HOLLYWOOD -- With all due respect to The Ipcress File, Alfie, Sleuth, Hannah And Her Sisters, The Cider House Rules, lots of other movies and even his latest, Secondhand Lions, Michael Caine knows his best work is elsewhere.
Caine cites The Quiet American, the 2002 film that earned him an Oscar nomination as best actor earlier this year.
"I regard that as the best work I ever did," Caine tells The Sun.
Yet Caine is still bitter about the treatment of his treasure. "I've done the best performance I've ever given -- and nothing happened!"
Caine feels that Miramax Films, which produced the film and released it in the U.S., actually abandoned it because Miramax head honcho Harvey Weinstein did not like the politics of the piece. Only the success of the film in the 2002 Toronto film festival saved it from the scrapheap, says Caine.
The Quiet American, which is a new adaptation of the Graham Greene novel, tells the fictional but semi-autobiographcal story of a dissolute English journalist (Caine) and a hotshot American aid worker-spy (Brendan Fraser) who feud in Vietnam in 1951-52, leading to tragedy. The story is set against the backdrop of French colonialism, the war of independence and the zealous and rash involvement of Americans, which led to the folly of the U.S. war in Vietnam in the 1960s.
"It was a great lesson for me," says Caine, "because I no longer care about it -- so I'll walk away."
What he means, Caine says, is that he no longer cares about the fate of his films, not even his favourites. It is just too painful.
But, of course, he is being slightly disingenuous in the case of The Quiet American. He does still care, as he demonstrated when he enthused about the DVD release this summer (by Miramax in the U.S. and Alliance Atlantis in Canada).
"It's there in DVD," says Caine. "That's where I wanted it."
DVD allows audiences to discover films forgotten from the past or overlooked in the present, he says. "It comes round and round and round, and that's what I hope will happen to The Quiet American, which wasn't given a real good release (in the U.S.) and wasn't pushed. If it stays around awhile on DVD then ... It may take awhile, I may not see it, but it will be there."
Even the Oscar nomination is a bitter point. "It would have been a great triumph," he says of finally winning as best actor, "but I knew I wasn't going to win anyway, because I had seen the budget of the publicity (campaign)."
While such films as Chicago and Gangs Of New York were heavily promoted for Oscars, his was not, Caine says. "There was never anything at all about The Quiet American. Nothing! The Quiet American? It was the absolutely silent American! I was told there would be no campaign at all for me." Few videoes were sent out to Academy voters, he says. "You can't vote for an actor if you haven't bloody seen the film."
The DVD helps right the wrongs done to his film, Caine says. He doesn't usually participate in his DVD releases: "It's the past; if you keep looking back, you'll fall over!"
But he does share DVD time on The Quiet American, joining director Phillip Noyce, co-star Fraser and others on a feature-length commentary. This excellent DVD, which features a beautiful widescreen transfer, also has a strong lineup of other extras. They include a Sundance Channel special, Anatomy Of A Scene, in which we see how the infamous real-life terrorist bombing of Garnier Square is re-created in the film.
DVD, says Caine, is a beautiful thing for a film like this one.
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