Behind the Scenes: The Ipcress File (Furie, 1965) with Michael Caine and Nigel Green

Very often I read in the newspapers about what a great life movie actors have. They stay out all night drinking and having a great time. I never read anything about any work that actors do. In actual fact we work very very hard, I think. For instance, I'll give you for instance, the time this is today is a Tuesday. It's a Tuesday in January, a very miserable day. It's 25 past 10. Now Tony, just, Tony, just pan round, pan round. And this, now this is my lounge on a Tuesday morning in January. I had a farewell party last night because I'm going away and that's the first party I've been to in months. And this is what's happening to me on a Tuesday morning in January. Now this is my first holiday for four and a half years. And admittedly I don't have to do this. I mean people from the television didn't force their way in. I was just trying to point out that in actual fact an actor is never on holiday. And we have to do the publicity and everything, which is not a bad chore considering we get overpaid a fortune. But we'd never keep it anyway. I don't know why I started on this this morning. I guess I got out of bed the wrong side. But what it was is yesterday I read an article about myself called How Michael Caine Gets the Girls. You know, How Michael Caine Gets the Girls. What time do I have to get any girls? If you have any, send them along. Well I like America because of the attitude towards success. If you're somebody successful, I don't mean necessarily an actor, but supposing you're a rich businessman, very wealthy, the attitude that differs is in America someone will see you who hasn't got much money and they'll say, he did it, I can do it. In England they see you and they say, he's rich, wait till we tear him down and make him as poor as us. The whole attitude is different. It's their idea is to try and everybody try and be as rich as the guys who are rich. Here everybody says, wait till the revolution comes, you know. Do you want a hand Mark? You want to come in? No? I've got that. Go on. No, no. You sure? You really sure? Well there's a television on. You want the television on? No, no, I'm okay. All right. Is it a strain to live up to the image of Michael Caine film star? No, oh no. In Hollywood. Oh, no, no, no, not at all. Because the image that I have is something that wasn't built by me. And if you don't tell any lies, you don't have to remember anything. And that's where the strain comes in. That's where they all break down. For me, I live my life exactly as I want to by my own rules and own standards. And I let the image fall where it may. And it fell in a way slightly untruthfully with the sort of girl thing of chasing around after girls. Who was it once said that? Frank Sinatra said, if I'd been with all the girls they say I'd been with, they said I'd been with, I would now be speaking to you from a jar in the Harvard Medical Laboratory. Which is true. You know, this is how I feel about it. This is how I feel about Frank Sinatra. But mainly, the main thing that strikes me, I read my own image in the papers, you see, to find out if it's true. And one of the things, one of the complimentary things people say about me is that I am honest with people. And I am. I regard that as one of my great conceits, is that I'm a completely honest man. So I never try to fool anybody. So there's never any strain with me, you see. And I'm quite prepared tomorrow not to be a movie star. And I wouldn't cry for one moment. I would be something else. I'd be a writer, I think. Do you wonder why a writer particularly? Do you see writing a film, for example? Yeah, I've always been very interested in writing. If you read the scripts, a lot of the scripts that I read, even some that I make, you will find that it's very easy to read a script and say, well, I could do something better than that. Possibly you can't, but I do feel that I can write as badly as most of the scripts that I receive. I can do a rotten job just as well as they can. I like to work with professionals. I know there are some people who are young geniuses and all that, but those geniuses are usually geniuses at everybody else's expense. I'm not interested in a flash-in-the-pan genius. I'm a professional actor, have been for a long time, and hope to continue. I'll tell you what gets you with the Hollywood thing, with the glamour of it. All your life, like John Wayne, say. I've been seeing John Wayne pictures for years, cockney kid at the elephant, going to see John Wayne. Then one day, I was walking through the Beverly Hills Hotel lobby, and a helicopter came down outside, and it was John Wayne coming back from location. He came into the Beverly Hills Hotel lobby with the full Hondo kit on, with that sideways walk. He saw me, and I was getting a massive publicity. They're always very nice to youngsters in Hollywood. They give you advice. He saw me, and he said, kid, and I said, yes, Mr. Wayne. He said, I just got a piece of advice to you. He said, you're doing well. I said, yes, Mr. Wayne. He said, well, if you want to last in this business, talk low and talk slow. It stood me in good sight. Goodbye, kid. What led up to me being Harry Palmer was, I was in a restaurant with my best friend at that time, Terence Stamp, and Harry Saltzman, this famous producer, came into the restaurant at another table. He was very famous for producing the bonds with Cubby Broccoli, and he sat down with his family, and then he saw me, and he sent a note over with a waiter. Would you have coffee with me at the end? So I obviously said yes, and then I sat down with him, and he said, do you know a book by Len Dayton called The Ipcrest File? And I said, yes. I said, I'm halfway through it. He said, do you like it? I said, yeah, it's great. He said, would you like to play the lead in it? Because there was no name. It didn't have a name. And I said, yeah, that would be great. He said, would you like a seven-year contract? I said, yeah, that would be great. He said, I've just seen you in Zulu, in which I play a very, very aristocratic officer, the complete opposite of Harry Palmer. And I said, you saw Zulu, and you thought of me for the lead spy in The Ipcrest File? He said, yes. He said, I just think you'd be good in it. You know, I think you're right for that. I like your real accent, the way I speak. He said, use that. And that was it. And then I met him the next day, and we had a very posh lunch at Les Ambassadeurs. And I was quite impoverished. I'd made Zulu, but I got paid 4,000 pounds for Zulu. And I was sort of broke at the end of it. And so this was this incredible opportunity. And I mean, the first year of the contract was 100,000 quid or something like that, which to me was like 12 million. And we were sitting in Les A having lunch. And he looked at me, and I'd never had lunch in anywhere like Les Ambassadeurs. Very, very posh. And we were eating caviar. And he just looked at me, and he smiled. He said, I wonder what the rich people are doing today. And that started us off on a wonderful relationship. And then, of course, we had to figure out a name for him. And he said, well, he's a spy. He's sort of dull and boring. We've got to think of a boring name. And I said, Harry. Oh, I said, I'm sorry, Harry, because Harry Saltzman. I'm sorry, Harry, I didn't mean that. He said, that's all right. My real name's Herschel. So we decided on Harry. And then he said, think of someone really boring you knew. And I remember I was at school with a boy called Palmer, who was the most boring boy I ever met in school. So I said, well, this guy was named Palmer. He said, that's it, we'll call him Harry Palmer. We decided we wanted him to be the antithesis of Bond. It obviously wasn't any competition for the Bond. It wasn't another great suave spy. It was more like a real spy, an ordinary guy who you wouldn't look at twice in the street. You know, that was that kind of thing. And so we gave him some glasses. Because I wore glasses naturally. So I knew how to use glasses. I took them off and put them on very easily. But what worked for me is the minute I took my glasses off, I wasn't Harry Palmer. Because I saw Sean having the difficulty trying to get away from James Bond. And I thought, well, the minute I take these off, it's not Harry Palmer, which proved correct. I loved the character because he was insolent. You know, I like that. I'd been, I was a soldier in the army. I was a private, you know, and I was always known as what officers called a barrack room lawyer. I knew all the regulations. I had ideas above my station, which of course continued right the way through my life. And Harry definitely had ideas above his station. But it wasn't all sort of beer and skittles. I mean, the first day of shooting, I was on my way and the driver said to me, he said, are you in this film, Ipcrestfile? I said, yes, I am. He said, I've read it. Biggest load of crap I've ever read in my life. And then when we got there, Sidney Fury, the director, he said, I'll show you what I think of this script. And he said to me, have you got any matches? I smoked and I gave him the matches and he burnt the script on the floor of the studio in Pinewood. And that was the start of my sort of, my big time movie career. Nobody liked the script. This was my big starring moment. I liked the script. I thought it was great. Harry Saltzman, he was a very close friend of mine, but boy, some of the things he did to other people. He was a rough guy. I mean, he was always great with me because we were close personal friends. But I used to sit and I used to say, Harry, for Christ's sake, you know, lighten up a little bit. You know, don't lean on people so heavily. He said, did I do it? I said, did you lean on him heavily? The guy was almost having a nervous breakdown when he left here. I remember once we were filming at Notting Hill in Lionel Blair's flat. I think it was in that skyscraper thing. And then Sid had a row with Harry Saltzman. Sid Fury, the director, had a row with Harry Saltzman, the producer. And he started to cry and he ran off the set. And he got on a number 12 bus. And Harry and I chased him in a Phantom Rolls Royce all the way down Bayswater Road. And we kept coming up beside the bus saying, stop, our director's on there. And the driver went, screw you. And anyway, we got him back and it all went very well in the end. I said to Sid once, I was coming up some stairs to go in the door and the camera was on the next landing up. And I said, what's up there? Why is it up there? Is there someone up there gonna jump? He said, no, but I want people to think there is. He filmed the whole movie as though someone else was watching it. And that was the idea. When they saw the first rushes, he said, he's wearing glasses. Is he short-sighted? Does he have to wear glasses? He said, well, no, that's part of the character. He said, there's never been a leading man since Harold Lloyd who had glasses. And he was a comedian. And then they saw the rushes where I cooked a meal for the woman. And everybody would say, I mean, the cooking. I mean, this is, I mean, John Wayne wouldn't cook anything for anybody. It's just, it looks like a cooking. And these guys are saying letters like that. Say, cut the sequence where he's cooking. Also, if you see the picture in my kitchen, there is a sort of dresser and everything with all recipes and menus and whatever on it. The recipes on it are all Glen Dayton's because he used to have a column in the Observer. Which was like a comic strip of recipes because Glen Dayton, the writer of Pit Press Farm, he was a great cook. He was a smashing cook. I learned a great deal from Harry about food because I was a foodie without Harry's money. So I used Harry's money to further my education because anytime Harry said, let's have dinner, I said, yes, because I couldn't afford where we were going. The relationships with the people were all great and they were humorous. So, I mean, comedy is difficult, but that's what I liked about it. A lot of stuff was ad-libbed, I must say. Well, a lot of the torture of being on your own, showing the agony of it and being very inexperienced and trying to hold the screen on your own entirely for quite a long time was tough and teaches you a lot of lessons very quickly. The cameraman, Otto Heller. Otto was a German Jewish refugee. And I said, what year did you come to England? He said, 1939. I said, 1939? I said, blimey, how did you get out? He said, that's so late. He said, well, I didn't believe it. He said, my crew, you know, my camera crew, he said they were all Germans. None of them were Jewish, he said. And they kept telling me to go. He said, and I said, no, this is great. Why am I, you know, let's keep, we're movies, we're coming in, we're having a great time. He said, and then one day, he said, my camera operator came in in an SS uniform. And he said to me, Otto, I've joined the SS. Will you go? I'm telling you, go. And he said, when do you go? He said, now. He said, I went to the toilet. I went out through the toilet window and I never stopped running until I got to London. And that was Otto. And Otto would always come up with his light meter. As a cameraman does, he'd read it. When he died, the light meter, they looked at it and it was dead. He didn't know how to read it. It had never been of any use at all. He'd seen other, he lit by eye only, but he'd seen other men, cameramen being very technical going, oh yes, F8 or 11, whatever it is. And he bought a Duff one and pretended he was doing the same. You know, he was an extraordinary man. Extraordinary. We were very fortunate to get John Barry. If you think in terms of great movies, you've never seen a great movie with Duff music. Every great movie had great music. What John added to the atmosphere was quite extraordinary. I mean, he helped us with the plot line, adding central European music into a trick cell sequence, which wasn't in a foreign country at all. It's part of the plot, you know? I saw Dr. No with Harry and Cubby with no music on and they were both suicidal. I promise you. The music does so much for a movie, I cannot tell you. Harry said to me one day, I'm putting your name above the title. And I said, well, thank you. I said, oh, that's fantastic. I said, do you think I was good in it? And he said, no, he said, it's just that if I don't think you're a star, who the hell else is going to? He said, I'll put your name up there anyway. I said earlier that Harry was rough and tough, you know, but he did some extraordinary things. One of the things he did with me is he had me for a seven year contract when Zulu came out, Alfie came out, Ipcrestfile came out. And of course, my money went through the roof that I was getting for a movie. And so the contract was a steal. And on my birthday, he gave me an envelope and I opened it and inside was my contract torn up. He completely freed me from that. Now that's an extraordinary act for a movie producer. Even for people who were nicer than him when you met them. Lewis Gilbert said, I'm looking for a guy to play Alfie. Everyone had turned him down. Terence Stamp turned him down, Larry Harvey turned. He couldn't find anyone to play Alfie. And Peter Hunt, who had edited Ipcrestfile, said, I know a guy. You know Michael Caine? He said, no. I know this guy. He's in this movie I'm editing now. And he said, I shouldn't show it to you. We've got a rough cut. And he secretly showed Lewis Gilbert a rough cut of Ipcrestfile, which got me the part of Alfie. I remember in the 60s, someone said to me, what do you think of the 60s? It was extraordinary, because everyone you knew became famous. I shared a flat with Terence Stamp. He became a movie star. I shared a flat with John Barry. He became one of the greatest composers in the world. My barber, Vidal Sassoon, he'd become one of the world's greatest hairdressers. It was like the working class came out of this shell of being told who they were and being designated. The 60s was a whole working class thing of not saying we're going to storm the battlements and bring down the toughs and the snobs and put them under guillotine and behead them. They said, this is our world. If you want to join it, okay. If you don't, we'll leave you behind. Goodbye. And that's what we did. They're all out there in their country houses going, I wonder what happened to all those servants who used to doff their hats for us. Ipcrestfile is a very good movie that stands the test of time. You find things that you've forgotten. We did Funeral in Berlin. And then we did The Billion Dollar Brain. And Funeral in Berlin was great. I enjoyed it in Berlin so much. And I liked the picture. And then we got into Finland and the snow with Ken Russell. And that didn't work out so well. Ken was more of a classical picture maker than a thriller maker. It was the wrong type of movie for Ken. But Guy Hamilton directed Funeral in Berlin. And he, of course, was the sort of upper crust Harry Palmer. He was the James Bond character, really. And he directed. Harry Palmer being directed by James Bond in Funeral in Berlin. But I enjoyed all three of them. And they all had a life. There was one that Len did that I always wanted to make. And it could be made. But I love the title. It was set in Paris. And it was called An Expensive Place to Die. It was a wonderful book. That was the main regret that I had about the whole series. It was extraordinarily important for me. The first review I read was, here we have 003 and a half. But then there was an extraordinarily good review. And I read this review. And I knew that I had a career in movies, in leading characters, if not the star role. And I knew I had a future. And I was 31. And for the first time in my life, I knew I had a future in this business after being an actor for 11 years, you know? And I remember I started to cry. And I trumbled up the review. And I threw it out the window as a sort of thing of, I'm on my way from this thing. And I never, ever looked back.