Malcolm McDowell - Caligula (1979)

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I'm proud of the work I did in Caligula, there's no question about that. But there's all the raunchy stuff, the blatant modern-day porn that Bob introduced into the film after we'd finished shooting. That, to me, was an absolutely outrageous betrayal and quite unprecedented. Frankly, it showed that Bob had no class whatsoever.

Malcolm McDowell
The Roman Empire, like any other empire, was made up purely of bureaucrats, the army, the priests and everything else, and he systematically goes from one institution to the other, trying to provoke them and trying to get an action out of them, and this is why in our view the misconception is that Caligula was completely mad... Anyway, he tries to destroy the institutions. Of course, naturally, he never fails. I mean, he does fail, simply because it's impossible to destroy a burocracy, and I think that is a very relevant point for modern-day audiences.

Malcolm McDowell
It was absurd. The footage didn't even match, most of the time. Here would be a shot of me smiling, looking at what was supposed to be my horse or something - and then suddenly they would cut to two lesbians having sex.

Malcolm McDowell
People think of him [Caligula] as a revolutionary or a figure of fun or a madman. There are so many aspects to him that we know really little about him, just the information that was given to us through a historian, a Roman historian called Suetonius, and he was from the other side of the family, so Suetonius paints Caligula as a very wicked madman, and that's the only reason that Suetonius considers why he did so many, on the face of it, crazy things. My interpretation of the character is not quite like that.

Malcolm McDowell