Use the Difficulty
Dear all,
It’s been exam week for students in Year 7, 8 and 9, which formed the basis of my Thought for the Week on Monday.
Most of our students have probably never heard of Michael Caine, given that he was born in 1933 whereas even our oldest students were born in 2005 or 2006. Most readers of this blog will, however, know that he enjoyed a prolific career during which he starred in over 160 films across eight decades that grossed almost $8 billion worldwide. He is one of only five male actors nominated for an Oscar in five different decades. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in the year 2000.
His breakthrough in acting came in the 1960s in famous British films such as Zulu (1964), the Ipcress File (1965), and The Italian Job (1969). More recently, he played Batman’s butler Alfred in Christopher Nolan’s trilogy (2005-12) as well as being cast in several more of Nolan’s films such as Inception (2010), Interstellar (2014), and Dunkirk (2017). He is one of the most famous and successful ever British actors.
The reason for choosing him as the subject of my message to students this week, however, comes from a story he told on a chat show in 2002 about something that happened before he made his breakthrough in film when he was a young stage actor. The character he was playing had to enter through a door as an argument was taking place between a man and a woman already on stage. In rehearsals, during the argument the man had thrown a chair across the stage, where it had lodged in front of the door Michael Caine was due to come through. When he called out to the director that he couldn’t open the door because of the chair, the director replied
use the difficulty.
Michael Caine asked what he meant and the director repeated his comment adding, ‘if it’s a comedy, fall over the chair; if it’s a drama, pick it up and smash it’.
Michael Caine said that this phrase had a profound effect not only on his acting career but his life in general and that he has used it ever since. His premise – in his own words – is that
there’s never anything so bad that you cannot use that difficulty…if you can use it a quarter of one percent to your advantage, you’re ahead, you didn’t let it get you down.
If you’d like to see the relevant extract from the interview with Michael Caine in 2002, you can watch it here.
It’s a simple but powerful message that became the mantra of one of the UK’s most successful actors, and I encouraged our students to think about how they might apply it to their own circumstances: in other words, how we can all ‘use the difficulty’ make us more content and successful in whatever it is we’re trying to achieve in life.
Best wishes,
Michael Bond
