Michael Caine - The Elephant to Hollywood

Batman Begins , on the other hand, was a huge success and after it came out Chris Nolan called me to suggest another project. We had developed a really great working relationship, so I was pleased to take on The Prestige , a movie about magicians in which I played the guy who actually makes the tricks. I was working with Christian Bale again, along with Hugh Jackman and Scarlett Johansson. I had never met Scarlett before, but it only took about two minutes of conversation for us to become firm friends: she’s talented, clever, funny and beautiful – what more could you want? We were standing together waiting to do a scene when I suddenly realised I was looking down at her from quite a distance. ‘How tall are you?’ I asked. She gave me a funny look for a moment and said, ‘You mean, how short am I, don’t you?’ She’s five foot four and that’s her all over: gets right to the point, with no mucking about! I had a bit of a warning for her. ‘You’re going to have big sons,’ I said. ‘How do you know?’ she asked. And I said, ‘Because my mother was five foot one and my brother and I are both six feet two…’

The Prestige is the ultimate example of cinematic sleight of hand. You watch it, and then you lose the thread and you think, what’s going on here? Chris Nolan leads you by the nose right the way through the movie and then you discover that the whole thing is a trick. It really appealed to me, because it demanded a lot from me as an actor. Of course I’d read the script and I knew what was going to happen and where all the illusions and double meanings lay, but I had to put all that to one side. As an actor you know what’s going on, but you have to remain with the character and stay with the reality of his experience. I found it very interesting, because my character was holding the centre of the picture together: my job was to explain things (or that’s what you’re supposed to think) and that was really testing.

I’ve always been fascinated by magic, first as a little boy and later by shows in Las Vegas such as Siegfried and Roy, but I’ve never been much of a magician myself. When we were on the set of Zulu , I remember that the director, Cy Endfield, turned out to be a fantastic magician. He invented card tricks – I mean, it’s hard enough to do them, let alone invent them. He used to keep us enthralled night after night. But he never revealed his secrets. And the magicians who taught Christian and Hugh the tricks they perform in The Prestige ? Well, they never really explained how they did it, either. I found it hard to learn tricks myself – both for this and for the more recent film Is Anybody There? in which I play a retired magician – because my fingers just don’t work quite as well as they used to.

From all the razzamatazz of a huge international blockbuster movie, I went back into the much quieter world of the British film industry. Well – it was quieter when I went into it, but when we released Sleuth in 2007 all hell was let loose. The picture got slammed by the critics in an almost maniacal frenzy of personal attacks on Jude Law – who played the character I had played thirty-five years previously – and its director Kenneth Branagh. I came out of it relatively unscathed, but the other two really copped it.

Perhaps one of the biggest mistakes we made with the movie was not billing it as an original work by Harold Pinter; there isn’t a single line of Anthony Shaffer’s previous script in the film. (It turned out to be Harold Pinter’s last work – which made it all the more special for me as I had been in his first play, The Room , at the Royal Court in 1960. Harold died just after the movie was released.) This Sleuth is very different from the first version. Ken was always very clear that it wasn’t a remake. It was a movie based on the plotline of Sleuth , he said, and we happened to have stolen the title, but it’s a different concept entirely. Whereas the original was set in an English country house with all those mazes, this was all minimalist marble and glass – it’s a much cooler effect. And although I’m playing the role Olivier played all those years ago opposite me, there’s a very different feel to that, too. I deliberately didn’t go back and watch the movie again – not that I could play the character the way Larry did (I didn’t want that little black hairy caterpillar stuck on my face for a start), but I didn’t want any confusion, either. In any case, the Pinter script was so different that the whole movie felt completely fresh to me.

Unlike the critics, I really admired Jude’s performance and, having often been mauled myself, I felt great sympathy for him – not that he needed it, as, like me, he has a very successful career despite the carping! I once complained to David Lean about the unfair treatment by the critics of a film I had just made and he said, ‘You have to go through the envy barriers, Michael. Once you are through the other side, they know they can’t harm you any more and the personal stuff just stops.’ I’m through that barrier now (I suspect age has something to do with it – go on long enough and everyone loves you), and Jude and Ken have gone on to even greater success. Jude’s acclaimed portrayal of Hamlet at the Donmar Warehouse in London’s West End in 2009 was, I thought, outstanding, as was Ken’s raved-about performance in Ivanov at the same venue the previous year, not to mention his BAFTA-winning performance of the Swedish cop Wallander in one of my favourite ever TV detective series.

After we had all picked ourselves up and dusted ourselves off, I was pleased to know that my next film would be back to the world of the blockbuster. When we had finished Batman Begins , I’d asked Chris Nolan what the next one would be like. He’s famous for never giving anything away, so all he said was, ‘Darker… much darker.’ And how right he was… I thought the first film was brilliant, but The Dark Knight , which finished filming in 2007, is even better – in fact I think it is one of the best action movies I’ve ever seen.

When I read the script for the first time, however, I could see a problem. Jack Nicholson had been such a fantastic Joker in the earlier Tim Burton Batman movie that it was difficult to see how anyone could follow that performance, let alone top it. But when I called Chris to ask him who he wanted to take the role and he said he wanted Heath Ledger, I immediately stopped worrying. Quite what we would get I didn’t know – but I knew it would be something original.

We were back in the big airship hanger at Cardington and the Chicago set was still standing. The unit had been shooting since February and it was the end of April by the time I joined them – I could never get used to the schedules on these enormous pictures – and in fact I actually only shot on this movie for ten days out of eight months. But for me, one of those days was unforgettable: it was the first time I came face to face with Heath Ledger’s Joker.

The scene was a cocktail party in Batman’s flat and as the butler I was masterminding the event. The flat was enormous – it was actually the lobby of a grand Chicago hotel – and I was greeting guests as they came in from the elevator. Eventually a group of guests were going to arrive and with them would be the Joker who would terrorise the whole party. I’d never met Heath before, and I didn’t have any dialogue with him during the scene, but we chatted between shots quite casually, with me trying not to let him see how disturbing I found his make-up. Any worries I might have had about him competing with Jack Nicholson vanished the moment I saw his face: it was truly horrific – it almost looked as if he was rotting from the inside. Jack was a great Joker; Heath was not a joke at all – he was a nightmare. He went in a completely different direction and I knew from the moment I saw him that it would work. In contrast to his sinister appearance, he was completely charming and so relaxed about his work that I had no inkling of what would happen when those bloody lift doors opened… Alfred thinks he’s letting friends in, but instead the Joker has killed them all. I was standing there and suddenly Heath burst out at full throttle and took over not just the party, but almost the entire film – I tell you, I was so terrified, if I’d had any lines, I’d have forgotten them…