How Michael Caine made friends with Hollywood’s most hated director: “A tyrant with a filthy temper”
In most lines of work, a person with a reputation for being an unflinching and unrepentant arsehole would be cast out and left on the breadline. Of course, Hollywood isn’t like most lines of work, leaving Michael Caine to practice reverse psychology to deal with one of the industry’s most detestable directors.
For want of a better word, some of cinema’s most important and influential figures gained reputations for being dickheads. They were nightmares to collaborate with, but when the end results were frequently greeted with acclaim, awards, and box office dollars, an abrasive personality is often forgivable.
On the other hand, Caine was always viewed as one of Tinseltown’s most down-to-earth and likeable lads. The two-time Academy Award winner did admit that he lost his temper on set, but that only happened once, and he was incredibly remorseful about it for the next half-century.
He did his homework before agreeing to most roles, with the exception of those he only played for money, so he was fully aware of what he was walking into when he agreed to lead the cast of Otto Preminger’s 1967 drama Hurry Sundown opposite Jane Fonda.
“Otto, I knew by reputation, was a tyrant with a filthy temper who screamed at people a great deal, so I decided to take the bull by the horns and lay down some ground rules from day one,” Caine wrote in his memoir, What’s It All About. It was an accurate assessment, and it might even be something of an understatement, based on how other actors spoke of their experiences with the filmmaker.
Alarmingly, allusions to Nazism were pretty frequent. Anthony Hopkins compared him to Adolf Hitler, Kirk Douglas said much the same after they partnered on Stalag 17, Paul Newman branded him “a fascist asshole,” and even Adam West, the kitschy face of the 1960s Batman TV series, called him “despicable.”
And yet, Caine considered him a friend by the end of principal photography. How did he do it? By calling him out to his face: “When we were first introduced, I informed him that I knew of his reputation and that he should know that I was a very shy little flower, and if anybody ever shouted at me, I would burst into tears and go into my dressing room and not come out for the rest of the day.”
The actor recalled how Preminger was so taken aback because “he was not used to being spoken to like this,” and Caine could almost see the gears turning in his head. The director smiled, revealed himself to be a fan of his leading man’s work, and said he “would never shout at Alfie.”
Just like that, Caine had unlocked what he described as “a long friendship with this unpopular man,” and all he had to do was lay down the ground rules during their first encounter.
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