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"NO!" he fairly bellows over the line. "Call me Michael."
A working-class London yob at heart -- and still the hardest-working man in cinema -- Caine, 68, is dutifully putting in time promoting Quills, the art flick that stars Geoffrey Rush as the Marquis de Sade and Caine as his malevolently self-righteous nemesis, Dr. Royer Collard.
According to various media calculations, Quills is Caine's 98th film. The day after our talk, he and his wife of 28 years, Shakira, are off to vacation in Mauritius and Bali before he moves on to Vietnam to shoot his 100th, a remake of The Quiet American with Brendan Fraser. (Number 99 was a British gangster film called Shiner, due out in April.)
"I've never counted, but 100 sounds right," he says. "Some of them you have such small parts in. Pictures in which I play the lead must be about 60. The other 40 would be little parts, guest shots and all that,
y'know. I'm the last name on the list in a couple. They're movies like A Bridge Too Far or Battle Of Britain where you turn up for a five-minute part. Whatever, you still get paid."
Not all of them, however, carry more prestigious rewards like, say, Oscars. An underdog in the best supporting actor category, Caine won his second Oscar last year (after Crimes And Misdemeanors) for The Cider House Rules. The studio is pushing him for Oscar consideration for Quills, a movie that also boasts stellar performances from Rush as de Sade confined to a madhouse, Joaquin Phoenix as a conflicted French priest struggling to run the asylum with compassion, and Kate Winslet as a virginal charwoman obsessed with both the priest and the debauched inmate.
"Not a lemon in the bunch," agrees Caine with a laugh. "I have a lot of competition from my own castmates. I think Geoffrey will get nominated. Kate might. Joaquin deserves one. And I think it works against me that I've won twice."
Nonetheless, he is the yin to Rush's yang as the not-so-good doctor (among other things, the brutal husband of a teenage bride). Collard is a political appointee sent by Napoleon himself to halt the smuggling of the Marquis' infamous sado-masochistic writings to his publisher. A proponent of the Iron Maiden treatment of mental disorders, he's perfectly willing to use torture to kill the Marquis' muse.
"A reporter attacked me recently saying, 'You made this picture defending the Marquis de Sade, this terrible filth.' And I said, 'Yes, that's what I'm doing.' And they said, 'Why?'
"And I said, 'Because he must have the right to write, and I must have the right not to read it. Because what happens is directly after someone censors something and tells you what you can and cannot write, the next step is to tell you what you can and cannot read. And very often the next is to tell you what you must read, as in Das Kapital or Mein Kampf.' "
He characterizes Collard as "one of these religious zealots who, in the name of a God of love, would do anything to other human beings. On the other hand, he was very enjoyable to play because when you get something as extreme as that, you joke and have laughs on the set. It was not a serious set.
"I had to do a scene in bed with a girl of 17 (Amelia Warner) who's playing my wife. And the only way we could accomplish that, her and I, was to laugh through the whole thing. At times when she grimaced, she was holding back laughter.
"It's pretty embarrassing at my age to be doing that with a girl who's young enough to be my granddaughter."