The Elephant to Hollywood

20 The Quiet American

Just as I was getting comfortable with my leading actor status, along came a film that had, as they say in skating, real ‘degrees of difficulty’ – and I couldn’t turn it down. It wasn’t just that playing the anti-hero Thomas Fowler in The Quiet American was a challenge that would make greater demands on me than I had faced in some time, it was also – I hoped – a chance to make a film of a Graham Greene novel that the author, who is one of my favourites, would have been proud of.

I was at a table in the Connaught Hotel in London one Sunday evening many years ago, having dinner. We were making a film nearby and I had rushed over between takes – as the only person on the set wearing collar and tie (it was my costume, actually, not my own clothes) and therefore allowed into the place, I was eating alone. Suddenly a shadow fell across my table. I looked up and thought, ‘Oh, shit!’ It was Graham Greene and I was aware that my recent film of his book The Honorary Consul was not very good. Sitting there, looking up at him and feeling guilty anyway, he seemed very tall and threatening, but as I stood up to greet him I realised he was only my height. We introduced ourselves and shook hands, and then he said, ‘I didn’t like the film, Michael, but I did like your performance.’ He was notorious for hating the films of his books, but I think he was probably right about the film – and I was flattered by his assessment of my part in it.

The film – which was eventually and mysteriously released in America in 1983 as Beyond the Limit – also starred Richard Gere and, the first time I had worked with him, Bob Hoskins. Bob was very much ‘what you see is what you get’ from the first moment I met him, and we have gone on to make several pictures together since. Richard Gere, on the other hand, is a much more intense actor, although some of the intensity of his concentration during the making of that film may have been down to the appalling dysentery he suffered on location in Mexico. I wasn’t surprised when I walked past the café at which he and his girlfriend had eaten – I hadn’t seen a plague of rats like it since Korea. However careful you were, it was impossible to escape the bug and eventually the entire cast and crew all fell ill – all except me. I had devised the perfect preventative: before every meal I downed a straight vodka and followed it up with wine and finally a brandy (this was in my younger days, you understand). I figured that no germ could survive an onslaught like that; the problem was that it nearly finished me off, too…

No matter how much I drank off the set, I was always meticulously careful about never being drunk on set; I have too much professional pride for that. I was playing a drunk, too, and that, of course, requires complete sobriety. My character, the Consul, was not only a drunk, but also addicted to aspirins and I was given handfuls of dummy pills to chew. I had to chew away in the first scene, but unfortunately there had been some mix-up and I really was handed a fistful of aspirins. They had an extraordinary effect: I began to feel very odd, started swaying far more than the Consul was supposed to and eventually collapsed and had to be carried off the set. I recovered back at the hotel and was fine for the rest of the shoot. In fact I was the only member of the team who didn’t succumb to dysentery, so maybe my bizarre diet of aspirins and heavy duty evening drinking stripped my system bare of any rogue germs – I wouldn’t recommend it, though…

I felt that justice had not been done to the genius of Graham Greene by The Honorary Consul and so in 2001 I leapt at the chance to put things right with The Quiet American, which charts the start of American involvement in the Vietnam war. I had waited a long time for this sort of role and I was looking forward not only to a story of this quality, but also to filming in Saigon, or Ho Chi Minh City, as it was named after the war.

It was not exactly how I had imagined it. Shakira and I arrived at the hotel at Sunday lunchtime and we were starving. I asked if we could eat in the restaurant, which I could see from the lobby was doing a roaring trade. The manager was apologetic and told us that there would be a half-hour wait. ‘It’s always packed for Sunday lunch,’ he said. ‘What are you serving?’ I asked. ‘Go and see,’ he said with a smile. ‘You won’t believe it!’ We did – and we didn’t. Apart from a very few Europeans, the tables were stuffed with Vietnamese families all tucking into roast beef and Yorkshire pudding. ‘Incredible, isn’t it?’ the manager said from behind us. ‘We started it because we get a lot of British visitors and it’s just caught on.’

After we had unpacked and sampled the delights of a Vietnamese roast dinner (not bad at all), we went for a walk. Our impressions of what the streets would look like were all taken from films – mostly French – and featured horse-drawn taxis, vintage cars and locals on thousands of bicycles. Needless to say, we’d got that one wrong. Ho Chi Minh City has three million motor scooters and not one single traffic regulation or signal that anyone takes any notice of. I later asked a Vietnamese if he had any tips on how to cross a road. ‘A good start,’ he said, ‘is to be a Buddhist.’ Well, I had already failed that one. ‘Anything else?’ I persisted. ‘Just step off the pavement,’ he advised, ‘and don’t catch anyone’s eye. If you catch their eye it puts them off and they’ll hit you.’ He seemed to think this was an entirely reasonable explanation. Shakira and I never risked following his advice, but we did come up with a method of our own. We looked for groups of Buddhists, inserted ourselves into the very centre of them and crossed when they did. If we were going to be mown down, we would at least be in the right company.

Once we had mastered the art of crossing the road, I noticed that all the young women riding scooters wore full-length evening gloves that reached right up to their armpits: it was a truly bizarre sight. I asked our Vietnamese friend why this was and he told me that middle-class girls did not want sunburnt arms because only peasant women had sunburnt arms. Class distinction on scooters – that was a new one on me! If we made it safely to the other side unscathed by the scooters, we were ambushed by the small boys who swarmed the streets carrying trays of stuff to sell. Apart from the usual postcards and cigarettes, they also all carried the same three random and at first sight rather puzzling products: David Beckham Number 8 football shirts, pirate DVDs of Miss Congeniality, which hadn’t even come out in America at this point, and paperback copies of The Quiet American.

I was intrigued by all three of these items – not least by how the hell they had managed to smuggle out a black market copy of Miss Congeniality so quickly – but it was the presence of the Graham Greene novels I found the most interesting. It turned out that the book had almost iconic status in Ho Chi Minh City. People would point out the window of the room where Greene wrote it in the French colonial Majestic Hotel and just walking around, it was possible to sense the decadence, imagine the brothels and almost smell the drugs that had pervaded the city – and Greene’s novel – then. Although the Communist government had cleared out most of the signs of bourgeois decadence, there was one visible reminder of the Saigon Greene writes about so evocatively: portly, elderly European men could be seen everywhere with beautiful young Vietnamese girls on their arms. A couple of the reviews of our film implied that I was too old for the role of Fowler, but obviously they had never been to Vietnam. I, too, had been a bit worried about taking it on because of the age difference between my character and my young mistress and when we did the screen test, I asked make-up to make the actress Do Thi Hai Yen who was to play Phuong look as old and tarty as they could. It was an impossible task as she was stunningly beautiful – and I needn’t have bothered: such was the desperation of many young Vietnamese women to leave the country that they would go out with any foreigner, even one as old and creaky as me.

Everywhere I went in Vietnam it was still possible to find someone who knew something about The Quiet American or about Graham Greene himself. One old American reporter – a Graham Greene character if ever there was one – told me that the reason Greene had written the book in the first place was because he had come across a story of two American women who had been killed in the North and their bodies shipped back without a mention. Greene went to Hanoi to investigate. The reporter didn’t know what he had found – but he did know that Greene started writing The Quiet American on his journey back to Saigon.

We received fantastic co-operation and help from the Vietnamese authorities during filming. At a key point in the movie, which is based on a real incident, there is a huge bomb explosion and the city council allowed us to close streets all around the city centre so we could recreate this. I think they did it because the book and Greene himself were seen as anti-American – although the Communists were blamed for the explosion at the time, Greene suspected that the bomb had been planted by the Americans and he is likely to have been right. The Americans ignored his advice (which made him very unpopular at the time), which was to keep clear of a war the French were already losing – although I think they would take a different view in hindsight. I had served in Korea alongside Americans and at the time, I fully expected the British to go into Vietnam with them. I was very surprised when we didn’t. It was only when I was in Saigon for this film, and realised that Greene was in British Intelligence in Sierra Leone during the Second World War, that I put two and two together: maybe he advised the British government against it. Perhaps he really was ‘Our Man’ in Saigon.

Letting off our explosion in the square caused some considerable excitement. First of all we had a very special secret visitor on the set: a tiny Vietnamese man who turned out to be General Giap, the general in charge of North Vietnamese forces who had finally beaten the Americans. He just wanted to witness our recreation of the incident that had started the war… Then, as we worked setting up the scene, we noticed a man with a bicycle standing right next to one of the cameras and watching what was going on intently. When the explosion went off – and it was a very big one – he went nuts and started running round and screaming in Vietnamese. Our interpreters shouted translations at a surprised Philip Noyce, the director. ‘That was exactly it!’ the man was yelling, pointing to a spot about twenty yards from where the ‘bomb’ had gone off. ‘I was riding this bicycle right there – I could have been killed, but I was late for work!’ We obviously got something right…

We finally left the hustle and bustle and the three million motor scooters behind and while the unit prepared to move location, we escaped to the paradise of the Furama Hotel and spa on China Beach, near Da Nang. It was the first free time I had had – I have never worked so hard before or since on a movie – and we were determined to make the most of it. It was also a chance to see the traditional Vietnam – and we weren’t disappointed. One night, after a night shoot, we were coming back to the hotel when we suddenly came across a massive vegetable market sprawled across the road for about a quarter of a mile. The car screeched to a halt and we slowly picked our way through the stalls as ladies moved their mats and baskets of fruit and vegetables out of the way. When we finally made it safely to the other side without killing any of the vendors or squashing so much as an onion, I asked our driver, who was a local man, what on earth they were doing holding a market in the middle of the road anyway. He shrugged. ‘They were there first,’ he said. ‘They have been there for a thousand years and weren’t going to move, so when they built the road right through the middle of the market they were prepared to change the time of the market to night time when there is less traffic, but they refused to budge.’ That’s what I call tradition!

From there we moved on to the old Communist capital, Hanoi. We encountered the same motor scooters and the same noise – although there didn’t seem to be any Buddhists to help us cross the streets there. In fact the whole place and the people we met seemed to be much tougher and I could understand how these people had refused to be beaten by the Americans. Vietnam seemed to me to be almost three nations: the southerners were like the Italians with their great love of life; the ones in the middle were a bit like the Belgians: just anxious to get on with everything quietly and hoping their bigger neighbours would leave them alone; and the northerners were like the Germans – tough, efficient and always on time (Churchill was once asked if the Blitz on London had taught him anything and he said yes, it had – the Germans were punctual!).

There were signs everywhere in Hanoi of the monotonous lives that the Vietnamese had to put up with under the Communist regime. We were driving back late one night through the city and as we passed house after tiny house, all with their doors and windows open and all with the television on, it dawned on me that they were all watching the same programme. No wonder – when I asked the driver how many stations they had, the answer was ‘One’. They were also subjected to a relentless diet of propaganda. In an overnight stay in a hotel outside Hanoi, I was woken up at dawn by loudspeakers all over the town blaring martial music at maximum volume before a man came on and began to exhort his comrades to get up and produce even more than they had the day before. It was too noisy to stay in bed, so I got up and went for a walk and by chance passed a small studio with its doors open. Curious, I peeped inside and there was the actual man making the broadcast, screaming his head off. I had nothing to lose (I’d already lost enough sleep!) and I stepped inside and shouted at him, ‘shut the fuck up!’. He just smiled and waved and carried on…

Eventually it was time to move on from Vietnam and shoot the studio interior sequences, which we did in Sydney. I think it’s one of the most beautiful cities in the world and I love the place – if it were a couple of thousand miles closer, we’d all be living there… It was a relief to get there after Vietnam, and our Australian crew – who were great – were especially happy to be back on home ground.

I turned up to make-up on the first day of shooting feeling very relaxed and happy with life. I sat down and as the make-up lady was getting to work she said to me very casually, ‘You do know you’ve got skin cancer, don’t you?’ I shot out of that chair at about a hundred miles an hour. ‘Skin cancer?’ I said. ‘Where?’ She pointed to a mark on my face that I had thought was just a razor rash. I didn’t know what to think, but I was encouraged by how unperturbed she seemed to be – I mean, I know Australians are laid back, but she was a genius. ‘No worries,’ she said. ‘It’s very common in Australia – and most of them aren’t serious.’ For obvious reasons I couldn’t have the operation while we were filming, so I made an appointment with Sydney’s top skin cancer specialist, who scheduled surgery for the very second we finished the shoot, and did my best to put it out of my mind and just get on with the job.

We were operating a more relaxed filming schedule in Sydney, so there was a bit of time to see the sights. We had a fabulous apartment right on the harbour with spectacular views, although the most spectacular of all wasn’t there when we went to bed one evening, but in the morning when we woke up it had appeared during the night – there, outside our window, was the QE2. We were invited on board for a tour one afternoon and were shown around by the captain. It is a beautiful and remarkable ship (it was retired in 2008 and is now awaiting refurbishment as a floating hotel) although it has its stranger aspects. We were just going past what was obviously the most luxurious apartment on board when the captain put his finger to his lips. ‘Sssssh,’ he said. ‘Our most important guests are probably asleep.’ It turned out that this couple had actually lived on the ship for several years and travelled all round the world without ever leaving the ship…

When we came back on deck I looked over at the famous Harbour Bridge and noticed that there was a group of tourists all tied together climbing over the top of it. ‘I’d love to do that,’ I said, ‘but it looks a bit scary.’ ‘Not at all!’ said the captain. ‘People do it all the time and it’s perfectly safe.’ Not many people can say they were talked into climbing the Sydney Harbour Bridge by the captain of the QE2, so I accepted the challenge and the next day Shakira and I lined up with everyone else. We were given special harnesses to wear that were clipped into a wire that ran all the way up to the top. ‘That will stop us falling off,’ I said to the guide rather nervously. ‘It’s not there for that,’ he said, ‘it’s to stop you jumping off. People lose their nerve sometimes and seem to want to leap!’ Not me, I thought, not in a million years, but we took a deep breath and started the climb. It was fantastic – Shakira and I loved every moment and there’s a picture of the two of us on the very top, with the block of apartments we were staying in over one shoulder and the Sydney Opera House over the other to prove it.

All these wonderful experiences were to a certain extent displacement activities. We were coming to the end of the filming and I knew I was then facing surgery for my skin cancer. I had already been reassured to some extent by my first visit to the surgeon. ‘If I were going to have skin cancer,’ he said, ‘then this is the one I would choose.’ I nearly kissed him. He did tell me the name of it, which I found unpronounceable, but being a keen gardener and cook there was one syllable I did recognise: ‘basil’ – pronounced in the American way (actually it turns out to have been a ‘basal cell carcinoma’). So if you are ever unlucky enough to get skin cancer and you hear the word ‘basil’, you are probably OK. In the end, the whole thing was remarkably painless. A lump of skin one inch wide and fourteen stitches long was cut from my neck and I got on the plane to England an hour later and flew all the way home without any discomfort at all. The guy was a genius – there’s no sign of any scar at all and in the unlikely event of my ever wanting to have a facelift, I’ll be straight back on that plane!

The Quiet American was first scheduled to be released in September 2001, but because of the tragic events of 9/11, it was postponed for over a year. When it was eventually released – and I had to beg Harvey Weinstein to release it in time to qualify for the Oscars – it got a great critical reception and I was nominated for an Academy Award as Best Actor. I knew in my heart of hearts that there was no way that a film which implied even the slightest criticism of American foreign policy was going to have a good chance, so I went back to England and got on with the important things in life: my family and my home. After all, there were roses to be pruned, potatoes to plant and rhubarb to be cut. I was reminded of something a Hollywood producer – and great friend – I had worked for once said when he had to break some bad news to me about an award. He gave me a hug and whispered, ‘It’s not your turn, Michael.’ I smiled and pretended not to mind too much and as he walked away, he gave me a very Hollywood line. ‘I am an honest man, Michael: I would only ever stab you in the chest.’ That’s show business.

A lot of show business is about timing and in this instance the timing was against The Quiet American big time. The Americans invaded Iraq on 20 March 2003; the Academy Awards were just four days later on 24 March. The night before the ceremony I had dinner at Jack Nicholson’s with three of the other four nominees for Best Actor: Jack, for About Schmidt, Nicolas Cage for Adaptation, Adrian Brody for The Pianist (who was a worthy winner). Daniel Day-Lewis, who had been nominated for Gangs of New York, was still on a plane and couldn’t join us. We were basically deciding whether or not we should go ahead with the ceremony or abandon the whole thing. In the end, we decided to go with movie tradition and the show went on – although it was a very subdued ceremony indeed, only livened up by speeches protesting against the war.

It’s always disappointing not to win, but in this case I really felt I had given my best. Philip Noyce, a great Australian director, guided the film brilliantly and Brendan Fraser, who plays the well-intentioned American, Alden Pyle, for whom my character’s mistress Phuong leaves me, gave a great performance. With them, a brilliant new actor I hadn’t come across before, Rade Šerbedžija, who played Inspector Vigot, and a script by Christopher Hampton – not to mention the quality of the original novel – I felt I had a chance of getting as close to my own standards of perfection as I possibly could; a chance to reach the limit of my own talent, a chance to improve my work. Great movie actors make themselves and the acting disappear and you only see the character. If you sit there and say – isn’t he a wonderful actor? – then he isn’t a wonderful actor at all. You shouldn’t see the actor in the movies; that’s for the theatre…

When I was young, I read something somewhere that urged Olympic athletes to ‘go for the dream, not for the competition’ and this line has stayed with me all my professional life. In fact I have absolutely no sense of competition whatsoever. What other actors do or don’t do has never been of the slightest interest. It’s the same with critics. I am my own most severe critic and far harder on myself than any film critic could ever be. I do find the opinions of the better and more thoughtful critics interesting – and some of them are very helpful – but so many of them have been wrong so many times that I’ve found it’s best to ignore all of them, the good and the bad! I learnt two lessons about critics, one at the beginning of my theatre career and one at the beginning of my movie career. When I was in rep, I met the local newspaper critic and asked him what experience he had – and he admitted that he had none. The person who was the latest into the office during the course of the week, he explained, got assigned the theatre review as a punishment. Mind you, remembering some of the performances – including my own – in my first rep company in Horsham, I am inclined to think the punishment wasn’t severe enough… The first review I read for Alfie commented that, ‘a potentially good film is ruined by the terrible performance of Michael Caine as the central character.’ After that, I decided, I was on my own – and nothing I’ve experienced since has made me change my mind!