friend, Paul
Challen, another out-of-work actor,” he recalls. “We shared a bedsit in
Notting Hill, a terrible place at the time – not only a dump, but dangerous.
You had to walk around in twos and threes. When we were in work, we earned
about £5 a week.”
By the time he was hired for Sleuth, he had transformed himself into one of
Britain’s biggest stars, with Zulu, Alfie, The Ipcress File, Funeral in
Berlin, The Italian Job and Get Carter under his belt. “It counted for
nothing,” he recalls. “I was still this young cockney upstart, with Olivier,
then, at 65, the greatest actor in the world. People were saying, ‘He will
eat you alive.’ I was 39, the great years of the 1960s were over, and there
were plenty, including a lot of posh film critics, ready to see me fall flat
on my arse. So I was nervous. Olivier had been a big star since I was a kid.
He had written me a note a couple of weeks before we started filming, saying
I could call him ‘Larry’.”
When they met to start rehearsals at Pinewood studios, Olivier was warm and
friendly. “He was physically smaller than I thought he would be, but he had
a way of advancing towards you, rather than walking,” he recalls. “And I was
amazed at the energy he put into rehearsals. He said, ‘Always do the part
out loud, as if you are playing it, even the very first time you read the
script.’ ” But when filming started, Olivier pulled every actor’s trick in
the book. “He would place himself in the best possible location for a scene,
then leave me to somehow act around him, in a very theatrical way,” Caine
recalls. “If I had a line that interfered with one of his moves, he would
just tell the director, Joseph Mankiewicz, to cut it. In a shot that was
supposed to be 50-50 on both of us, he pulled me around so you would only
see the side of my face.”
Olivier also kept forgetting his lines. “He was going through a lot,” Caine
explains. “He had spent years building up the National Theatre. Then, after
all the fund-raising and building of the theatre, he was thrown out. He was
on Valium because he was so upset. One of the side effects is memory loss.”
Caine admits that he made a complaint to the director about Olivier’s attempts
to upstage him. “He told me not to lose sleep about it. He said, ‘Every time
Larry has suggested I cut one of your lines, I have told him I will cut it
in editing. Don’t worry, I will look after you.’ And he did.”
Yet Olivier grew more appreciative of Caine. “After one particular scene,” he
recalls, “he put his arm around my shoulder and said, ‘When we started on
this, I thought of you as a stooge. I now see I have a partner.’ He just
took a little time to get used to me.” The breakthrough came when Olivier
discovered Caine had a television in his dressing room. “He said, ‘How did
you get that?’ I told him, ‘I asked for it.’ He would then join me to watch
Wimbledon, and we got on famously. There was no messing around after that.”
What, if anything, did he learn from Olivier? “Nothing specific, just how to
take care of myself,” he says. “I have never given anyone advice, either. I
had plenty in the past. It was always, ‘Give up.’ Free advice is usually
worth nothing.”
He doesn’t say whether he gave Law advice for Alfie, though he comments on the
differences between the two films. “My Alfie had to ask, ‘What’s it all
about?’ He was a bit stupid. Jude’s Alfie was too smart, too clever by half,
as they say. I can understand why he said yes to the part. It seemed like a
good idea at the time – an actor’s life is full of things like that.” Caine
is also circumspect about his younger co-star’s personal wobbles. “I went
through a stage of drinking two bottles of vodka a day and going out on the
town most nights,” he says. “I had a flat in Grosvenor Square and was doing
all the things a bachelor around town was supposed to do.” It all stopped
shortly before Sleuth began. He had just met Shak-ira Baksh, and had decided
to move with her to Windsor, where he got himself fit through gardening.
They married in Las Vegas, shortly after the release of Sleuth.
“It was like a test coming through that movie, both during and afterwards,” he
reflects. “I treated the whole thing as a brand-new beginning. It is
ridiculous to say I no longer had to worry about the next part – you always
have to worry – but I thought everything would work out fine.”
Caine has made jokes, in the past, about checking a film’s exotic location
before its script, but that is exactly what they are: jokes at his own
expense. He’s covered up a catalogue of hurtful remarks about his accent,
his acting and his talent. “I never take anything for granted,” he says. “At
Venice, the audience gave Sleuth a 7½minute standing ovation. I was next to
the festival director, and asked, ‘How long do I stand here?’ He said, ‘Stay
where you are; it may never happen to you again.’ ”
Sleuth is released on Friday
