Here’s how making spy thriller Bullet To Beijing nearly made Michael Caine quit the craft. According to Michael Caine in his 2010 memoir The Elephant To Hollywood, one of his favorite characters of all time is spy Harry Palmer. Based on the unnamed protagonist in a series of novels by Len Deighton, Caine first played Palmer in the 1965 adaptation of The Ipcress File. Critics described Palmer as an “anti-Bond” and praised The Ipcress File for its gritty, unglamorous take on the spy movie genre. Even today, it’s hailed as one of the best spy movies ever made.
Michael Caine went on to play Harry Palmer twice more in the 1960s in Funeral In Berlin and Billion Dollar Brain. Back in 1966 when Caine was shooting Funeral In Berlin in what was then West Germany, the Berlin Wall was still up which caused a few issues. Apparently, while shooting scenes at the Wall, East German soldiers on the Communist side tried to disrupt filming by using mirrors to reflect sunlight into the crew’s cameras. Compared to making Bullet to Beijing, however, Caine’s experiences filming Funeral In Berlin were just a minor inconvenience.
In the mid-1990s, the character of Harry Palmer was revived in movie Bullet To Beijing, which was made back-to-back with its sequel Midnight In Saint Petersburg. The two were filmed on location in St Petersburg, Russia and saw Palmer come out of retirement to take on a couple of jobs involving local crime boss Alex (Harry Potter’s Michael Gambon). While the films were an opportunity for Caine to return to one of his favorite roles, he would later describe making them as his “worst professional experience ever”.
According to Caine, after the collapse of communism in the early 1990s, the Russian mafia basically took over St Petersburg and had made the hotel Bullet To Beijing’s cast and crew were staying at their base. One day in the café, Caine and his co-stars witnessed the elite Russian police come crashing through the joint to arrest a local mafia member. This incident led to Caine being assigned a trio of bodyguards who followed him at all times. It turned out those bodyguards were unnecessary when Caine was personally assured by another mafioso that as the local mafia owned a movie studio involved in the production, he was technically the safest man in St Petersburg.
The mafia wasn’t the only issue Michael Caine faced working in post-Communist St Petersburg. According to the actor, when the cast and crew of Bullet To Beijing first sat down to lunch on set they were each given Geiger counters to test their food for radiation from the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. Caine also described filming as a joke, but the last straw came when the call of nature beckoned while shooting at Lenfilm studios and he was forced to urinate against the soundstage after seeing how filthy the toilet was.
His experience shooting Bullet To Beijing was enough to make Michael Caine quit acting. It wasn’t too long, however, before he was lured back by good friend Jack Nicholson, who persuaded him to get on board the movie Blood And Wine – a neo-noir helmed by The Postman Always Rings Twice director Bob Rafelson that co-starred Jennifer Lopez (Hustlers), Stephen Dorff, and Judy Davis. While it wasn’t a huge hit, Blood And Wine did get Caine back into acting and if it weren’t for the movie he wouldn’t have gone on to make critically acclaimed films like The Cider House Rules - which earned him his second Oscar - and Christopher Nolan’s Dark Knight trilogy.
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