Michael Caine discusses “the cardinal rule of bad movies”
He might be one of the United Kingdom’s greatest-ever actors and a true legend of the business, but like almost every single other thespian in the history of cinema, Michael Caine has made more than a few horrendous films during his 70-year career.
With two Academy Awards and three Golden Globes just the tip of a trophy-laden iceberg, though, he’s never been one to dwell on the misses for too long when the next hit is lurking around the corner. If anything, he’s treated each one as a learning experience and even managed to find the positives.
Jaws: The Revenge was awful and cost him the opportunity to miss out on collecting his first Oscar in person, but he did at least enjoy spending months shooting in such sun-kissed and glamorous locations while the money earned from the role allowed him to buy himself a rather nice new home.
When it came to the equally abysmal The Swarm, working with a laundry list of Hollywood legends gave Caine insight into the differences between Stateside productions and those back home, but he struggled to justify his decision to sign on for a Steven Seagal vanity project that was deservedly torn to shreds for being self-indulgent claptrap that existed solely to stroke its star and director’s ego.
The mid-1990s wasn’t the most fruitful period of Caine’s career, in fairness, something he was happy to admit when reflecting on how he’d “reached the period of my life I called the twilight zone”. Ageing out of leading man roles, he was struck by the realisation that “the spotlight of movie stardom was fading, and it all seemed gloomy.”
A defeatist attitude, sure, but Caine’s existential crisis began to consume him. “Soon the scripts started to dry up completely – even the bad ones – and if there is one thing worse than being offered bad scripts it’s being offered none at all,” he wrote for The Daily Mail, so at least he was aware that aligning himself with Seagal for On Deadly Ground was a disaster waiting to happen.
And yet, he broke his own self-appointed ‘cardinal rule’ of bad movies to do so. “The danger is, of course, that the wait for a decent movie makes you desperate, and I got desperate to the point that I accepted a picture in Alaska with Steven Seagal, the martial arts expert,” he explained. “The movie was called On Deadly Ground and the title was to prove apt.”
By his own admission, Caine had “broken one of the cardinal rules of bad movies” by signing on: “If you’re going to do a bad movie, at least do it in a great location.” Instead, there he was in the harsh and unforgiving terrain of Alaska, freezing his arse off for a film he believed was going to be awful. It turned out as expected, funnily enough, but from that day forward, he “vowed never to work in a tough location again”.
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