Michael Caine

Seasoned actor Michael Caine draws not only on decades of experience, but also (his words) his lower class, gang-turned-military upbringing for his role as Harry Brown in the film of the same name.

Set in Elephant And Castle in London, the actual location where Caine grew up, war veteran Harry Brown watches his neighborhood become one of England’s most dangerous areas where drug-fueled gangs run rife. Harry finds himself no longer able to look away when street violence hits close to home and Harry finds himself with nothing to lose.

Moviehole’s Tim Johnson sat down with the film’s star in New York to talk ”Harry Brown”, which is obviously close to the screen legend’s heart.

What was making such a violent, disturbing film like?

M: It’s very funny because, I never saw it as a violent film. I saw it as a film about violence, which I hate, and I’m not. And the whole movie was made against violence. If you want a message on it, I made the picture because it was a very good part for me, a wonderful script and I thought it would make a great thriller. But I wouldn’t have made it just for that, not playing the vigilante. the vigilante is there as a warning to whoever is in charge in England, I’m not quite sure most of the time, probably nobody, that if you don’t do something about the whole section of young people who you’ve left to rot, this is what’s going to happen to you. And it’s especially interest me because I come from that whole section of people, who’ve been left to rot. Except it didn’t work with me.

And you went to the military, so I’m sure that helped a lot?

M: Yeah, eighteen I went to the military, and I don’t want to be one of those old guys, ‘stick ’em all in the army’ and all that. But I do believe that six months, not two years like I did and no combat like I did. No combat just six months of discipline and learning to serve your country. You learn weaponry to defend your country; you never use it on anybody. You come out and you’re a different person, I absolutely promise you, and you’re a better person. All my gang, I was in a gang we all went in and we all came out absolutely differently. I remember one of them, I was on an airplane and he came out and he said, ‘I’m the pilot’ and I said, ‘You can’t be the pilot! You’re more stupid than I am!’ I said, ‘I couldn’t fly a plane, how the hell did you manage it?’ He said, ‘Well, I went to flying school’. And before that he was just like all of us, you know, a gang on the street, we were what they used to call, Teddy Boys. We had thick crepe soled shoes and hair in a certain way because it was called a ‘DA’. It looked like a duck’s arse, that’s why it was called a DA. And we were quite rough, but compared with today’s gangs, we were like Mary Poppins, because our drug was alcohol, and fought with our fists, but we were only together as a gang out of self defense, we never wanted to attack anyone.

Now you grew up in the area that the film…

M: Exactly. Where those flats at the entrance to those apartments, there is a mural. To me.

How was it going back there and seeing how it had changed after all those years?

M: Well it was scary, because I hadn’t realized quite how dangerous it all was. Because now, instead of alcohol and a fist fight and getting a broken nose, get shot or knifed and you get people who have no idea what they’re doing because they’re so drugged up to the eyeballs, you could say, ‘Well they’d never do that’ and of course they do because you don’t know they’re high. So, it was extremely dangerous and one of the minor, silly things is we would do daylight shots, with dialogue and it became a Nuisance because every time we started a shot, there was a police siren. All day long, and we became aware in the daylight on a sunny Wednesday afternoon, we had to keep reshooting because of the police sirens.

Were you ever intimidated, because you used the real kids from the area in the film?

M: No, the reason for that is, you must remember to them, I am them. I’m the same. I can talk to them like nobody else could talk, because they know I’m not going to talk to the police about anything. So I am them. And that’s why I became more charitable towards them because I understood, 80 percent of all gangs including yours, the most terrible gang here that you can think of, 80 percent are not there to do anybody any harm. They’re there so that nobody does them any harm. They’re there for self protection. And that’s the people you’ve got to rely on to educate and get them out of the system.

Because there’s a vicious cycle isn’t there? This film shows that.

M: Oh blimey, yeah.

What do you see as the solution? What could the government do at this point?

M: I see it as education. It’s education. If you think, it’s sort of kind of class system, even in America it’s the same, but in England it’s a lower class. Which had been white, and is now black or colored. Here you had a lower class of black. So you had the class thing stuck there. In England, it doesn’t matter what you are, if you’re lower class it doesn’t matter, you could be red, white and blue. I know that because I am lower class. You’ve got to get over that and educate these people. You say, ‘You going to educate this guy, who’s got tattoos up to here, and he’s got two knives in his pocket? What are you going to do, take him to school?’ You’ve got to break down the system, and start with the younger ones.

There isn’t really a breaking of the class system in England is there? Paul McCartney even still considers himself a working class lad.

M: Yeah, me too, as you heard me just say. That’s because the upper class in England is useless. So we don’t want to belong to them. So we are our own kind. We will forever be working class because that’s how we think.

Is there a pride in that?

M: Yes, incredible.. And one of the things of that is that people like myself and McCartney, it was the sixties when we just said to society, ‘Shove it up, somewhere. This is how it’s going to be’. The sixties was started by very mundane reasons. One of them being Lord Reith, wouldn’t let the BBC, which was the only radio program we had, play pop music. So we had to listen to the American forces network in Germany and Luxemburg. And we said, ‘Wait a minute, what is this?’ And so there were all these sort of prejudices against a whole group, and then you had a whole load of working class guys like myself, and as we said, Paul McCartney came up and said, ‘This is not going to be like that. So we told everybody to shove it, and we created our own society. But the reason we call ourselves working class is because we don’t want to be anything else. Being upper class is not a rise in the system. It’s probably a downward step, if you understand the meaning.

Is this film shining a new light on the problem, and do you feel a change coming?

M: Yes, it’s worked in some areas. Like, for instance the London Times called it odious. And you go, that’s a pity, because the film was actually aimed at you, because you don’t seem to know it’s there. And if you’re reading the London Times you’re probably educated and in some position of authority, and you could get in to some power and do something about this, and as you are that strata society and the film is odious, you must take responsibility for the smell. Because you created the cesspit it’s coming from. So that’s why, I was particularly upset, not because of the review, I couldn’t care about what they said, but because we hadn’t got through to them. But we did get through to a lot of other people.

You’ve worked with some amazing filmmakers, and this was director Daniel Barber’s first film. What was he like to work with?

M: He was fabulous. He did a picture called The Tonto Woman. It was a short movie, and he got an Oscar nomination for that, and I saw that and I thought, ‘This guy knows exactly what he’s doing’. And then when we talked he said to me, ‘This is a Western isn’t it?’ You know, the guy going out to get the villains. I said, ‘in a way, yeah’. And I noticed with him, and it came sort of to fruition in the movie. I know he’s a movie director, but he has incredible use of sound. And he’s a young, he’s done lots of commercials, and what I like about him, was that he knew all the lenses and things, he knew the stuff you could do, rather than an old time director, no matter how great, but this guy knew every technologies all over the shop. He’s got it in there. And I think he’s going to be a very big director. He’s a wonderful young guy.

Do you think that community that the film is based on, will be affected by the film?

M: I think so. But the community itself there, will say, ‘Well we know about that, because those two drug guys live next door’. It’s aimed basically at the middle class and upper class, who of necessity, run the country.

Have you had any response from the lower class about the movie?

M: Yeah, I was told by a reporter, he asked me, ‘Have you seen this film with the public?’ and I said no. He said, ‘Every time we shoot someone they cheer’. So that’s the response on the people in the Elephant and the Castle.

Emily’s character seemed really fragile, even at the beginning.

M: Yeah, I thought it was a very courageous thing. Instead of casting some great big butch girl who could throw you out the window, you put Emily in there.

Do police come in from London and have that feeling of being overwhelmed?

M: I remember I was walking along, in the area, just going for a stroll around and looking between takes and there was a young couple coming along, and she was very pretty young and they had their arm around each other. And they got to me and went, ‘Can we have your autograph?’ and I said yes. And they both said, ‘We’re undercover police’. And she looked just like Emily. Because I had been a bit worried, I thought, I would have expected someone a bit more, not lesbian, but butch you know? As the mayor of Los Angeles said, ‘With more upper shoulder strength’. He got into trouble for that one. But what Emily had, she’s a wonderful actress, and she had this very sensitive quality, quite thin, not a robust girl.

She looked like she was going to break the whole time.

M: And that was the thing, she mixed this icy policeman’s thing, with a tremendous tenderness for this old man who was crumbling before her eyes. And that’s what I thought was so wonderful about it, because when Daniel said Emily, who I’ve known since she was born, because her father John Mortimer was a friend of mine, I thought, ‘I don’t wonder if Emily’s a bit small for this’. But she turned out very big, I thought she was excellent.

Harry was very reluctant to discuss his military background…

M: Soldiers never do. Combat soldiers don’t. If you hear a guy shooting his mouth off about combat and all that, he’s never been in combat.

Is it hard to put that behind you and put that in a box?

M: Wasn’t for me. The day I left the army, I specialized in cowardice and won seven medals. I think they were going to give me a pair of running shoes, some Nikes.

Did you do any weapons training for the film?

M: No, I knew all that. If you gave me a really modern gun, I would have said, ‘Where’s the safety catch’, but I really know weapons.

It wasn’t mentioned what Harry did in the army directly, did you prepare that in Harry’s story? Was he a sniper?

M: No he wasn’t a sniper because he was in the squad. Because when he described watching his friend die, the sniper wouldn’t be there. He would just be an ordinary infantry member, but he wasn’t a soldier, like me, he was a real one. He was a marine; I mean they had to teach me that stab move when the guy came out. A guy came from the army and taught me how to do that. I wouldn’t learn that as an ordinary British soldier, you fired at anybody that moved and ran.

How did you as an actor step in to some of the heavier, emotional scenes involving Harry prepared?

M: I’m a Stanislavski actor, and it doesn’t mean you mumble and scratch your arse all the time. But I’m a method actor. And the basis, there’s a couple of things, Stanislavski is, the rehearsal is the work, and the performance is the relaxation. And the other thing is sense memory. You pick for instance, if you want to cry, I can do it like that. Because I pick one thing from my memory that I remember and I will go, and I’ve never told anyone what it is. Even my wife doesn’t know what it is. But I can cry, as you saw me do it in the movie. I just did it, straight like that. But what you have to remember, if you’re an actor, and a male actor, is men do not cry. They will do anything but cry. They stop themselves crying and eventually they do cry if it’s bad enough. And so that’s how you know with a man, how bad it is for him. because he would have stopped himself because, ‘I’m very butch and I don’t cry, that’s sissy, that’s feminine’. Men always cry like that, they don’t cry and in the end they do. And if they do, then it’s overwhelming. Which is what I did and then I blew the whole thing out.

So you have taken acting classes to learn the Stanislavski method?

M: No, I never took any acting classes. Where I learned that, I went to Joan Littlewood’s Theater Workshop as an actor in plays, and she taught Stanislavski during rehearsal and taught me in particular. She said something rather telling for me, she was communist and it was all very communist, in group theater, in Russian and Stanislavski. But she eventually fired me. And the reason she fired me, and I had no idea what she was talking about, she said, ‘This is a group theater Michael. We will have none of this star nonsense here. You’re fired’. I said I’m in the group, what am I doing? She, said, ‘I know what you’re doing’. But I didn’t, and that’s what she said to me. She fired me. But before she fired me, I learnt about those things from Stanislavski.

How has Hollywood changed in your five decades of making movies?

M: Hollywood has for me, has stayed the same, in as much as all the myths of Hollywood, and I’ll give you some for instances, like ‘You’re only as good as your last picture. Your friends will dump you if you fail. It’s full of false friends. Don’t trust anyone’. I have in Hollywood a group of friends who I trust with my life, who I’ve had for forty years and whether I’ve made a flop picture or a successful one, they’ve not changed anything in the slightest about them. And they are completely sincere and would do anything for me. And so I have the highest regard for Hollywood. Also, I was writing my first biography, and I was so pro-Hollywood, I thought to myself, ‘Bloody hell, I sound like I’m kissing arse here. I better do something negative about Hollywood. And I sat there and I thought I know what I’ll do negative about Hollywood, divorce!’ And I went to write about divorce, and all my Hollywood friends had been married to the same woman longer than I had. So I couldn’t write about divorce. You know, Billy Wild, Gregory Peck, Frank Sinatra, all these people, they’d all been married for years. And I was going to do Hollywood about divorce. So I had to can it. So, I’m very pro-Hollywood. It can be tough, but it’s only tough if you haven’t prepared yourself. If you’ve never done an acting lesson, never done any acting, and you go to Hollywood and say, ‘I’m going to be a star’, whether you’re male or female, you’re going to have to sleep with someone along the way to get there. Take my word for it, and there’s also one Monday morning when some director’s going to say, action and you’re going to go, ‘Oh shit. What do I do now?’

Thank you Michael, you’re a legend and congratulations on a stellar performance.