Michael Caine on Acting in Film

January 4, 2015 10:30 AM

Michael Caine on Acting in Film is 58 minutes from a 1987 BBC documentary in which Michael Caine teaches some actors about how to adjust their performance for the movie camera instead of the stage. Worth watching if you're interested in acting or movies, or if you just like seeing someone who's very good at his job explaining how he does it.

From the video description:

"The theatre is an operation with the scalpel, I think movie acting is an operation with the laser." Michael Caine teaches in this documentary the art of movie acting to five young actors, who perform scenes from "Alfie", "Deathtrap" and "Educating Rita". He talks about how to perform in close-ups and extreme close-ups. He warns about the continuity dangers of smoking cigarettes or fiddling with props. He talks about screen tests, special effects, men who are cavalier about your safety and speaking to someone who is off camera. The movie camera is your best friend and most attentive lover, he says, even though you invariably ignore her.

posted by FishBike (25 comments total)

This is how Michael Caine speaks.
posted by (Arsenio) Hall and (Warren) Oates at 10:34 AM on January 4, 2015 [18 favorites]

I'm not going to bury another Batman. Sorry for the derail(s) but these guys doing Caine just reduce me to tears
posted by Flashman at 10:47 AM on January 4, 2015 [16 favorites]

"Not many people know that..."
posted by leotrotsky at 10:48 AM on January 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Michael Caine, when asked about Jaws: The Revenge:

I have never seen it, but by all accounts it is terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.

posted by DirtyOldTown at 10:50 AM on January 4, 2015 [14 favorites]

Peter Serafinowicz's Michael Caine is pretty great, too.
posted by bstreep at 10:50 AM on January 4, 2015 [11 favorites]

I saw Zulu the other day (yes, I don't know how I'd avoided it this long either) and thought he was rather good when playing against type. Unfortunately in most things I've seen him in I can never quite forget that I'm watching Michael Caine Michael Caining in all his Michael Cainess.

Michael Caine.
posted by sobarel at 11:03 AM on January 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

My Cocaine.
posted by phaedon at 11:07 AM on January 4, 2015 [20 favorites]

Apparently he considers Muppet Christmas Carol one of his finest performances, and he really should. The moment when he asks "How can we endure it?" about the death of Tiny Tim and his subtly instead of cartoonishly awful Scrooge at the beginning are all fantastic, but the best moment is when Beaker gives him the scarf and he has this moment of being like "For me?" that just absolutely completely blows me away. He manages to act with Muppets in a way that is totally appropriate for the medium without being over-the-top. The whole thing is effing amazing.
posted by Mrs. Pterodactyl at 11:08 AM on January 4, 2015 [34 favorites]

Yeah, that Peter Serafinowicz bit is actually a terrific spoof of the original post here (about acting in front of a movie camera) that's worth watching.
posted by koeselitz at 11:11 AM on January 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

Somewhere I read him talking about how in Zulu he wasn't sure how to play a member of the upper class, but he had observed in footage of people like Prince Philip that they walked with their hands clasped behind them because there were always other people around them to open doors for them. So he played a lot of scenes with his hands clasped behind him as he walked. After seeing the rushes some studio head sent the director a telegram saying "Actor playing [wossname] doesn't seem to know what to do with his hands, suggest you replace him." Caine happened to see the telegram and was completely paranoid for a while...
posted by George_Spiggott at 11:13 AM on January 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

That's interesting. I was reading the character as someone putting up a good show for the benefit of the men, but not entirely buying the performance himself - hence the slightly affected stiffness and hands behind back etc - but maybe it's the actor who was doing that himself. How meta.
posted by sobarel at 11:21 AM on January 4, 2015

Don't blink.
posted by paper chromatographologist at 11:30 AM on January 4, 2015 [5 favorites]

My Kull Kane
posted by KingEdRa at 11:58 AM on January 4, 2015

Is that first actor who does the Alfie scene Adam Godley?
posted by cardboard at 12:05 PM on January 4, 2015

Tangerine.
posted by George_Spiggott at 12:32 PM on January 4, 2015 [4 favorites]

Is that first actor who does the Alfie scene Adam Godley?

Don't know, but it appears to be Celia Imrie in the middle.
posted by Grangousier at 12:50 PM on January 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

There are credits at the end, and yes, that's Celia Imrie -- who was evidently about 35 and already had film and TV credits at this point -- and no, that isn't Adam Godley.
posted by George_Spiggott at 1:19 PM on January 4, 2015

You're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!

One of the finest moments in a career filled with finest moments.
posted by quin at 1:26 PM on January 4, 2015 [1 favorite]

Brilliant shot of Sir Michael Caine rehearsing with Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. (Twitter)
posted by furtive at 1:52 PM on January 4, 2015 [5 favorites]

The whole OP talk is really fine and fascinating for those of us who know nothing about the craft of acting except what the final result looks like.
posted by localroger at 1:58 PM on January 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

It's really hard for me to watch this because of the way it dissects human action. It's like seeing the tendons inside your hand or something. Too much detail.
posted by cthuljew at 3:27 PM on January 4, 2015

It's like seeing the tendons inside your hand or something

Yes! And yet this is what actors have to do, and we take it for granted. Caine's explanation of what you have to do to hit your mark, to remember your little cues like when you puffed on the cigarette, how to look with one eye at the eye of your partner in a closeup, all such craftwork. The necessity of repeating the scene near-exactly for the long and close shots creates a whole different problem for actors used to the theatre, where you project it to the audience and they either get it or they don't.

And every actor in every movie we've ever seen has had to deal with this, yet nearly all of them have managed to make it all invisible. That is fucking impressive.
posted by localroger at 3:49 PM on January 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

Ungh, I loooove detailed breakdowns of technique like this (in a similar sense, but about theatrical acting, I've adored the "Playing Shakespeare" video series. But I haven't gotten to see movie techniques explicated nearly as often.).

I've been having a lot of discussions at work lately about how many people seem to think that movies, especially the acting component of movies, just sort of...happen. That the camera points toward the people, and they say words, and bam that's a movie. Whereas in reality, there's an enormous and complicated amount of scaffolding and work going on. It's just that most of the time, your goal is to make the scaffolding and work seem invisible and second-nature, not to let the effort show. But the fact that you don't let it show doesn't mean it doesn't exist.
posted by theatro at 6:09 PM on January 4, 2015 [2 favorites]

There's more Caine on acting from his old Siskel & Ebert special from '91. Willis and Jodie Foster are in it too. Remember when Bruce Willis was an actor?
posted by octothorpe at 8:12 PM on January 4, 2015 [3 favorites]

A neat thing to watch to see the 'scaffolding' is the behind the scenes shot of the final tracking shot of Hugo. It's flabbergasting the number of things that have to go right to get that kind of thing on camera.
posted by Green With You at 9:11 AM on January 5, 2015