From Rebecca Murray,
Your Guide to Hollywood Movies.
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Michael Caine on Signing on to Play Alfred in "Batman Begins:" “Christopher [Nolan] turned up at my house on a Sunday morning with a script and said he was doing ‘Batman,’ which I felt was extraordinary because I knew what Christopher had done with ‘Insomnia’ and ‘Memento.’ And then he made me read it because he wouldn’t leave the script. So I gave him lunch and read the script. And I’d seen many ‘Batman’ movies before and this one was called ‘Batman Begins’ and I was rather suspicious at that. And at the end I felt, ‘Yeah, this is Batman Begins – I’ll do this.’ And that’s why I did it. Because it was Christopher. And the script.”

Michael Caine on the Process of Playing Alfred: “I wanted to bring a very unusual, very tough butler for Batman. I didn’t want the usual obsequious bobbing ‘dinner is served’ type of person. I wanted someone extremely tough so I did a backstory on myself. I did it very quickly. He was an SAS Sergeant, which is a very tough British Army unit, got wounded, didn’t want to leave the Army, became in charge of the Sergeant’s Mess in the canteen. Therefore he knew how to serve drinks and prepare stuff, which made him attractive to Bruce Wayne’s father, the billionaire, because he wanted a very tough butler. And that’s how he came around. And I used the voice of the first sergeant I ever had in the Army.”

Did Michael Caine Run the Backstory Past His Friends?: “No. I never talk with friends about acting. That’s how I keep ‘um.

No, I just made up my own mind as I was reading it. It comes to you after you’ve been doing it as long as I have. I just said right there, ‘He’s the sergeant.’ I remember who he is, that’s where he came from and I did that and I had this voice. Your first sergeant in the Army, even though I was 18 at the time which was a long time ago, stays with you. So that’s his voice in the picture.

…Everything is in the script. But I was reminded… I made him a military man and in the Army - in the British army - officers have a private who does all their stuff like cleans their boots and their brasses, and he is in actual fact called a batman. So I’m Batman’s batman.”

Michael Caine on Working with Christian Bale: “Christian is so dedicated and the first sign I ever had of that was physical inasmuch…I hadn’t seen ‘The Machinist’ yet otherwise I’d have been more impressed. I remember him being a very slight young man from ‘American Psycho.’ I mean, you didn’t look at him and say ‘God…’ And I turn up on the set of ‘Batman’ and there was Arnold Schwarzenegger standing there. So I thought, ‘Boy, this guy has really got into it.’

Hiis dedication to the part is quite extraordinary. He’s a wonderful actor. He’s a very nice man, too. I don’t know him socially. You don’t go out to dinner with the guy who’s playing Batman because he’s been there for two months before you got there and he’s gonna be there for three months after you’ve gone. You forget that he’s been doing this and he’s absolutely exhausted.

One of the things about his own character which affected our relationship was he’s a very egalitarian kind of person himself, and we talked about this and he hates the master/servant relationship and so he would never - we drew a line along that on this. I knew how far an English servant would go without being so obsequious or overbearing and he knew how far he would go in patronizing a servant, which is no way at all. So it came out as a very good relationship which met in the middle on equal lines.

It was very fortunate for us that I knew the other side of it because my mother was a cook in these big houses in the country during the war when I was evacuated. So I knew all about the butler and everything and I’d seen the line with which masters who were very, very kind to their staff came down to. And I knew the line where the butler or someone who was very confident went up to and neither of them ever crossed the line. And that’s what I did with Christian. I never crossed the line. I always called him master. ‘Master Wayne.’ Because I wanted to keep this idea that he was a small boy, which made the humorous stuff with him funnier because I treated him as a small boy in these shenanigans he was getting up to. I’m always pissed off, you know, that this little boy’s gone out and done all this stuff, like climb up the Empire State Building with a guy in his hand.”

Christian Bale’s Reaction to Being Called ‘Master Wayne:’ “He liked it. He told me that he thought that since that’s what he’d be called and I said yes, what he knew was it was truthful. If it was the truth, it works. If it ain’t, it doesn’t.”

Page 2: Michael Caine on "Batman Begins'" Special Effects