People don't get to see icons of cinema every day.

When Sir Michael Caine's newest movie, Is There Anybody There?, was shown at the film festival on Sunday, there was an electric moment when it was announced that Caine was in the theatre. A collective gasp of surprise and delight went up from the audience, and people rose spontaneously to give the actor a standing ovation.

Is There Anybody There? is an exquisite film about subject matter that's rare at the movies: Getting old and dying.

The movie is told from the point of view of an adolescent boy named Edward (Bill Milner from Son of Rambow) whose parents run a hospice for the elderly. Edward is obsessed with death and what happens after death, and he observes and records the old people around him, hoping to find evidence of the paranormal.

Sounds morbid, but it's mostly hilarious. Edward's world changes with the arrival of an elderly former magician (Michael Caine) who is both cranky and fascinating. The old man and the boy develop a relationship, and it comes in handy when Edward's parents have problems of their own.

Caine's performance is, frankly, extraordinary, though not everyone was happy about that.

"I just saw it with my wife and she got terribly upset," Caine said yesterday during an interview for the film. "I realized, she's watching me grow old and senile in the film. She got herself in quite a state. I said, 'I'm only acting, darling,' but she got carried away," he says, laughing. "I didn't even think about it, because it's just performance to me. And makeup and stuff."

Is There Anybody There? is directed by John Crowley (whose film Boy A is in theatres here now), and he says it took a minute to figure out who should play the lead. He was with the writer and producer of the film when Michael Caine's name came up, "And we all said, 'Duh!' "

Caine says that the subject matter is tough, because age and dying are hidden away in our culture. "And society is very ageist. But what happens is, old gets older and older, doesn't it? Old used to be 60, and now it's 80. When I was young, a man of 75 -- which is my age -- was very old, you know, needing help to get out of a chair. We're healthier now."

Caine also commented on the way death is currently airbrushed and hidden away in our culture: "I grew up during the Blitz. Dying was all around. There were children missing from school. And children without mothers. Death was all too real, then."

A working actor for more than 50 years, Caine has more than 100 movies to his credit and has played the leading man about 85 times. He has two Oscars, for The Cider House Rules and Hannah And Her Sisters, and he's been nominated four other times. He said there isn't much that intimidates him now about preparing for a film, and in fact, "what I'm doing now is, I choose for the degree of difficulty, for the challenge."

The man who has always claimed he started acting just to meet girls is one of the best-known actors on the planet; even children know who he is, thanks to the role of Alfred in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight.

Despite the old adage about not working with children or animals, Caine has nothing but praise for his young co-star in Is There Anybody There?

"Bill never trained as an actor. He doesn't know how to be anything but real. You know, you train as an actor, and then it takes you ages to lose all that, and get back to where you started," Caine said, laughing. "Olivier once said about preparing for a play, 'I always read things the first time out loud, straight through, exactly as I'm going to present them on stage, and then after six, or 10 or 12 weeks of rehearsal, I can finally get back to doing what I did the first time through."

Truth is, Caine's performance in Is There Anybody There? is so emotionally engaging that it changed the shape of the story. "(It) shifted the focus of the film in the editing," is how director Crowley put it, and shifted it more toward Caine at that. In other words, he stole the movie from a child?

"I can see the headline now," quipped Caine.