There’s more to Sir Michael Caine than just a couple of catchphrases. With a quick wit to rival many stand-ups and a CV featuring some of the greatest films ever made, he tells Kim Francis why his latest had him laughing and crying.

Phrases like “Not a lot of people know that” and “You’re only supposed to blow the bloody doors off” follow Sir Michael Caine – but he’s so quick-witted that he could have a million other phrases attached to him as limpet-like as those. And, referring at least to the first of these quotes (which famously he never said), they might even be phrases that he actually uttered.

“See you later; no hurry,” for instance, which is what Sir Michael says he wants written on his gravestone when he finally pops his clogs.

A morbid and some might say impertinent topic of conversation for discussing with a knight of the realm yet it’s an inescapable one when you consider the subject matter of his latest film, Is Anybody There?

In the film, Michael plays Clarence, a grizzly octogenarian former magician who comes to stay at 10-year-old Edward’s (Bill Milner) house, which doubles as a retirement home. The film’s elderly cast is made up of a glut of well-known faces from television, film and theatre all portraying residents of varying degrees of infirmity.

As the film progresses, Clarence descends into dementia and Michael sadly found events mirrored in real life.

“I brought a lot of experience of how it was to suffer dementia because [tailor to the stars] Dougie Hayward was one of my closest friends and he died while we were making the film,” he says.

“I hadn’t really thought of it because it’s not a film about a guy with dementia – it’s just a film about an old magician and a little boy. And I didn’t think of it honestly until I really came to [the end of the film] and then it struck me.

“I’d been four, five years with it – obviously not day in, day out like [his] relations – but [I was] just waiting to walk in and for Dougie to ask me who I was. And one day he did.”

The film had another sad echo in the passing of talented actress Elizabeth Spriggs during post-production.

Sir Michael remembers her fondly as he recounts an endearing anecdote from filming: “She spent a few minutes one afternoon congratulating me on my performance in a film I wasn’t in.

But I never let on and I thanked her very much.” 

And what was that film? “It was Lawrence of Arabia,” says Michael.

“She thought I was Peter O’Toole!”

The unique human ability to keep one’s humour in the bleakest of situations is a theme that clearly spoke to Michael upon reading the script for the first time and he found himself so profoundly moved by what he read that he felt compelled to take on the role, which many critics are calling the most accomplished of his career.

He says: “I’ve read many scripts that have made me laugh, and this one made me laugh, but I’ve never read a script before that made me cry, and it made me cry – and that’s why I did it.”

As well as shining a spotlight on old age generally, the film highlights the problems that come with an ageing population; concerns that Michael believes need addressing. 

“My opinion is that everybody’s getting older and older and older,” he says. “So we have a great deal of dementia [these days] because nobody grew old enough to get it [before], if you see what I mean. And somebody said to me the other day: ‘You’re eventually going to live to 110,’ and I said: ‘Well, who’s going to keep me? What age do I retire? 100?’ You know, how are you going to live all those years and who’s going to keep you?”

He adds with a wry smile: “I’ve got a couple of grandsons now so I’m banking on them.”

Of course, with a 10-year-old boy as the focus as well as the incorporation of plot strands weaved around his middle-aged mother and father, Is Anybody There? isn’t only about old age, it’s also about youth and life at all its stages.

In the film, Clarence learns a great deal about living from young Edward with whom he bonds, but his ability to teach wasn’t confined to the on-screen action – newcomer Bill Milner also imparted to the great Sir Michael some indispensable real-life lessons that gave him a newfound respect for the talented young actor.

“I learnt a most invaluable lesson [from Bill] inasmuch as unlike all other child actors I could absolutely trust him to be there as though I was acting with an adult actor which was an incredible thing to know,” he says.

For Michael, Bill was as accomplished an actor as anybody else in the cast, a compliment he tenders when he says: “When I was very young I went to the Theatre Royal with Joan Littlewood and we were taught the Stanislavsky Method [an approach used to get to grips with a character] and one of the things that struck me about Stanislavsky, which was very good for movies, was the phrase: ‘Rehearsal is the work, performance is the relaxation.’

“That’s what I look for in very good film actors. They’ve already done all the work before they’ve got there and that’s what I got with the entire cast of this picture.”

Michael Caine may be 76 but he has the effervescence of a person a third of his age. His appetite for work is still strong and he shows no signs of giving up or even slowing down. When asked how he might fare himself in a retirement home, he says with typical deadpan candour:

“I would probably own it.”

And in response to a question about whether the role of Clarence has made him consider his own mortality, he says: “When I do a role like this I don’t think of my mortality – I think of [everybody else’s]. [I did it for] all you people who are going to die. I want to show you how it’s done because I’m not going to do it!”

See? This man is full of quotable lines of his own design. And he isn’t finished there, coming out with a veritable gem of a quote as we move to the question of whether there is an afterlife, based on the film’s title and young Edward’s obsession with the paranormal in the film.

“I’d dearly love to think there is somebody there,” he says. “And I’ve got a lot of back-up because my father was a Catholic, my mother was a Protestant,

I was educated by Jews and I’m married to a Muslim. So I won’t lose out on a technicality.”

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