VENICE, Italy — Michael Caine said Tuesday that he supports Brexit because he doesn’t want Britain to be controlled by European Union bureaucrats.
At the Venice Film Festival, the Oscar-winning actor said Britain was “being run by a man called Mr. Juncker” — European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker, a former prime minister of Luxembourg.
Caine said that “up until I was 20, I thought Luxembourg was a radio station. I didn’t even know it was a country, and now he’s running my country — and he doesn’t seem to like us.”
Caine is in a minority among Britain’s creative artists, most of whom backed staying in the EU when Britain voted last year to leave the bloc.
The 84-year-old actor said his decision wasn’t based on immigration or economics, but because “I’d rather be a poor master of my own fate than a rich servant of someone else’s.”
Caine is in Venice with “My Generation,” a documentary about the 1960s.
He narrates and interviews contemporaries including Paul McCartney, Roger Daltrey and Marianne Faithful for the film, directed by David Batty.
Caine, who made his breakthrough in 1960s dramas including “Zulu” and “Alfie,” said he had long wanted to make a movie about the social transformation of the ’60s, when he and other working-class actors, artists and musicians were given new opportunities to express themselves.
“I regard myself as one of the most fortunate people in the world,” Caine told reporters.
“There is no reason from my birth why I should be here talking to you. Not a single reason. None. And it just happened that way. Not because I was clever, but because I was lucky.
“It was timing. It wasn’t my timing, it was the timing of when people started to write parts for working-class men and women.”