Harry Brown - Michael Caine On Staying Hard Well Into His Seventies

The British acting legend on swapping one estate for another.

“I’ve always wanted to be relevant. The films that put me on the map – Alfie, The Ipcress File, Get Carter – those were very much movies of their time. They were of their era and they were about their era. The challenge for me is to make challenging films. I can think of nothing worse than being shut up in an ivory tower feeling all disconnected and conceited. I want to be involved.”

These sentiments are all the more extraordinary when you consider what the man behind them’s accomplished during his lifetime. With a filmography that reads like a list of essential British cinema, Sir Michael Caine is also one of the few talents from this side of The Pond who can truly claim to have conquered Hollywood. Even now in his early eighties, his regular involvement in the films of Christopher Nolan (the Batman saga, Inception, Tenet) demonstrates that this two-time Oscar winner is every bit as big as the medium he has come to dominate.

So why was it then that in 2009, at the relatively tender age of 77, the erstwhile Maurice Micklewhite found himself on a housing estate in South East London shooting the kitchen sink crime drama Harry Brown?

“I wanted to do this film because I really identified with the title character. I have a lot in common with Harry besides age. For one thing, we’re both ex-servicemen – I served in Korea, he’s a former Marine. Then there’s the fact that the Aylesbury Estate where he lives is a stone’s throw from where I was raised. I know this man and I know the area he lives in, and that’s why I had to make Harry Brown.”

A gritty picture about an OAP who issues his own kind of ASBOs, Harry Brown is notable for featuring great turns from Emily Mortimer, Charlie Creed-Miles and Caine’s fellow veteran David Bradley. However, it was the younger members of the cast and crew that the great man gravitated towards.

“Working with young people keeps you young,” he says with a familiar chuckle. “Harry Brown’s director Daniel Barber had never made a feature film before. To see the excitement and enthusiasm he brought to his work, you can’t help but have some of it rub off on you. And as for Ben Drew [aka Plan B], I didn’t know anything about his music but I can tell you he’s a fine young actor even though he’s only made a couple of films.

“Seeing people at the start of their career, it’s a bit like a time machine – you find yourself remembering the way you felt when you were starting out. It’s a great thing to revisit. And as for some of these kids – I don’t mean that patronisingly but, when you’re as old as me, they all seem like kids – to have them come up to me and say that I encouraged them to become actors, that’s just wonderful. It’s like getting the Oscar all over again.”