At 70, Michael Caine is happiest puttering about in his English country garden, which all summer was bursting with plants that Caine calls by their Latin names.

"I've got a life there," Caine told The Sun last week in Toronto.

"I don't need to work."

Yet the veteran actor can still be lured out of his bucolic bliss and away from his beloved second wife, Shakira, to tackle a film project.

"I don't know why it is because I hate leaving, I hate going," he groused softly. "But, I suppose, in the end you say: 'It's what I do!' "

He ended up in Vietnam to shoot Phillip Noyce's The Quiet American, which garnered Caine a best-actor Oscar nomination earlier this year for his sterling performance as a dissolute British reporter during France's bloody Vietnam War. Then he ended up in Provence and the Cote d'Azur in southern France for Norman Jewison's The Statement, a political thriller that opens tomorrow in Toronto theatres.

In this movie, a Canada-Britain-France co-production, Caine plays a French Roman Catholic fanatic. He is on the run from federal prosecutors in 1992 because of his crimes against humanity during World War II.

During the Nazi occupation, France operated under the Vichy regime, which helped the Nazis round up and murder Jews. Caine's character is personally responsible for seven deaths, as we see in a flashback to 1944.

Yet the Church still harbours him, even paying his expenses and giving him safe passage. The story is fiction, loosely based on fact.

The role fascinated Caine -- and he realizes there will be other roles that lure him out of that garden.

"If you're a boxer or a footballer or something else, you've got to give up at some point because you can't run around anymore.

"But, with an actor, they need guys (aged) 95 sometimes. So there's always some temptation there to do things."

The temptation of playing Pierre Brossard in The Statement involved the chance to show both the banality of evil and to reveal Brossard in subtle ways with the behavioral details of a real and ordinary person.

"I've always dealt in subtlety," Caine said. "That's what I do. I'm not a bravura actor. Now that I'm older and can choose these people that I play more freely, and get better parts to play, it's more interesting for me.

"I'm playing to the people who can find the subtlety in what I'm doing. I'm not there for people who want a motorbike to come off the edge of the cliff and burst into flames."

As for the banality of Brossard, Caine wanted to show reality.

"Whenever you find some serial killer or child rapist or anything, what do the neighbours say?: 'He was the nicest guy!' I was playing some psychopath years ago -- which I do a lot -- and I was reading a book on psychology.

"Something that stuck in my mind is that the writer said: 'You must remember that all psychopaths spend 99% of their energies trying to be like us.' It's quite amazing, isn't it?"

CHARACTER STATEMENT

The Statement is yet another movie spun from the Holocaust. When queried by another journalist why there was a need to do another, Michael Caine was quick to answer.

"I said: 'It's a reminder. It's a surprise (because of the involvement of the Catholic Church) and it's information.'

"This generation has grown up (with people) who don't know who The Beatles are. You think we shouldn't rerelease a Beatles record and let them know?

"Also, if you are going to make a movie and you want to say something serious, that's okay but don't belt everybody over the head. We wrapped it in a chase thriller, put some tinsel on it and a little bit of candy, so it wasn't so bad."

Both 2002's The Quiet American and The Statement, which opens tomorrow, gave him flawed people to play in strong stories.

"I love 'em," Caine says of these mature characters.

"They're the grist for my mill in my old age. Being a flawed person myself, I know how they feel."


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