The performance that gave Michael Caine amnesia: “I think I tried to switch myself off”
It goes without saying that learning and memorising lines is one of acting’s key tenets, and it was never something Michael Caine had a problem with during a remarkable 70-year career that saw him retire with his head held high as one of Britain’s all-time great thespians.
The two-time Academy Award winner was the consummate professional throughout his professional life, even when he was fully aware that he was starring in terrible movies. He was never anything less than prepared, only to discover during one of his most underrated late-stage performances that he was developing a form of short-term amnesia.
It was something that had never happened to him before despite the huge array of credits he’d amassed dating back to the 1950s, leaving him convinced it had something to do with the reprehensible character he was playing. It sounds very actor-ish, but Caine was adamant that because he was spending all day every day embodying someone so awful, his brain tried to get rid of the role as quickly as possible.
Norman Jewison’s 2003 dramatic thriller The Statement was a change of pace for Caine, with the beloved legend cast as a Nazi collaborator tracked down 40 years after committing his wartime atrocities, and he called the character the single worst person he’d ever played. Not only was he repulsed by the role, but it turned out that his psyche was, too.
“Because I disliked the character so much, I developed a kind of selective amnesia,” he told Salon. “At the end of each day, I couldn’t remember what I’d done with it. At the beginning of the day, I knew exactly what I was going to do, obviously, as one would. But I couldn’t remember. And at the end of the picture, I couldn’t remember any of the performance at all. I think I tried to switch myself off.”
It didn’t hamper his performance in the slightest, even if the experience of knowing nothing about his own work was a new one. “I always knew what was coming,” he explained. “You usually say, ‘Well, there was this scene where I did this, and I wish I had done that’. This time, I didn’t know what was coming, I couldn’t remember a single thing.”
On the plus side, it would have allowed Caine to see his performance with a completely fresh pair of eyes. While The Statement wasn’t a particularly good film and failed to make the most of a riveting premise inspired by true events, the leading man’s central turn deserved to be the focal point of a much better movie.
Plenty of actors refuse to watch themselves onscreen, but in this case, Caine was in the unusual position of being able to view The Statement in its entirety with absolutely no clue as to what would happen from scene to scene.
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