The one director Michael Caine called better than David Lean: “It’s the writing, you know”
When Michael Caine first considered working with the director he would later come to believe was a better all-round filmmaker than the legendary David Lean, he wasn’t sure what to expect. For starters, he wasn’t particularly impressed by the role he was being offered, dismissing it as a thankless supporting part that required little more than filling space on screen. However, he was pleasantly surprised to discover he couldn’t have been more wrong—and over the years, he and the director would become synonymous with each other.
When Caine spoke to HuffPost in 2012 about his fifth film with the director in question, he reminisced about how unconvinced he was with that first role. For one thing, he’d never been part of a superhero movie before, and for another, the prospect of playing the hero’s trusty butler didn’t sound exciting or creatively fulfilling. This meant Christopher Nolan had a lot of convincing to do to get Caine to play Alfred Pennyworth in Batman Begins.
“I thought that wasn’t a very good part,” Caine admitted. “I’ll be saying, ‘Dinner is served’ and ‘Would you like a coffee?'”
Thankfully, Nolan explained to Caine that he envisioned Alfred as much more than the wry, quip-wielding servant played by Michael Gough in the Tim Burton/Joel Schumacher Batman movies. This Alfred would still get to bust Bruce Wayne’s chops and serve him dinner, but he would also be a fully-rounded character with genuine pathos. If anything, he was written as a father figure for the tortured hero, more than he was hired to help.
Caine wound up playing Alfred three times across The Dark Knight Trilogy, and he was consistently pleased with the depth of the character. “It was a complete surprise to me,” he smiled, “Because I know in all these big, expensive, blockbuster, special-effects films, they don’t really ever write the parts. They’re sort of cyphers to get the action going.” Instead of this, though, Caine found Alfred to be just as brilliantly written as every other character in the series – and this is where he believed Nolan’s talents truly lay.
“Chris, though – not just with the butler but with everybody – is such a fabulous writer,” Caine gushed. “If you look at the last Batman, for instance, you could take the writing out and make a story out of that without the special effects and stunts. The writing is of such a high standard.”
In fact, Caine was adamant that the scripts got better as they went along, especially when it came to Alfred’s participation in the story. “When I read the last script, The Dark Knight Rises, I thought this is the best part for me in all of them,” he insisted. “It’s one of the most emotional parts I’ve ever played.”
Caine went on to praise Nolan’s ability to elicit outstanding performances from his casts and helm mind-bogglingly spectacular action set pieces. However, he revealed that he realised over time that Nolan’s writing is what makes him a cut above most other directors in Hollywood – even undisputed Mount Rushmore figures like Lean.
“It’s the writing, you know,” Caine explained. “The thing about Chris is that he’s not only a brilliant director. I think he’s up there with David Lean, but David Lean couldn’t write. He used Robert Bolt to write his scripts.”
Amazingly, Caine thinks so highly of Nolan that when Esquire magazine later asked him to name five movies everyone should see, he argued that any one of Nolan’s pictures could fit alongside the classics On the Waterfront, Casablanca, The Third Man, and Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia. Caine was adamant, “I think anything done by Christopher Nolan, and I’ve been in all of his movies! But I think Chris Nolan is the greatest movie director”.
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