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Michael
Caine stars in writer/director Tim McCanlies'
new film Secondhand Lions as one of the
cranky, eccentric great-uncles who Haley
Joel Osment reluctantly finds himself
spending the summer with. Caine tells
ComingSoon.net that starring opposite
young Osment was the same as any other
actor.
"I
think he is brilliant. He is not a little
actor," he says. "Someone said
to me what's it like to work with a child
actor? I said I don't know, we weren't
working with a child actor. We were working
with an actor who is a child. To me he
is exactly to Bobby (Robert Duval) and
me. I mean we do not treat him as a child
at all. We showed him no mercy. He is
so mature for his age, it’s quite
extraordinary. He is a very good example
of opposite of what he was playing. He
has an excellent father and an excellent
family. But you see he is very rounded
and he will make the successful change
from child actor to adult because he has
that family."
Caine
says he enjoyed making the movie because
of its message and the father/son relationship.
"It's something absolutely different
from anything that I have done. And it's
so positive. I've done a lot of tough
pictures; a lot of complicated pictures
and this is just very honest and positive.
It's also slightly old fashioned in a
way and in very good way. For instance,
boys with role models, so many go wrong
because there is no father there. And
this is what you see in here. He finds
two fathers, which is very important."
In
"Lions", he and Robert Duvall
play wealthy Texans. He described how
to us how he got the mentality of a Texan.
"It's a stillness," adds Caine.
"Texans are the ultimate country
people and they have stillness - you watch
this on the porch. We just sat still,
no one fidgeted. In city life you have
to compete with lots of other people ambient
noise and everything. So you speak loudly,
and you use your hands all the time in
front of people's eyes to get they're
attention. Texans don't have to. They
are very big, they have a gun, and when
they talk you listen and that's a supreme
example of it. But that does go through
their whole society. You have to remember
the crew were Texans on that picture.
So I could see Texans sitting around very
quietly when I had nothing to do."
An
Englishman doing a Texan accent must have
been tough. "Joe Stevens, who was
my dialect coach, recorded all of my dialogue
three months before the movie and sent
it to me. I learned it from him on earphones
so my accent is very much Joe Stevens.
But when I got there it sounded wrong
to him. And he was very clever. He said,
'you are speaking with a Texas accent
and an English rhythm'. He said' you are
speaking each word separately like soldiers
standing to attention. That's English.'
He said Texan is lazy, all the words lean
on each other (doing a Texan Accent) just
like that one after another. That was
all he said and I knew it! They just lean
on each other. Remember that, they don't
stand up right!
In
the movie, humor can be found everywhere,
even at times when no one is intentionally
trying to be funny. "That was the
whole point. The three of us played it,
we were never funny. What is amusing is
us being real. These people are funny
if they are real. If you try to be funny
you've had it. That really goes for movie
acting in general. What I do, when I am
watching television, sometimes I'll get
all the movie channels and I'll say lets
find a movie where they are doing a bad
comedy. The way you do that is you switch
the sound off and you go through and if
you look at the faces in the acting, you
can tell it's a comedy, you can tell it's
crap."
Hmm,
good advice! Michael Caine added that
he does have several favorite scenes and
lines in the movie. ""It was
a scene where Bobby talks to Haley about
love. He had great difficulty in saying
the word love. I thought it was so wonderful.
My favorite line in the film is where
he said, 'a thing doesn't have to be true
in order for you to believe in it'. When
Bobby was in the water sleep walking and
we were by the fire, that's my favorite
scene in the film when I'm with Haley."
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