Back to the Elephant
For his latest film, Michael Caine has returned to the tough London neighbourhood where he grew up. But as he tells Garth Pearce, he’s alarmed by the way things have changed.
Michael Caine is 76 and a world-famous star,with a knighthood, a fortune and a country estate surrounded by rolling acres of Surrey countryside. But now he’s returned to film in the tough London streets where he was brought up. It has left him feeling angry. The distinctive blue eyes which helped propel him to international recognition 40 years ago as Harry Palmer in The Ipcress File and gangster Jack Carter in Get Carter turn cold as he talks about old and vulnerable victims of crime.
“There are too many scumbags out there who are allowed to get away with it,” he says, forcibly. “The more they escape any form of justice, the more they feel they can cause hurt and damage. Victims feel helpless and lose the will to leave their homes.”
The reason for our meeting is that Caine has rolled back the years to play a pensioner who turns vigilante in his latest film, Harry Brown. It won rave reviews at the Toronto Film Festival and puts him back at the top as an actor who can deliver rough justice.
It clearly gave him much satisfaction to make and the audience gains equal satisfaction in seeing violent gang members get a taste of their own medicine – even though it is fiction, rather than fact. But the film, directed by Briton Daniel Barber, 44, who won an Oscar nomination last year for his short film, The Tonto Woman, has reopened several key issues in Caine’s past. He returned to his south London roots, near the Elephant and Castle, for what proved to be a tough filming schedule, much of it at night, around the virtually derelict Heygate estate.
There were instant echoes of his upbringing, immediately after the Second World War. And he identifies huge differences of culture. “I am not saying that there was no crime or violence around when I was growing up,” he says. “But I can’t remember old people terrified to go out. So it made me think about how society has changed and how we’ve wound up with such a terrible, frightening situation. I was from the very area we were filming in – but I didn’t recognise it from the buildings, the atmosphere or the people.”
The first mistake, he says, was the wholesale destruction of streets in favour of concrete labyrinths of flats, walkways and subways. The second was allowing family life to drift to the extent that too few knew what young children and teens were doing in the evenings. But, worst, was the domination of drugs.
“It was booze in our day,” he reflects. “You’d have too much and have a punch-up. But it would be forgotten the next day. And you’d never be forced to buy drugs or kill anyone to get them.
“Compared with lads who live there today, I had a happy home life. We lived in a council prefab with a garden. I also won a scholarship to go to a grammar school, so I had the advantage of an education. Home life and schools taught the basics, with some discipline – and the lack of drugs made everything different. But this was the toughest area of London and we were terrified of spivs, with their razors, who were into gambling, the black market and protection.
“Their own sons became Teddy Boys, with their drainpipe suits and DA hairstyles. They were vicious and you’d keep clear of them. But beating up old ladies or terrorising pensioners? That never happened.”
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