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Few actors in the history of British cinema can boast of having had a career as varied and as renowned as Michael Caine. Whether he’s fighting members of the Zulu tribe or preparing for puppetry in A Muppet Christmas Carol, Caine never fails to bring a sublime intensity to his roles. Aside from his undeniable acting ability and command of the screen as a leading man, Caine thrived thanks to a series of smart decisions.
Often, decision-making is an overlooked feature in the fierce world of acting, especially when it comes to eminence and permanence in Hollywood. An actor will have to judge which roles suit their abilities and also be informed to drop any roles that could damage their reputation, even if the monetary accolades prove exciting at the time. In Caine’s case, he was lucky enough to work his way up in Zulu, which gave him a steady stream of high-profile character roles, adding Alfie, The Italian Job, and The Battle of Britain.
Over the past five decades, Caine has remained equally relevant, with Academy Award-winning roles in Woody Allen’s 1986 film Hannah and Her Sisters and 1999’s The Cider House Rules. Speaking to Rolling Stone in 2019, the actor is proud to say that he never regretted the opportunities he missed. “I’ve never made that kind of mistake,” he said. I just did things in the opposite direction, which I didn’t say no to. “
Given Caine’s prestige as a true legend with a full trophy cabinet, his regrets may not actually be particularly worrying as he retires at 91. Still, as he reviews his work, there are some hiccups that he would forget. One of them was the 1978 film The Swarm. Directed by Irwin Allen, the sci-fi horror film follows a scientist who joins the US military to combat a swarm of giant mutant bees. plot, but that was not to Caine’s liking.
Assessing the film in 2019 as one of his few mistakes, Caine noted that, to add insult to injury, he struggled to shoot the film. “I said, ‘I’m going to do it. ‘ One day we were all chatting with live bees on top of us and all of a sudden we saw all those little black dots on our shirts,” he said. “The bees were shitting on us. And then the first complaint arose, but us. I didn’t know it at the time.
Another Caine regret is the 1969 film Play Dirty. As an identified hero of war films, he was then cast in André De Toth’s World War II adventure film. The film, which followed a project to destroy a Nazi fuel depot in North Africa, Box Office Sadness and Caine once again had trouble filming. He hated the experience so much that he swore never to return to Almeria, Spain again.
The frustration of the assignment made Almería an incredibly popular filming location at the time. “There are six sand dunes in Almeria. . . We were all going around the hill chasing Rommel’s tanks – and there was horse shit all over the desert and a stagecoach in other instructions being chased among the Indians,” Array Caine recalled in his autobiography, Raising Cain. Training
He added: “The other sets in the film were shoveling tank tracks to get their westerns, and we were shoveling horse poop and erasing hoof prints to get our El Alamein. “
Caine explained this unfortunate experience in his book What It’s All About. . . , pointing out how the disruption led to the task going over budget, which added insult to injury when the box office numbers came in. “Sometimes people ask me why videos are so expensive and I’ve been tempted to tell them those stories,” he wrote. “It may sound unbelievable, but I swear they’re all true. “
After his reporting filming Play Dirty, Caine included a clause in his long-term film contracts that said he would never shoot in Almeria again. He added a mantra: “The fundamental rules of bad movies: If you need to make a bad movie, at least do it in a smart place. Although he never returned to Almeria, he claimed to have violated his rule of shooting a mediocre film in a mediocre location during his career crisis in the 90s. The film in question was On Deadly Ground, a film directed and co-produced universally starring Steven Seagal. The film was shot in various locations in California, Wyoming, and Alaska.