“He earned my trust”: Michael Caine’s misplaced faith in the first-time director who almost ruined him
Trying to summarise the career of Michael Caine is a futile task, as for over half a century, this titan of cinema has been involved in some of the greatest films ever made and means so many different things to so many different people.
He’s worked with almost every famous actor or director you can think of, and naturally, sometimes this works out, and sometimes, it very much doesn’t.
One of the stranger entries in the esteemed performer’s catalogue is On Deadly Ground. Released in 1994, this action romp stars Steven Seagal as a firefighter who discovers that his employer is causing rampant environmental damage in Alaska. Caine plays a villainous oil baron called Michael Jennings, who serves as Seagal’s foil. It’s a rare US-style action flick for the British icon (who plays the character with a strange American accent), and you’d be forgiven for forgetting it ever happened.
Seagal not only starred in the picture, but he directed it as well. He’d had plenty of experience in the martial arts realm up to this point, but successful actors don’t always transition to a leadership role. Caine seemed to back his new employer, however, if the studio-approved publicity material is to be believed.
“Steven has a very strong vision of what this movie is and should be,” he said (via Vicious Imagery), “He earned my trust. I wouldn’t have come and just done a crash, bang martial arts film. There’s more to On Deadly Ground than that.”
Unfortunately, this wasn’t how he actually saw things. Four years after the release of On Deadly Ground, Caine was giving a talk at the NFT and spoke candidly about working with the controversial action star and what it was really like on set.
“I finally wound up in Alaska with Steven Seagal, which took quite a lot of joy out of it,” he recalled, “I remember ringing down to the desk in my hotel and saying, ‘Could you send someone up for the laundry?’ And they said, ‘The laundrette’s next door’. And I was freezing my butt off, and I thought, ‘I don’t need this’.”
He was so irritated by this working environment that he decided to step back from acting altogether, entering semi-retirement at this point, reducing the number of roles he would take over the next few years. He only managed to get his career back on track years later with The Cider House Rules, which landed him his second Academy Award. However, he wasn’t the only Oscar winner to suffer from making On Deadly Ground, as Billy-Bob Thornton, who had a minor role as a henchman, almost died when he was thrown from a horse during an action sequence.
Caine has never been shy about his opinions on films he doesn’t like, so he must have taken great pleasure when On Deadly Ground crashed and burned both financially and critically, to the point where Seagal never directed another film ever again. It turns out there is some justice in the world after all.
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