The part Christopher Nolan wrote for Michael Caine at the last minute: “To make sure I was in the credits”
There haven’t been many cinematic partnerships like the one between Christopher Nolan and Michael Caine. Most enduring collaborations between a director and an actor are based on one of three dynamics. They are either contemporaries who built their careers together (John Ford and John Wayne, Martin Scorsese and Robert De Niro, and Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune are all examples), or the director is in a mentorship position (Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio and Elia Kazan and Marlon Brando are examples of this variation).
Sometimes, these duos are made up of romantic partners, such as Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann or and John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands. Nolan and Caine’s dynamic was unique in the fact that they began their collaboration when Caine had been an established movie star for nearly five decades and Nolan was only just getting started as a filmmaker. The only other analogous relationship is between Wes Anderson and Bill Murray, though Murray is just one part in Anderson’s extensive rotating ensemble.
Their first collaboration came in 2005 on the first Batman movie. In the film and its sequels, Caine played Bruce Wayne’s butler and mentor, Alfred. The actor remembered doing the first scene with Christian Bale as Batman and how calm and assured Nolan was as the director, even though he was only in his early thirties at the time.
“It’s all very calm,” Caine wrote of Nolan’s directorial style in his memoir, Blowing the Bloody Doors Off. “There is never a raised voice. He is the exemplar of quiet authority.”
The admiration is mutual. Nolan apparently referred to Caine as his ‘lucky charm’ and took pains to include him in every movie he made after Batman Begins. They worked on eight movies together before the actor retired in 2023, though that first film featured more screen time for Caine than any of the others. In fact, in one movie, Caine plays such a tiny part that you might miss him entirely unless you recognise his famous cockney accent.
“When there was no part for me in Dunkirk,” the actor wrote, “He cast me as the voice of the squadron leader who talks to the pilots over their radios, to make sure I was in the credits.” Not only is he just a voice actor in the 2017 film, but his time on screen is limited to the very last scenes. If you popped out of the theatre for a quick toilet break, you’d miss him.
Despite how small this and his role in 2020’s Tenet were, it must have been painful for Nolan to hear that Caine was planning to retire. He had made the majority of his movies with the star, and no matter how small the roles were, he and Caine clearly had a special kind of magic when they were on set together. If the director did have any superstitions about the actor being his ‘lucky charm,’ however, those fears would almost certainly have been allayed as soon as he released his first Caine-free film in nearly two decades. 2023’s Oppenheimer earned the best reviews of Nolan’s career and swept the Oscars.
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