At the risk of sounding idiotic - I know, I know, it's hard to believe, but there's always a first time - let me assert that movie stars are so very much ... who they are ... that they can throw your sense of reality out of whack. (At least, I think that's what's causing it.)

Such is my experience when I meet Sir Michael Caine, who - together with director Kenneth Branagh - was recently in town to accommodate a round of media interviews in support of Sleuth, his latest film. He looks like Michael Caine - unlike some stars he really is as tall as he appears on screen - and, even more, he sounds like Michael Caine. Visually, he has, of course, aged a tad during his 40 years of stardom - how creepy if he hadn't! - but the voice is essentially unchanged. Because he is so absolutely Michael Caine, it might qualify as ironic - I must check with Alanis Morissette - that, after all these years, legally he's actually not Michael Caine.

The Artist Generally Known as Michael Caine has been, since birth, Maurice (accent on the first syllable) Micklewhite. "I don't introduce myself to anybody that way," he tells me. "It's just official; it's what's on my passport, put it that way."

But not for much longer. "I'm gonna change my actual name to Michael Caine on the passport as well, because of all the terrorism security. It's become too much a pain in the ass." (Try to imagine Caine's voice in your head as you read this.)

Surely he doesn't get hassled at airports?

"Ooh, hoo, hoo! The police get very suspicious. You say Michael Caine's coming, and Maurice Micklewhite turns up, and they go, 'Waaaait a minute.' Just yesterday, I came in from New York, and I missed the first plane, so they put me on a second plane. And I don't have any luggage. I'm coming here for one day and then going back to London on a plane tonight, so my wife has the luggage. I don't want to mess about with that. All I've got is hand luggage.

"So, there I was, with a ticket bought an hour ago and no real luggage. And alarms went off. They were searching. It was a nightmare. And I've only got one little bag, in the corner there, and they're looking at it and trying to find something. The guy said, 'I love you, you're my favorite actor!' And I said, 'Well, what are you treating me like a terrorist for if I'm your favorite actor?' He said, 'Because we have to. The computer says we've got to do that.'"

Listening to that iconic voice, it's as though you're in the presence of Harry Palmer from The Ipcress File, Peachy Carnahan from The Man Who Would Be King, Alfred Pennyworth from Batman Begins, and Milo Tindle from the first Sleuth - almost 35 years ago.

Caine's first real starring role was in The Ipcress File, and I can't resist telling him that it was the first film I ever received money for reviewing. "Blimey," he says, "that was a long time ago!" (Oooo ... just hearing the word "blimey" in that voice in person is a thrill.)

He consolidated his star status with Alfie, Funeral in Berlin, The Italian Job, The Man Who Would Be King, and a string of other British and Hollywood films. Even his commercial failures were potentially interesting projects - Get Carter, Pulp, The Magus. He established himself as both a reliable leading man and a tremendously resourceful actor, who slipped effortlessly into a wide range of characters.

But in the late '70s and '80s, in addition to such triumphs as Hannah and Her Sisters (for which he won his first Oscar), he took on a higher percentage of apparent "paycheck" films: The Swarm, The Hand, Jaws: The Revenge. (Regarding the last of these, Caine has been quoted as saying, "I have never seen the film, but by all accounts it was terrible. However, I have seen the house that it built, and it is terrific.")

"You do these films because they're there," he tells me. "You get to that period where you're the young, glamorous lover, and then you get to an awkward period where you're slightly too old to be the lover, and you're not old enough to be the father. I actually retired at one point and wrote my autobiography and opened a load of restaurants. I got fed up with the scripts they were sending me. Until I was in Miami, and Jack Nicholson turned up with Bob Rafelson and Blood and Wine. And they talked me into being in that. I had such a wonderful time with the two of them, especially Jack, it was a sort of epiphany for me. I thought, 'If someone gives me a good script, I'm going back to work.' And along came Harvey Weinstein with Little Voice, and along came The Cider House Rules, and along came The Quiet American.

"It's not based on economics now, but you've got to make me an offer I can't refuse. Nothing to do with money. I don't want to get up Monday morning in the rain at half past six having learned 10 pages of bloody dialogue for the day over the weekend. It's got to be something really, really worthwhile. Like with this picture, it's a sort of rewrite of Sleuth but it's an adaptation by Harold Pinter. Now what am I gonna do? Say, 'You can shove that up your ass? I don't want to do it!'? Alfonso Cuarón comes to you and says, 'It's only a little part' [in Children of Men]. Of course I'll do it."

Though it was sometimes painful to watch Caine squandered in dubious projects, he never failed to do honorable work, and he always brought his irresistibly likable personality, which provided useful misdirection on the few occasions he turned out to be the bad guy. Through it all, he has continued to radiate movie star quality - the first great Cockney star not to don a more upper-class persona as a mask, á la Cary Grant.

For those too young to remember or simply not keeping score, Sleuth (2007) is technically a remake of Sleuth (1972), in which Caine played Tindle, the young man cuckolding aging novelist Andrew Wyke (Laurence Olivier). With the passage of 35 years, he's now more appropriate playing Olivier's old role, even as Jude Law - who was still in utero (third trimester) when the first version opened - plays his.

~ (Top) Andrew (Caine) and Milo (Law)... , (Bottom) ... and Milo (Caine) and Andrew (Olivier) ~
Photos by David Appleby (Top) and 20th Century Fox (Bottom)

Sleuth started out as a play in 1970, the only major stage hit for Anthony Shaffer, whose other credits include two great screenplays - Hitchcock's Frenzy and Robin Hardy's The Wicker Man. Shaffer was following in the footsteps of his twin brother, Peter, whose critical success with the plays Equus and Amadeus he would never match. The two had cowritten a few mystery books, apparently in the British drawing-room tradition, before Peter turned to the stage and Anthony became an ad man. But, according his 2001 obituary in the Guardian, "by the end of the 1960s, Shaffer had experimented with LSD and found that the appeal of advertising had palled. He quit to write; the result was Sleuth."

In the play, Wyke invites impecunious travel agent Tindle to his country estate with a proposition: Since Tindle is planning on marrying Wyke's wife, and Wyke wants to make sure that, once she's out of his life, she stays out, he suggests that Tindle fake a burglary of the mansion (under his direction) and make off with jewelry that will enable him to support the soon-to-be-ex-Mrs.-Wyke in the style to which she's become accustomed.

Shaffer keeps the dialogue fast and funny enough to finesse us past the issue of Tindle's gullibility. Certainly the audience, knowing what kind of play they're watching, can instantly smell a rat-in-Wyke's-clothing.

While it would be a bit much to characterize the play as some kind of acid fantasy, it does reflect the times: It savages the snobbery that informs the sorts of books Wyke writes; when stressed, Wyke is witheringly contemptuous of his younger rival, who is not only working-class, but the son of a half-Jewish Italian immigrant.

The 1972 Hollywood film version - the final directorial effort of Joseph L. Mankiewicz (All About Eve) - made only minor changes to the play: Tindle became a hairdresser, and his Jewishness vanished (with virtually no effect).

Remakes are generally a dismal proposition, particularly when the original is good. On a very rare occasion, a worthy film is improved: the recent remake of 3:10 to Yuma being an example. And there are numerous cases where good source material has been given substandard treatment, and it takes a second - or, in the classic case of The Maltese Falcon, a third - go-around to get it right. The other valid approach is to essentially spin a wholly different piece of material from a few retained elements, which is what has been done here.

The new Sleuth is vastly different from its predecessor, with nearly everyone involved - including Branagh and the revered Sir Harold Pinter (who might as well change his name to Sir Harold PinterthegreatestlivingplaywrightintheEnglishlanguage at this point) - talking down the remake aspect.

"It was Jude [he produced and developed the project, as well as starring] who came up with the idea of Harold Pinter," Branagh tells me. "Then at some dinner party Jude put to Michael the idea of him playing the other part. I think Michael was a little wary to begin with, but then, once he knew Harold was doing it, felt that it was going to be a really different thing."

The casting of Caine makes a great marketing hook, and I ask him - more as a conversational ploy than a serious question - if, 35 years ago, it ever crossed his mind that he'd remake the film, and do that role.

"No, you don't think of any remakes of anything," Caine responds. "What you're thinking of always is, will you get another movie? Is this one gonna bomb? Am I gonna get another movie? You're trying to make a career for yourself when you're 30, 35, 40, like I was. I was 30 when I sort of became a success.

"There have been several remakes of my movies. There's been Get Carter and The Italian Job; and Jude remade Alfie. But no one had ever come to me to remake one of my own movies."

I remind him that he was involved in the 2000 version of Get Carter. "Well, sure, I did a day on that, because I was friends with Sly Stallone. I just did a walk-on sort of thing.

"But what happened with Jude was, he hadn't come to me to remake one of my movies. I mean, he had a completely different script by Harold Pinter. There aren't any lines from the old script in the new one, except for a couple. There are two lines, I think, somewhere. And that was the attraction for me. It wasn't a remake; it was just a wonderful script."

When I float the notion that the class issues at the center of the old film were mostly abandoned this time to accommodate the casting of Caine, I'm disabused by everyone.

"No, no, no," Caine says. "It was gone before I first saw the script, and I didn't think it was necessary. It no longer applies. I'll give you a for-instance on that.

"When I was going to do the first film, I had never met Larry Olivier, who was Lord Olivier. It was much more divisive of class then, and I was a sort of working-class Cockney actor and getting ideas above my station and all this, and I was going to act with the great Lord Olivier. He wrote me a letter saying, 'You may be wondering how to address me when we meet. Please call me Larry.' Which was lovely, but the fact that he thought of writing the letter at all tells you something.

"I mean, to show you how preposterous it is: I am Sir Michael Caine. Can you imagine me writing a letter to Jude and saying, 'You may be wondering how to address me when we meet. Please call me Mike'?"

When I mention that I recently rewatched the old film, Caine says that he hasn't looked at it in over 30 years. (Indeed, Pinter and Branagh also avoided seeing it when preparing the project.) "It's a tremendous amount of fun," I tell him. "Olivier is so intense, though, that it's almost exhausting to watch - "

Caine interrupts: "You oughta try acting with him. Shit."

With Branagh, I obliquely approach my biggest problem with the film - the casting of Law, who, as producer and originator of the project, presumably never really considered anyone else for the part. According to the press notes, which I always read with a certain degree of skepticism, Law was not developing this automatically as a vehicle for himself so his casting was not a foregone conclusion.

"Well, I think that's probably true," Branagh says. "Your skepticism, I think, would be refuted by the notion from the outside world that perhaps Jude was just chasing down all of Michael's old parts. So the question mark had been raised in his own mind about the sanity of that. But once again, a savage artistic judgment came into play and it was: How is this screenplay? Am I right for it? Is this the right combination? And we all agreed that it was."

My problem with Law in Sleuth is not an issue of talent - I think he's done excellent work in a number of films - but rather physicality and age. Caine was able to hold the screen in the presence of Olivier - no mean feat. But Law is much smaller; his handsomeness is of the "pretty" variety, almost fey. He doesn't seem a strong enough counterbalance to Caine's size and decades-in-the-making star charisma. I finally come out and tell Branagh what I'm hinting at: "Was there ever a moment when anyone suggested you play the younger part?"

Judging by the director's reaction, I'm all by myself on this one.

"I think, no, there was never that moment, and I think, in all honesty, Time's Winged Chariot had hurried by my potential for that part. It never came up. It literally hadn't occurred to me. When I knew that these two were potentially doing it, I thought it was a great combination, and I was really very excited to be directing the pair of them. So it was win-win."

But the age disparity makes more sense with Branagh in the role. In the stage play, Shaffer describes Tindle and Wyke as 37 and 57 respectively - exactly the ages of original cast members Keith Baxter and Anthony Quayle. At the time of the first film, Caine was 39 and Olivier 65 - a disparity of 26 years. Branagh is 28 years younger than Caine - whereas Law is a full 40 years younger.

"You're the first person who's really brought up the issue of this age difference," Branagh says, then elaborates in a manner that suggests I'm too tied to the work's earlier manifestations. "In the original movie, you get the feeling that somehow Olivier's character is rather happy in his eccentricity, in his house of games out in the country; whereas Michael's character seems more spiritually isolated. His house is like a brilliant modernist kind of expression of the inside of someone's brain, some terrible empty place full of loads of space for the tumbleweed of torture to go whizzing past. He may have the most extraordinary house and success and wealth; but he ain't got the woman, and he ain't got that boy's youth and beauty. I think that's a major difference in our film: The first one has so much to do with the class difference; this has to do with youth and age but also humanity versus technology as well."

Law's "pretty boy" looks also strengthen the other thematic heart to the new version, which existed, in far more muted ways, in the '72 film - a strong current of homo-eroticism that runs through the encounter between these two men.

"It wasn't there in the first one," Caine says. "The class distinction was much more pronounced, and what Harold has done is drop that to a certain extent, and replace it with a sort of homo-erotic thing."

I point to one scene near the end of the old film, where nothing in the dialogue is explicitly romantic or sexual, and yet it's played as though the two men are lovers.

"Yeah, yeah," Caine says excitedly. "I had a feeling with that, that we were doing that. There was a moment there where Larry - because Larry had become so camp in that thing, he was putting women's scarves on, and he was going around the room - and then when we did that, we looked at each other and he said, 'You know, you're my kind of man.' Of course Larry immediately made a joke of it in rehearsal. He was camping it up. Because he could do that, I'll tell you. Come to think of it, I really just thought that Harold picked up on that and exaggerated it."