ROYAL RACONTEUR
Michael Caine embraces his age in Youth.
Sir Michael Caine has been part of Hollywood royalty for decades. But he’s that rare man who has also consorted with the real thing.
“She knighted me once,” he said easily, discussing a meeting with Queen Elizabeth in 2000. “I nearly got into trouble, though. She said to me, ‘I have a feeling you have been doing what you do for a very long time.’ And I almost said, ‘And so have you.’ ”
Caine stars alongside Harvey Keitel in writer/director Paolo Sorrentino’s second English-language film, Youth, which screened in competition at the Cannes Film Festival on May 20. The two men play old friends with very different attitudes to old age.
Keitel is a film director hard at work on his next movie, while Caine is a former orchestra conductor who refuses to come out of retirement, even at the behest of the Queen. The film also features Rachel Weisz (also in The Lobster at Cannes), Paul Dano and Jane Fonda.
Caine has been to Cannes with a film exactly once before. Forty-nine years ago he starred in Alfie, which won the Special Jury Prize and earned an Oscar nomination for the actor. “Alfie won a prize and I didn’t so I never came back,” he said with a grin. But he added: “I loved this film so much I’d go with it anywhere, for nothing.”
Continuing as a royal raconteur, Caine recalled the time the Queen had asked him — at a party! — if he knew any jokes. “None that I can tell you, ma’am,” he answered carefully. So she proceeded to tell him one, which he’s frustrated to say he can’t remember. “Anyway, she has got a great sense of humour,” he reported.
Youth is, not surprisingly, a meditation on aging, set at a posh Swiss hotel frequented by monks, actors, former soccer stars and even a Miss Universe (Madalina Diana Ghenea). Caine practised four weeks on a key scene that shows him conducting — perhaps in flashback; wouldn’t want to say if the Queen gets her way. He had two actual conductors helping him; one in an earpiece and one on a video monitor. The ultimate compliment on his performance came when “the lead violinist came up to me at the end and said, ‘You’re better than the guy we had last week.’ ”
Asked if he minds playing elderly characters, Caine said it beats playing dead ones. He remembers some confusion a number of years ago when he was sent a script and thought he’d be reading for the part of the lover, only to be told they wanted him as the dad. It was then he realized: “I wasn’t going to get the girl any more, but I was going to get the part.”
As to appearing shirtless and laid out on a massage table in Youth, he said: “It didn’t matter to me because it’s the only body I’ve got.” Besides, he said, scenes like that send a message to the young: “This is what’s going to happen to you. So don’t get too smart about it.”