THE QUIET AMERICAN Q&A with MICHAEL CAINE © 2005 PHASE9 ENTERTAINMENT

You have said that you were surprised to be cast in the role of Thomas Fowler in THE QUIET AMERICAN, as his own life is so different from your own. Is this true? Well I’ve had very few young Vietnamese mistresses! And here I was playing a 55 year-old at the age of 68, so that was a bit of a stretch. There was a lot of make up, a lot of hair dying going on. But I was delighted to be offered the part - it was like a great gift from God. I knew it, I knew the book, I knew everything about it. I had been in that part of the world as a soldier in Korea, so I had been interested in Vietnam. I realised later when I read the book that the reason - I thought - we never went into that war was because Greene had cautioned against it. He was in military intelligence in the Second World War and I can’t believe that someone didn’t ask his opinion. This is not your first Graham Greene adaptation, you also did THE HONORARY CONSUL nearly 20 years ago. You must have been aware that Greene himself was a stern critic of the film adaptations of his work… I met Graham on THE HONORARY CONSUL, and it’s true he never liked any films made of his work - he told me in no uncertain terms that he didn’t like that movie. He didn’t even like THE THIRD MAN because Orson Welles wrote that scene in the big wheel. The first version of THE QUIET AMERICAN was directed by a friend of mine, and Greene actually wrote an article called 'The Treachery of Mr Joseph L. Mankiewicz' in which he wrote: ‘this is the first time a film director has ever used a film as a weapon to murder an author’. So when Graham didn’t like something it got pretty hairy. Is it true that you actually based your portrayal of Fowler on Greene himself? I did to an extent. I didn’t know him very well but I knew a great deal about him because one of my best friends is Bryan Forbes who was one of Graham’s best friends. So I knew a lot by proxy. The story is about a British correspondent of The Times who is in Vietnam with a very beautiful girlfriend when the CIA came in to start doing things politically. Greene was all these things. I just copied something of the way he spoke, and his movements. They were very small movements. Journalists are like policemen; they’re always looking for things, their eyes go around all over the place, over your shoulder to see what’s happening. Coppers do that. He was that type of upper middle class Englishman, and screwed up like Fowler. Greene was drinking very heavily in Vietnam - I know several people who know him so it’s no good anyone lying about it - and screwing around. Continued on page 2

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