The career-altering acting advice John Huston gave Michael Caine
When he first started out as an actor, Michael Caine could never have imagined that he’d end up working with his favourite director of all time, John Huston. It was a dream, sure, but hardly an attainable one for a working-class lad treading the boards in 1950s London.
There’s no point in getting into the business if the aim isn’t to reach the very top, though, with Caine making the jump to America a decade later and realising virtually every single one of his ambitions. Not only did he get the chance to be directed by Huston, but he got to do it twice.
Their first picture together came on The Man Who Would Be King, the 1975 literary adaptation that partnered Caine with his longtime friend, Sean Connery. Even at that, there was an element of fate in play, with the two lead roles initially offered to various other duos before Huston settled on his powerhouse British pairing.
At that point, Huston had been developing the film for two decades, and he only ended up with Caine and Connery leading the line when the duos of Humphrey Bogart and Clark Gable, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas, Richard Burton and Peter O’Toole, and Paul Newman and Robert Redford had declined.
Not that Caine would have minded being so far down the filmmaker’s wish list because the opportunity to take direction from Huston was the ultimate exercise in wish fulfilment. Not only that, but his idol even passed on sage words of acting advice through tough love, which completely altered the way the star would approach every single one of his subsequent performances.
“I’d been working for about a week, and he’d never said all that much to me,” Caine recalled to Interview, growing frustrated at the distance being kept between actor and auteur. “And I said to him, ‘John, you never give me any directions’. And he said, ‘You get paid a great deal of money to do this, Michael. You don’t need me to tell you what to do.'”
That did change eventually, with Huston giving Caine one solitary piece of direction, which altered everything. “I had a very long speech, and I thought I was doing great, and right in the middle of it, he said, ‘Cut.'” he explained, which inevitably led him to ask why Huston was cutting him off midway through.
The legendary director responded by telling him, “You could speak faster, Michael. He’s an honest man. Only villains speak slowly.” The lightbulb suddenly went off, and Caine realized that Huston’s insight was “absolutely true” because “honest men speak faster than dishonest ones.”
The majority of audience members wouldn’t have even noticed, but Caine now had a clear distinction between how to recite his lines when he was playing good and bad, a method he’s maintained ever since.
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