What Color Was the Suit Bought for Nicolas Cage in Family Man?
T o start with, the thing most often said of Nicolas Cage: he is weird-looking, with constituent parts that don't promise to add upwards to a movie star. His hair, like cultivated grassland, is lush at the top and sparse at the root. There is something puppety well-nigh his face. And, of grade, there are his eyes, which, like the Woody Allen joke – "You take the most eyes I've ever seen on any person" – authorize him to play both romantic leads and psychopaths. At 49, Muzzle overturns every industry standard, and there's no denying it: the result is transfixing. "Accept a blueberry muffin," he says in that agonised drawl, and flashes a goofy grin.
Nosotros are in a hotel in Mobile, Alabama, a small town on the Gulf Coast where he and Danny Glover are filming an activity flick chosen Tokarev, in which Cage plays a reformed mobster reluctantly returning to his trigger-happy roots when his daughter is kidnapped. (The twenty-four hours before, they filmed a car chase downward the principal street and the excitement still ripples through the glutinous air.) It sounds like a classic Cage role, non that he allows for the existence of such a thing. Cage is methodical in rebutting preconceived notions about himself. "There is a misperception, if you will, in critical response or fifty-fifty in Hollywood, that I can but do exaggerated characters. Or what they would telephone call over-the-pinnacle performances." He pauses, as if issuing an historic statement from the podium: "Well, this is completely false."
And: "Some other misconception about me is that I just practise movies for pay cheques."
And: "That I'm obsessed with comics."
And: "The other big misconception, which needs to exist cleared upwardly in my stance, is video on demand." (His new pic, The Frozen Footing, has a limited cinema release and volition be available on demand, which, given the need for on demand, Muzzle wishes critics would finish using as shorthand for failure.)
Also, his reputation for excess. "For a while there, it was the three Cs; castles, comic books and cars." He gives me a doleful look. "I simply tin can't go that stuff off of me."
It's truthful, Muzzle has always been difficult to place, moving between genres, styles and accents more than most actors in his league. Even his dress, today, is contradictory, the pastel polo shirt at odds with the tattoos and big jewellery – part state club, part rocker. It is as well safe to say that his talent for grotesques is largely what made him. More than one director has threatened to burn Cage for going overboard. In 1987, Norman Jewison told him to quit trying to play Ronny, in Moonstruck, with art house surrealism. His uncle, Francis Ford Coppola, almost fired him for the falsetto he insisted on using for the function of Charlie in Peggy Sue Got Married. Not everything he does turns on high volume. He plays defeat very well, besides – it's in the stoop of his shoulders, the slump at the dorsum of his neck – and there is what the US film critic Roger Ebert famously called Cage's "inner tremble", that wait of excruciated bafflement that speaks to the panic of being alive.
In different circumstances, Cage might take been a grapheme actor in the way of Steve Buscemi. Simply there is a grandness to him that demands heart stage. He would brand a terrific Richard 3, if he didn't believe Americans tin't do Shakespeare ("I just don't retrieve nosotros get it. We don't get it right"). I don't know many actors who can brand the statements he does and get away with them. To wit, on the subject of the Guardian's recent NSA revelations: "I am paraphrasing Benjamin Franklin, one of my founding fathers, who said something to the effect that, 'Those that would requite up their liberty for a piddling chip of security deserve neither.' And so I'll quote myself: 'The truth is ever crucified.' Stop quote." His tone is so dry that everything he says comes out tinged with self-mockery.
Cage's 3 about baroque roles take been as the dying, grandiose drunk in Leaving Las Vegas; the coke-addled cop in Werner Herzog'due south Bad Lieutenant; and, well-nigh memorably peradventure, the deranged creep in Vampire'south Osculation, in some means the quintessential Cage movie and the main source of scenes for the internet montage Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit, in which, at ane phase, Muzzle is literally chewing the scenery. "Oh my god. I just can't keep up with that stuff," he says. "The internet has developed this affair about me – and I'm not fifty-fifty a computer guy, yous know? I don't know why information technology is happening. I'k trying not to… lemme say this: I'thou now of the mindset that, when in Rome, if y'all can't beat 'em, join 'em."
Most of it seems affectionate, I suggest.
"Well," a sudden, sardonic smile, "it is, but with enormous amounts of irony. Affection loaded with irony."
It doesn't carp him, overly. What bothers him these days is – brace yourselves – craft. "I'm at this betoken where I don't want to act. Information technology's not nigh putting things on, it'south about taking things off. And trying to exist as naked as I tin be as a flick presence."
Music, he has decided, is "the highest fine art form", and to this end the only hero he has right now is Anthony Hopkins, who he recently discovered "is a marvellous, magnificent classical composer. I was always such a huge fan of him as an actor; now I can run across it in his acting, the way he delivers his dialogue, information technology'due south musical. Fifty-fifty in Thor, when the young upstart says, 'I'm king', and Hopkins says [cue booming Sir Tony impression], 'You're NOT; Rex; Even so.' " Cage strikes a theatrical pose. "It's music! Ba-BA; BA; BA."
He comes from the non-acting branch of the Coppola family: his male parent August (blood brother of Francis) is a comparative literature professor and his female parent, Joy, a former dancer. Although Cage'south way is courtly in what seems like the southern style, he comes from Long Embankment, California, and went to Beverly Hills Loftier. He grew up, he says, in "modest circumstances. Extremely modest. My father was living on a teacher'south salary. He took a path that doesn't e'er pb to fame and fortune, just that was his passion."
Was he the black sheep? "How do I say this in a way that at that place'due south affairs, considering we're talking about a very famous family…"
Oh, please, nosotros're non talking well-nigh the Medicis.
"The point is, my father stuck to his guns and he was interested in literature. And he was also an outstanding educator." Muzzle calls his begetter his biggest career influence for exposing him to films that would, years afterward, inform his style as an actor.
"Some of it was downright terrifying. But it still got into my consciousness and came back in my piece of work as I developed into a man. I mean, I was watching movies like The Cabinet Of Dr Caligari, and Nosferatu and Fellini's Juliet Of The Spirits when I was 5 years old. He had this little projector and he'd play it in the house and we'd all watch, and I'd have nightmares. Simply nightmares. But then I grew to honey it. I said, OK, tin can I do that today? If you wait at Vampire'due south Kiss, it'southward all about that memory of Nosferatu; that Germanic, expressionistic interim manner."
Vampire's Kiss, in which Cage plays a literary agent labouring under the delusion he is a vampire, is a weird film that is kind of smashing in its weirdness and in which Cage exposes himself fearlessly to ridicule, not least for actualization in a horror movie in the get-go place.
His father wasn't a snob in these matters, nor in the larger affair of his son's desire to be an actor. He didn't pressure him to stay on at school or go to college. Cage (who changed his name from Coppola early on, to see off accusations of nepotism), auditioned for a office in his high school product of W Side Story and, when he didn't get it, opted to leave. "And my begetter said, it's OK. He told me he was very frustrated with the bookish world and you lot'll probably practice ameliorate if you lot go out and effort to make it as an actor. And he was right."
His parents had divorced when he was 12 and his mother spent periods in hospital with severe low, which, Cage says, afflicted him less than it might have. "I think I was just… some people would call it nether the protection of a guardian angel; other people would call it a child's solipsism. It's whatever you lot want to call information technology, but I was happy in the chimera of my imagination."
These days, his mother takes peachy pride in his success. "Yes, she'due south fun. She watches my movies when they come on television receiver and gets excited. Quite childlike almost information technology, actually." And she stakes a claim in his talent not taken by the Coppolas. "I never studied dance," he says, "but if you lot expect at Wild At Heart, my mother saw that moving-picture show and said, 'Yous are a dancer. Wait at how yous're moving: all that foreign energy is like modernistic trip the light fantastic toe.' "
To hear him draw it, Muzzle's own moods simply exist to service his piece of work. Being happy or sad is non the point, he says, with magnificent grandeur: "I invite the entire spectrum, shall nosotros call it, of feeling. Because that is my greatest resource as a film histrion. I need to exist able to feel everything, which is why I turn down to go on any kind of medication. Not that I need to! But my point is, I wouldn't even explore that, because information technology would get in the way of my instrument. Which is my emotional facility to be able to perform."
He is aided in this by a solid dwelling life – his wife, Alice, and their vii-yr-old son, Kal-El. (He has a grown-upwardly son from a previous relationship.) Every bit a swain, Cage says ruefully, he scorned the thought of stability. "I was a punk rocker, I was rebelling, I didn't want whatever kind of condolement at home." Being married to Lisa Marie Presley for 108 days, as he was in 2002, fixed that. It'due south the thing – along with buying and losing all those houses in Europe – that makes people call up Muzzle is nuts. He is an Elvis fan, and i imagines he gravitated towards Lisa Marie for what, in that context, was her superior celebrity.
Cage looks rather surprised. "I was the lesser celebrity? Well, celebrity is a word I take great umbrage with. I'thou actively anti-celebrity. I'm near creative expression. That particular human relationship was really based on sense of humor. We had a lot of laughs together. So that's what that was. Much was fabricated about information technology because of her father and whatnot, but nosotros had a simple relationship in my opinion. That was a different time in my life. Many lifetimes ago."
Things are simpler since he shed all those properties, he says. Cage once owned a portfolio including castles in Germany and England, mansions in New Orleans and Rhode Island, and an isle in the Commonwealth of the bahamas. From the exterior, it looks as though he went through a period of testosterone-fuelled property conquering. Why was that?
"I had to put the money somewhere, and I was a big laic in real estate, and I got caught up in that bubble that exploded. I thought information technology was real. I didn't trust stocks and I didn't trust simply leaving it in the banking company. I believed in real estate. And so now I'm working through all that."
The backdrop were sold, mostly at a loss, and he now lives more modestly. "I have a tiny – and I do mean tiny – piffling cottage in Somerset, nearly Glastonbury. And I enjoy it that way. The magic of the greenish hills and the copse and the history. Then I accept this other minor lifestyle in Las Vegas. Which is a dissimilar kind of magic. That's the razzle-dazzle of the city. My married woman loves it and we have good friends at that place. And that'southward it. That's my life, which is simple. And I desire to keep it that manner."
He gets upset when people accuse him of saying yes to any chore just to pay off his debts, or the jibe that he works too much. "I'm 1 of those Americans who believes in working. If you've fabricated mistakes in the past, y'all don't but whorl over on people or cave in, you find a fashion through information technology. But in film interim, for some reason you become criticised for working."
I'm reminded of something Sean Penn said most him, based on his prolific and populist output: "He'south not an actor, he's a performer."
"In a way I concord with him," Cage says. "I would rather be a performer than an thespian. Acting to me implies lying. 'He's the greatest player in the earth' is like proverb, 'He's the greatest liar in the earth.' To perform, in my opinion, is more almost emotion."
Penn wasn't being nice, though.
"Well, who knows with him? But that's OK."
Anyway, Cage says, his life these days is extremely stable thank you to Alice. "I made a very articulate decision to marry out of my ain zip code. I hateful, mode out of my own nix code. I married into another civilisation, and information technology'south interesting considering in Korea they call me the Son-in-Law."
Alice is 20 years his junior, a former waitress whom he met when she was nineteen and working at an LA restaurant. They married, he said, so she could travel with him to South Africa while he was making Lord Of War. "Yous tin connect the dots." Ah, an immigration matter. He adds, "And nosotros did information technology considering we loved each other."
If the genders were reversed, we would be talking a lot about the historic period gap, in which Muzzle is greatly uninterested, although Alice'south family were non and so sanguine. "When my mother in law came to the business firm for the first time, earlier fifty-fifty hello or nice to meet you, all I got was" – he puts on a broad Korean emphasis – "'She too young!' And and so I knew this was going to be an uphill boxing." He won her around, of form.
"I don't want to become in that location." Cage smiles. "I take slap-up respect for Korea and what'southward happening with their industry and they're hard workers and they're doing then well. Samsung is Korean. Hats off to any land that works equally hard as they do."
Cage has never spent more than 4 days away from his son, and is trying to figure out if it's fair to take him out of school for 3 weeks when he films in China afterwards this twelvemonth. Has he shown Kal Nosferatu yet? "No." He smiles. "He's on a very strict diet of animation."
Many of Muzzle's films would, of course, be unsuitable for his son to watch.
Cage grew up watching James Bond and realised, studying Sean Connery, that a career in activity volition continue you lot working. Information technology's non the Oscar he won for Leaving Las Vegas, or his charming performances in Adaptation and Raising Arizona that fuel demand for him. It's the roughly $2bn in revenue grossed by his blockbuster movies, some of which he had to exist talked into making. "I really didn't want to brand that," he says of Moonstruck. "I wanted to make Vampire's Kiss, because I was nonetheless trying to live my punk rock dreams. I did not desire to be in a big splashy romantic one-act with Cher."
And then there's The Wicker Man, the recent Neil LaBute remake that I didn't think was equally appalling equally everyone else did. "The issue with The Wicker Homo is there'southward a need by some folks in the media to retrieve that we're not in on the joke. But you don't go around doing the things that grapheme does – in a behave adjust – and not know it's absurd. Information technology is cool. Now, originally I wanted to play that cop with a handlebar moustache and like a really stiff suit, and the producers wouldn't let me do it." Oh, Nic! "And then you would have known how in on it nosotros were, Neil and myself. The fact that that picture has been so lambasted ways there's an inner trembling and ability to that movie. It has go an electromagnetic picture! And so I love information technology."
Cage's politics are indistinct. He has a libertarian edge, just besides seems broadly liberal. I wonder if he has any sympathy for Jim Carrey, who last month criticised his own decision to appear in Boot-Donkey 2 (Cage was in the first Kicking-Donkey movie) considering of its violence. "You know, Jim'due south gonna practice what Jim's gonna do. I believe in freedom of speech communication. I don't believe in putting a gag on artistic expression. Don't go to the movie if you don't want to see violence. That'due south your choice. I detest slasher films, for instance. I don't watch slasher films, I think they're disgusting. But I recollect it'south important to live in a earth where there'due south that freedom to create whatsoever it is you want to create."
Where is he on gun control?
He laughs. "That is a political question."
Right. "Information technology's something I would beloved to exist able to answer. Simply I've been very neutral. By pattern. I know some people look down on my quietude, but I feel it would impact my ability to be an creative person. If I wanted to brand a movie about it one day, I don't want you lot to know what side I'm on when you lot go to that movie. It's similar I, Claudius. I know this is random, but the whole reason Claudius survived and went on to be emperor is because he was smart enough to keep quiet and to build his path. Which is what I'grand doing."
And so he ploughs on. His new film, The Frozen Basis, based on the true story of a serial killer who killed at least 17 women in Alaska in the 1980s, is a skillful, solid drama, with Cage every bit the cop and John Cusack as the killer. There is something quite touching about Cage's consummate failure to publicise it during the interview, although it is the pretext for our meeting.
The fact is – and one tin can well imagine this – that Cage says he'south no good when he's non working. "It's like if you lot have a doberman and you don't let the domestic dog piece of work, information technology'south going to become a trivial… hyperactive. They want to delight, they want to work." He has a routine to keep him steady between jobs. "I've made a new point of reading the New York Times from start to cease every day. I watch CNN. I read the Guardian. I'm trying to take in what's happening in the globe. Those go resources for me."
Is he always in danger of feeling used upward?
"I tin't get used up. It's non possible, because I am open to the earth." Like so much of what Cage says and does, this should exist cheesy, but somehow information technology isn't. Information technology'southward the fundamental Cage paradox: the guilelessness that makes his performance.
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2013/jul/20/nicolas-cage-frozen-ground
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