“It wasn’t one of my dream experiences, to put it nicely”: why Michael Caine hated making ‘On Deadly Ground’
In the 2000s and 2010s, Michael Caine took pride of place as one of Hollywood’s most beloved elder statesmen. He became a good luck charm for Christopher Nolan, appearing in almost all the blockbuster auteur’s films; won a second Oscar for The Cider House Rules; and enjoyed eye-catching supporting turns in movies like Austin Powers in Goldmember, Children of Men, and Kingsman: The Secret Service.
However, it wasn’t always like this for Caine, who has admitted that the early ’90s were a low period in his career. During this timeframe, he took a paycheque to appear in a martial arts film he hated making – and swore never to do anything like it again.
In late 1991, Caine felt on top of the world. He’d spent the holidays in Aspen with Texas oil billionaires Marvin and Barbara Davis, partying with close friends like Sean Connery and Sidney Poitier. When he returned to Hollywood, he expected to keep living high on the hog, although he soon experienced a flop with 1992’s Noises Off. He should have seen it as an omen.
As Caine told the Daily Mail in 2010: “I wasn’t too bothered. Everyone has a flop now and then, I thought.”
However, in hindsight, he realises it was another chink in his armour of invincibility as a leading man. He admitted, “I was completely oblivious to the downturn in store for me. Looking back to this period I can see now what I couldn’t see then: the storm clouds, as they say, were gathering.”
You see, Caine was 58 at this point, and even though he didn’t consider himself old, he realised with horror that this was how most of Hollywood saw him. When he was sent a script and felt it wasn’t any good, he called his agent to complain about the lead role. To his shock, his agent said, “No, no – you’re not the lover, I want you to read the part of the father.” This hit Caine like a ton of bricks – he had aged out of the roles he’d built his career on.
He lamented, “I realised the only girl I’d ever get to kiss in a film again would be my daughter.”
Caine was faced with a tough decision. Either he could accept the way the wind was blowing and alter the kinds of roles he would consider, or he could hold out for leading man parts and risk not working for long periods. “Should I give up or keep going? The question stayed with me for months,” he mused. Soon, though, he stopped even receiving bad scripts that younger actors had turned down. Instead, he wasn’t receiving any scripts, which scared him to death.
With this existential crisis looming over his head, Caine jumped in desperation at a movie he never wanted to make in the first place. He was offered the villain role in On Deadly Ground, a 1994 Steven Seagal vehicle scheduled to shoot in Alaska, and he took it against his better judgment. By the time he flew to the snowy environs of the northernmost US state and realised just how cold he was going to be while shooting this film, though, he knew he’d made a mistake. Caine admitted: “Although Steven and the rest of the team were great to work with, I had broken one of the cardinal rules of bad movies: if you’re going to do a bad movie, at least do it in a great location.”
Caine was a professional on the movie, of course, and he didn’t have any horror stories to share about Seagal, unlike many other people who have worked with him. In fact, he claimed he barely saw the ponytailed action star, who rarely emerged from his motorhome between takes. However, the location was another kettle of fish entirely, with Caine confessing to Rolling Stone, “It wasn’t one of my dream experiences, to put it nicely.”
He added to the Daily Mail, “Here I was, doing a movie where the work was freezing my brain, and the weather was freezing my ass. I vowed never to work in a tough location again.”
From that point onward, Caine decided that desperation would never again make him accept a role if the shooting location wasn’t to his liking. He realised that he could use his wife Shakira to gauge whether he should take a part or not: if she refused to travel with him for the shoot, it wasn’t anywhere he wanted to be.
He chuckled: “I remember asking her if she would like to come to Alaska, and she didn’t even bother to reply. I should have got the warning.”
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