"People Forget That I Knew A Few Gangsters" - Michael Caine On Get Cater
Excerpts from an interview I conducted with Sir Michael in the early noughties.
There seem no limits to Get Carter’s popularity.
I'm always surprised by the number of young people who want to talk about the film. Most of Get Carter's fans weren't even born when the film came out. Of course, I get some older critics who want to discuss it, but by and large, it's young guys in their twenties. It's a little strange to me because it's very clearly a film of its time. But I guess the character of Jack Carter's pretty ageless.
How did you get inside Carter?
Well, people tend to forget that I knew a few gangsters, growing up in Rotherhithe. Knowing those men, I was well aware that gangsters weren't like the people you saw in the movies. If you watch films made before Get Carter, gangsters were always depicted as either funny or stupid, and I knew that was wrong on both counts.
Didn't you talk to a hit-man about the role?
Yes, I did. He thought it would be interesting to see the man behind the killer. If you're a criminal, you're not a criminal every minute of every day. The kids have to go to school, the bills have to be paid, the crossword's got to be done - he thought it was important that Carter wasn't shown as some sort of machine.
Carter laughs, he cries, he's an ordinary person - and that's what makes him frightening. I met a few of the ‘chaps’ after the film came out and they all said I’d done a good job of showing that Carter was a man first and a con second.