Director Kenneth Branagh

Separately, Kenneth Branagh and Michael Caine may have worked with just about every actor and director in Great Britain, but they’ve never worked with each other. That gap has been remedied with Sleuth, a new film based on the Anthony Shaffer play. Perhaps “inspired” would be a better verb: This version was scripted by the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Harold Pinter, who retained only the basic plot structure (two men in an English country house, one of them an aging novelist, the other the young man who has been sleeping with his wife). The play was filmed before in 1972 by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, with Laurence Olivier and Caine. This time Caine takes the role of the older man, against Jude Law (who also produced) as his nemesis.

Caine and Branagh were at the Toronto Film Festival in September for the premier of the film, which is currently playing in Buffalo at the North Park. Here are some of their comments from a roundtable interview I attended:

Artvoice: What made you decide to remake this story?

Michael Caine: The adaptation by Pinter is so great—there isn’t a single word of dialogue in it that was in the first one—that there was never a feeling of doing a remake for me. I would never have remade the Anthony Shaffer script because I thought that Joe Mankiewicz had done a perfectly good job of that.

Pinter never saw the movie—Jude just took him to the play, and said, make a screenplay out of that. And it was so completely different as to be unrecognizable. I always regarded it as if we were thieves, we’d stolen the plot and the title and made a film.

I have a long history with Harold. I used to be an actor with him [in his youth, Pinter worked as an actor using the name David Baron]. When he wrote his first play, a one-act called “The Room,” I did it at the Royal Court. I loved his writing, and it was a success, and then for 50 years I never ever got offered a Pinter part! I thought, wait a minute, I started all this, I was the first one to do it! And never again! Fifty years, never got another part. I have no idea why. Maybe they thought I couldn’t do it.

Kenneth Branagh: Well, you were probably too busy.

Caine: Yeah, that must be it!

Branagh: There’s a beautiful marriage between Pinter and Michael, who combines a working-class voice and a sophisticated intelligence and the ability to invest everyday colloquial phrases with deadly humor or terrifying menace. It does make it astonishing that he’s never done Pinter before.

Caine: The thing about Pinter is that you have to play it absolutely natural. It’s like being the straight man with a comedian. If you’re the straight man and you try to be funny, then you screw the comedian up. But if you stay straight, the comedian looks funny because everybody is looking at you and thinking, “He’s just like me,” and the comedian isn’t. That’s why it’s funny. That’s what Pinter is like.

Artvoice: Was the modernistic design of the house Pinter’s idea?

Branagh: His screenplay was pretty spare, it’s mostly dialogue. The big thing he said was that the outside of the house is period, inside it’s modern, and that was it really.

Caine: That was the basic difference between the two films. The house became a character, and not a very nice one.

Branagh: In a way the interior of the house is the interior of Michael’s mind, full of dark textures, showing off its conspicuous wealth and control. I thought of the house as saying to Jude, I’m so superior to you in every conceivable way, even in the area where you think I might be a bit of a slow coach, modern technology. I run this house, I am omnipotent. The only thing you’ve got on me is that you’re a little bit younger, and you’ve got my wife. But everything else…

A favorite shot of mine is right in the beginning, the overhead shot at the door, when you just see a hand emerge from the house, it’s as if Michael won’t even come out, he won’t even give him that. It looks like he is the house, like he’s wearing it like a backpack—I am this house, and I will beat the bejeezus out of you!

Artvoice: The original film was shot in 16 weeks, but yours took only four. Did that make a difference?

Caine: Our movie was shot on an adrenaline rush, because we didn’t have 16 weeks to shoot it. If we had 16 weeks, we would have screwed it all up, because we would have had time to have second thoughts about everything. But we only had about five days of rehearsals on the first one, and three weeks of very intensive, long rehearsals on this one. It’s based on a Stanislavski principle which I espouse, the basis of all my acting, which states that the rehearsals are the work, and the performance is the relaxation.

Branagh: The rehearsal is about making all the effort to make it look effortless, you work very hard to take all that away. The preparation is about being as spontaneous as you can on the final day. If you really work hard you can change things at the last minute, an the boys can roll with it. Ultimately my goal is to get the boys to a part where they can feel there’s an improvised quality to something they had prepared so well that they can surprise each other in the moment. It’s not about repeating, its about recreating in the moment through behavior and naturalism. But to get to that point they worked very very hard.

Caine: It also helps to have a director who as good as or a better actor than you are, If things start to go wrong he knows how to tell you. He knows how to treat you because he’s been in that position before.

Branagh: It was very interesting for me to realize how little you needed to say, because the rehearsals had got the shorthand going, and that’s how we could shoot it in four weeks.

Artvoice: Tell me about the North American release of [Branagh’s] adaptation of Mozart’s The Magic Flute, shot in 2006.

Branagh: It’ll be out in Canada in January, the UK in November. It’s been a big hit in Japan, big hit in the Scandinavian countries, big hit in Spain. It’s been difficult each time. The world’s not screaming to get The Magic Flute, but there is a audience out there, I cannot tell a lie, it is like pushing heavy weights up a hill to get distribution companies to take the film. It’s been an interesting process to find the right people who want to do it, and when we do we do really well, it’s bloody thrilling. So we’re just got to get the US. But it will be in Canada in January, and I shall be back to bore people stupid about Mozart!