Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: And Other Lessons in Life

Product Information

Instead, my biggest piece of advice to anyone just starting out, or to anyone who feels like they are taking a wrong turn along the way, is this. Find something you want to do and learn how to do it really well. Take what you got and make the most of it. Learn how to do something, whatever it is, you would choose to do for nothing. Whatever it is, when you are doing it, it makes you feel amazing and most yourself. Throw yourself into it. Challenge yourself to be the best you can be. We can’t all be famous actors. But, if you can find something you love and if that something will also pay the bills, you will be on your way to your own personal paradise.” I know that,” he said. “But what are you doing? You’re giving me an actor playing a drunk. I’m paying you to be a drunk. You’re trying to talk slurred and walk crooked. A real drunk is trying to speak clearly and walk straight.” My wise and wily repertory theatre director had summed up movie acting in one line, and I remember it and use it to this day. My” CAINE: We were an occupation force in Berlin, yes, for a year. I was 18. And then they sent us to Korea for a year.

BBC Sounds - Blowing the Bloody Doors Off by Michael Caine

Go on. “I’d rather be a poor master than a rich servant.” Spoken like a man paid several million dollars every time he turned out as Batman’s butler. CAINE: Yes, we’ve had loads of fish. He was quite well paid as a fish market porter but he was a gambler. So we never had a lot of money. He left school at 16; menial jobs followed, then National Service and deployment to Korea where he saw active service. But he had already found the professional love of his life, acting, through a youth club, and the teaching he needed from the cinema and the local library. By the age of 30 he had acted all around the country, and auditioned some 800 times. You are, Caine reminds us, always performing - yet he can say this as a basic rule without the reader ever doubting his sincerity and authenticity

Incidentally, we should remember that it was to Sir Michael’s canon that Sarah Vine turned on the morning after the Brexit vote, telling her husband Michael Gove: “you were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off.” Does Caine have any quotable quotes for those suggesting the complexity of the task is unprecedented? I don’t want to screw up today’s work and tomorrow’s worrying about yesterday’s and I don’t want to focus on what it looks like on the outside when the performance has to come from within me. I want to be in the moment now, getting it right from the inside.” AMANPOUR: One of the most chilling passages about your childhood is when you were sort of farmed out once the war broke out and many people were farmed out, right? Age to me is in the mind. I’ve seen 70-year-olds who are already dead and 90-year-olds who can’t stop themselves living. I stay young by refusing to be old.”

BLOWING THE BLOODY DOORS OFF | Kirkus Reviews

I do like to laugh. I remember Roger Moore, years ago, saying to me “Cheer up. You’d better have a good time because this is not a rehearsal, this is life. This is the show.” His painstaking working methods are quite staggering; learning all the script before he turns up – and not learning what the other actors are going to say, so he can react freshly as though having a conversation. On location he does not like to stay in his trailer but is out and about. He gives tips on how to look at the camera, and techniques to neatly upstage others (if desired). You are, Caine reminds us, always performing – yet he can say this as a basic rule without the reader ever doubting his sincerity and authenticity. Only the most blinkered Remoaner could think Brexit is the worst thing Michael Caine’s ever done. Whatever lies ahead of us politically, it just couldn’t be as ghastly as Sir Michael’s filmography for the years 1978-1985*. Which, when you consider he made Jaws IV in 1987, puts everything into perspective. When you are prepared, you are able to subdue your fear, control your nerves, channel your energy, and enter that state of highly alert relaxation that is spontaneity’s best friend.” Politics is always chaotic,” he explains. “In politics, you’re always going into areas you’ve never been before, so you’re always going to get lost and then you’re going to find your way, and then it’ll be all right.”I was cast as a drunkard, and at my first rehearsal I came staggering onto the stage, then swayed about a bit. The director held up his hand. “Stop. What are you doing, Michael?” “I’m drunk in this scene,” I explained, failing to hide my irritation that it had not been apparent.” AMANPOUR: And another thing that stayed with you — and not many people talk about this and I was really really interested to read it. You spent time at war. You were drafted. You went to Post-World War II Germany as part of the occupiers. MICHAEL CAINE: My view was this wasn’t going to be a sort of third autobiography, which it would have been. This was a journey between me and the reader. It was you and me. And we were going to do this together. And it came about because I told these people saying I want to be rich and famous. You know, but what I felt was that you’ve got to find out what you want to do and be the best possible person you can be at it. In my case, there are actors who are better than me, actors who are worse than me. My only competition was me. I had to be better every time.

Michael Caine on His Memoir “Blowing the Bloody Doors Off” Michael Caine on His Memoir “Blowing the Bloody Doors Off”

CAINE: It was abject poverty. Yes. Yes. After the war, I was moved into a prefab because we got bumped out, which was a modern little cottage made of asbestos. And this was the greatest thing that happened to me because I was 12-years-old and I had a house with an indoor toilet, a bathroom, a refrigerator. I’ve never had anything. So my father was a village fish market porter and he used to take one out of every box so they didn’t notice.