“She’s nuts”: Michael Caine’s first movie with a female director and why it took 23 years to be released
Obviously, when Michael Caine first embarked on his big-screen career in the late 1950s, the industry was hardly synonymous with women being hired to direct major studio releases.
They weren’t completely invisible, but it was a rarity nonetheless. As the times changed and cinema continued to evolve, it became less of a novelty and more of an accepted practice, although there’s still a long way to go on that front, even in the modern era.
The two-time Academy Award winner was over half a century removed from his screen debut in 1956’s A Hill in Korea before he worked with a female filmmaker for the first time, but by the time the picture was finally released almost 25 years later, it had technically lost its first-time status.
The husband-and-wife producing team of Randy Quaid and Evi Quaid, in her first feature-length undertaking, secured financing from billionaire and instrumental early Microsoft figure Charles Simonyi to make The Debtors, with Caine adding a high-profile name to the first-timer’s maiden film.
From the sound of it, though, the production was a disaster. The line producer abandoned ship after a month, Quaid was rewriting the script on an almost daily basis, and Rammstein were drafted in for a cameo musical appearance that saw Till Lindemann wield a gigantic fake penis that sprayed synthetic jizz into the gathered crowd of extras, which was in poor taste then, never mind now.
Caine, no stranger to a bad movie or five, had a sneaking suspicion that The Debtors would go the same way. “I know nobody’s going to get an Oscar,” he accepted. “You think, ‘We’re not going to get an Oscar here, but let’s have a great time making the movie.'” As it turned out, it didn’t even get a release.
It was a watershed moment for the veteran, marking his first female-directed flick, and when asked why he’d opted for a first-timer, too, he offered an illuminating explanation. “Because she’s nuts,” he said. “Because she wrote it. Because she believes in it. And because I’d never worked with a woman director. And it was really smashing. As to whether it’s any good, your guess is as good as mine.”
That was something audiences had to wait a long time to find out for themselves, with poor test screenings segueing into a legal battle over who actually owned the rights to The Debtors. It did premiere at the 1999 edition of the Toronto Film Festival, even though Randy Quaid had been ordered by a federal judge not to screen it due to the ongoing litigation. By January 2000, the Quaids had filed for bankruptcy as a result of the behind-the-scenes wrangling over possession of Evi’s directorial debut, plunging the movie into cinematic limbo.
By the time it was released digitally in 2022, Caine had added Nora Ephron’s Bewitched, Sandra Nettlebeck’s Mr Morgan’s Last Love, Brenda Chapman’s Come Away, and Lina Roessler’s Best Sellers to his list of credits, so The Debtors is either the first or fifth feature he made with a female director, depending on whether you want to view it as when they were made or when they were released.
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