The 2010 cult film inspired by a “classic Michael Caine technique”
Michael Caine is an undisputed British cinema icon, although this success didn’t happen overnight. Instead, he chipped away at an acting career, dead set on breaking into the industry despite his working-class roots, and after many years, he finally got there.
His rise to fame coincided with British cinema’s newfound interest in social realism, and Caine earned his first Oscar nomination with a performance in Alfie, playing a womanising Cockney who soon finds himself met with the realities of his careless, selfish actions. It wasn’t as raw as certain kitchen sink dramas, but it became a quintessential piece of British cinema from the era, nonetheless, catapulting Caine to success.
The actor quickly climbed the industry’s ranks from here on out, often opting for British gangster roles. With his horn-rimmed glasses, he was unmistakable, but it was only a matter of time before he’d make it to Hollywood, giving himself to everything from Jaws: The Revenge (never mind) to Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and The Dark Knight.
Caine never had any formal training as an actor, but his experience across British productions of varying sizes, as well as Hollywood blockbusters and more considered dramas, has left him pretty well-equipped to give good advice, and there’s a specific technique that he swears by, which Edgar Wright took to heart when directing Scott Pilgrim vs the World, his genre-blending comic book adaptation from 2010.
While Caine wasn’t in the film, his presence was always in the back of Wright’s mind, as he told Rotten Tomatoes, “There’s a thing, like Michael Caine, his school of acting, page one is, ‘Don’t blink on a close-up’, it’s like classic Michael Caine technique: ‘Never blink on a close-up, it disempowers you, and it makes you look weak’.”
This proved a vital bit of advice for his actors, specifically because he “wanted it to feel surreal, a bit like anime, and in animation, people don’t really blink so much”. Wanting his characters to appear larger than life but at the same time, totally at ease, he reminded everyone to be more like Mr Caine.
He noted, “If somebody doesn’t know their lines, they’re blinking like crazy. So, I sort of thought it was a good thing [to ask for no blinking]. If you look at Brie Larson’s performance, particularly, she’s so strong and so unblinking, so we got into this thing [of] not blinking during takes, and they used to call me ‘the blink Nazi’ on set.”
Scott Pilgrim vs the World doesn’t have much in common with your typical Caine film, but Wright referred to the British icon nonetheless, and clearly it worked, because despite getting his start in his native England with classics like Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, Scott Pilgrim saw him take on America, and, even today, it remains one of his most internationally recognisable movies.
Evidently, this no blinking technique helped to give the movie its unusual atmosphere, which feels somewhere between reality and a game that someone has made up, the characters part-human part-comic book. Inspiration can come from anywhere, of course, but who would’ve thought that Caine would have such a big impact on Scott Pilgrim?
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