‘Water’: The disastrous collaboration between George Harrison and Michael Caine
In the mid-1980s, George Harrison and Michael Caine were established stars in their respective lines of work. The former Beatle was more than a decade into his successful second act as a solo artist, and the actor already had three Oscar nominations under his belt and had moved to Hollywood. However, they were both fiercely loyal to their homeland and personal history, so taking a step outside their glitzy lifestyles to work on a low-budget project together wasn’t out of character.
So, in 1984, when Caine received a film script from Harrison’s production company, HandMade Films, he was probably predisposed to do it just because of its relation to his old friend. The movie was called Water, and it was supposed to be a sharp satire of British politics.
Set on a fictional Caribbean island, the movie stars Caine as the local governor who basks in the freedom of his tropical paradise, drinking, smoking pot, and generally living the good life. The British government seems to have either forgotten about the island or ceased to care about it. Then, an oil rig starts to produce premium mineral water with a lightly laxative effect, and all of a sudden, the island of Cascara is inundated with international interest from those who see a lucrative business opportunity.
Directed and co-written by Dick Clement, it was meant to be a satire of everything from Colonialism to the Thatcher government. Billy Connolly plays a biracial freedom fighter, brown face and all, in a plot line that brought Cuban guerillas into the mix as well. There was a lot going on, and the slapstick angle, which was meant to evoke the classic Ealing comedies of the 1940s and ‘50s, didn’t quite mesh.
The production was troubled from the start. Connolly later remembered that when they got on the plane from Heathrow to the filming location in Saint Lucia, they didn’t realise that the budget had just fallen through. By the time the plane landed, however, they’d come up with the money again. Clement and his writing partner, Ian La Frenais, also hadn’t decided how they wanted the movie to end and were working through different drafts of the script as they went. Not surprisingly, the plot feels chaotic and aimless.
Michael Caine was on autopilot, having been briefly typecast in the early ’80s as a washed-up alcoholic. “This was a particularly seedy period of my life,” he said in an interview. “I played three drunks in a row. I did Educating Rita and Honorary Consul, which was called Beyond The Limit in America, and Water, all one after the other. So I was a sort of rather sleazy overweight drunk for about a year.”
In a bid to make the film more enticing to audiences, George Harrison agreed to perform a concert at the end of the movie. He pulled out all the stops, enlisting Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr, Jon Lord, and Ray Cooper to join him. Despite featuring the scene in the movie’s trailer and marketing, Water bombed at the UK box office and couldn’t even find an American distributor for a year. When it was finally released in the US, it bombed even harder.
Despite Caine’s involvement, it wasn’t the most prominent failure for Harrison’s production company (that would happen a year later with the Sean Penn/Madonna debacle Shanghai Surprise), but it was the beginning of the end for HandMade Films. Within five years, Harrison was forced to cut his losses and sell it.
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