LUCIDMEDIA

A Conversation with Michael Caine (and several hundred of his closest friends)

Written by Adam A. Donaldson Monday, 14 September 2009 11:02

Michael Caine: respected actor, Academy Award winner, knight of the realm. Caine is all these things to millions of fans around the world, and many ticket holders at the Toronto International Film Festival got to share 90 minutes of his time Sunday afternoon in the Mavericks program A Conversation with Michael Caine.

This conversation with Caine was brought to TIFF with assistance from, and for the benefit of, the Brian Linahan foundation. Linehan was a respected and accomplished Canadian journalist and broadcaster that died of cancer in 2004. He interviewed Hollywood celebrities predominately, but they were never fluff pieces. Indeed, Linehan’s interviews were more like conversations; he talked to his subjects, he didn’t talk about them.

Before Caine came out along with his interviewer for this afternoon, Canada AM’s Seamus O’Regan, a clip was played of an interview Linehan did with Caine in 1981. Sitting there looking not entirely like how he portrayed Nigel Powers in 2002’s Goldmember, Caine talked about his friendship with Hollywood acting legend Cary Grant, a man who was quite tight with money according to Caine. Discussion of Grant came up off an on through the rest of the live interview, as Sir Michael ran down a couple of anecdotes about the North By Northeast star.

Sitting live in the Isabel Bader Theatre, Caine and O’Regan sat in matching leather chairs facing a full house; Caine dressed in a blue dress shirt, dark slacks and vest while O’Regan looked like he was going out for a day of boating once the show was over. The discussion started off with talk about Caine’s latest movie, Harry Brown, which premiered at TIFF the night before and is running again on Monday afternoon. The story is about a former marine that hunts down and kills the gang members responsible for the death of a friend, but Caine was quick to point out that this was not a story in the mould of the old Charles Bronson Death Wish movies. “He is a vigilante… but there was just nothing else he could do,” said Caine describing his character’s motivation.

Gang and youth violence is an escalating problem in England, Caine says, and one the things that attracted him to making Harry Brown was the subject matter and the fact that no one else was making a film like it. Caine talked about how his own perceptions on the issue shifted as he talked to the real life gang members that came out to watch the crew shoot in their neighbourhoods, including the one Caine himself grew up in. “What I realized is that 75 per cent [of the gang members] were redeemable and they had just been neglected.” Whenever they’d talk to Caine, the first question they’d ask is how he got out. The actor said he was had the two advantages of family and education, and did not have the two disadvantages of guns and drugs.

On the lighter side, Caine’s early career was discussed in a lot of detail, including how he came to choose his stage name (he was born Maurice Micklewhite), and what work was like before getting what he perceived as his big break with Zulu. “I did a lot of little movies where I was a detective that came in at the end and arrested the villain,” he joked. On his more modern work, Caine said that he feels that the remake/re-imagining of the film Sleuth will come around to a better appreciation in time because the focus of the reviews at the time of release was more concerned with Jude Law’s affair with the nanny then with giving the film any critical attention.

O’Regan turned the question over to the audience, and not surprisingly Caine was asked about advice for up and coming actors. “I never give advice to young actors because when I used to ask older actors if they had any advice, they’d say ‘yeah, give it up.’” But Caine said that he did have advice and that was to not give up. He then asked the young man his name, and he said it was Graham Grey. Caine said that he always asks because of an incident that once happened to him at a wrap party for the film Educating Rita in Hollywood, when at the end of the evening his wife got up to use the rest room and in her vacated seat immediately appeared a young 16-year-old actor also was looking for advice, to whom Caine gave the same tidbit. The actor? A young man by the name of Tom Cruise.

The 90 minutes of conversation covered a myriad of Caine’s works, from the earliest days of his career to playing the part of Batman’s butler. And to prove the potency of Caine’s engagement one of the audience members that asked a question of him near the end was none other than fellow thespian Sam Neill. Nothing quite so enjoyable as the randomness of one celebrity actor asking a serious question about acting to another, but that was just the sort of afternoon this was. As the session wore down, O’Regan shrugged and said, “I have no idea what got done here.” Me neither, but at least everyone had a good time.