I know a lot of stuff. I'm well known for knowing stuff 
Despite turning 70 in 2003, Michael Caine shows no sign of losing his workaholic approach to acting. Secondhand Lions is his second movie of 2003 (after The Actors), and he'll next be seen playing a Nazi war criminal in Norman Jewison's The Statement.
Why did you do this movie?
It was wonderful and it's very funny. The first time I ever saw the title Secondhand Lions, I was reading a movie magazine and it had a list of the ten best scripts never made into a movie and number one was this! Somebody obviously read that and got hold of it and five years later, they came to me with it. I thought it was wonderful and it was the chance for me to play a Texan!
How hard was it to master the Texan accent?
It took a good three months to do it. I had a great dialect coach and he told me there's always one moment when you get something. He said: "Do your Texan accent for me," when I had learned it from a tape. He said: "It's too English!" I said: "Why?" He said: "Each word stands up like soldiers standing to attention next to each other. The way they talk in Texas, they're so lazy they sort of lean on each word. And I could just picture all these words leaning over each other, and that's when I got it.
How was it working with Haley Joel Osment?
The thing about Haley is that he isn't a child actor. He's an actor who is a child. It's just like acting with another actor. You don't have to help him or do things for him. We didn't show him any mercy. Nothing. We just treated him like an actor and that was it. He is a wonderful actor. He's one of my bets for the few that go over from child actor to adult actor, and the reason is that he has a great family. I've met them all.
Talking to him is like talking to someone who's 45. He knows stuff. I know a lot of stuff. I'm well known for knowing stuff, and he knows nearly as much stuff as I do - and I'm 70 and he's 14! He's telling me about the laws of Vietnam where I made a movie! I said: "Where do you get this stuff from?" And he said: "The History Channel and the Discovery Channel". So I watch them now and I'm trying to catch up!
You also get to work with a lot of animals in this film...
We had five dogs, a lion, a giraffe, and a pig, so we took them all on!
All in all, it's a very wholesome family film, isn't it?
It's extremely wholesome! It's the most wholesome movie I've been in since the Christmas movie with the Muppets!
Secondhand Lions is released in UK cinemas on Friday 24th October 2003.
