Cage wrestles with his exaggerated mythology
Star satirizes perceptions of self but also acts out those personas sincerely in film
“Metropolis.” Bruce
Lee. Woody Woodpecker. A pet cobra. All of these things have been inspirations behind Nicolas Cage performances — sometimes private homages that the actor has used like blueprints to build some of his most exaggerated, erratic and affecting characters.
A conversation with Cage, likewise, pulls from a wide gamut of sources. In a recent and wide-ranging interview ahead of the release of “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” Cage touched on Picasso, Elia Kazan, Timothee Chalamet and Francis Bacon. A book of interviews with Bacon, “The Brutality of Fact,” for instance, helped Cage define his attraction to intense, even grotesque performance — “that which is not obviously beautiful,” he says — rather than naturalism.
“And I’ve kind of approached my public perception, as well as the way I design my film work, as an actor with that concept in mind — to not be afraid to be ugly in behavior or even in appearance,” says Cage, 58. “To create a kind of taste that you have to discover.”
With more than 100 films, Cage — an Oscar winner (“Leaving Las Vegas”), an action star (“Con Air”) and the source of internet memes for his most theatrical moments in films like “Face/Off ” — has long been one of the most particular tastes in movies. Yet by being “an amateur surrealist,” as he refers to himself, Cage has emerged — even after resorting to a string of VOD releases to pay off back taxes and get himself out of debt — as one of Hollywood’s most widely loved stars. As “Unbearable Weight” director Tom Gormican says, “the sight of his face sort of makes people happy.”
But for even the mercurial Cage, “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent,” now playing in theaters, represents something different. In it, Cage plays himself. Or, rather, he plays a fun-house mirror version of himself that sometimes interacts with a younger version of himself. The movie is one big homage to Cage in which the actor somehow manages to both satirize perceptions of himself and act out those personas sincerely.
“The through line that’s always been there for me: No matter what I designed, and it has been a design whether it’s ridiculous — and it’s often ridiculous — or whether it’s sublime, it has to be informed with genuine emotional content,” says Cage.
“No matter how broad or what some folk like to call over the top, it had genuine feeling.” But what to Cage constitutes over the top? This is the actor who, channeling Nosferatu in “Vampire’s Kiss,” gave one of the most bonkers recitals of the alphabet ever heard. He’s fond of answering: “Well, show me where the top is, and I’ll tell you if I’m over it.”
“I grew up in a house where my mom would do things that if you put it in a movie, you would say that was over the top,” says Cage, whose mother, Joy Coppola, was a dancer and choreographer. His father, August Coppola, brother of Francis, was a professor of literature. “But what is the top? When you want to design something and you think about different styles — naturalism, impressionism, surrealism, abstract
— then you start to look at it in a different way. It’s not going to be for everybody, and it’s not necessarily going to sell tickets. But that’s OK.”
But what’s unusual about Cage is that many of those experiments have sold tickets. A lot of them. Cage’s films account for nearly $5 billion in worldwide box office. Still, it has been a while since he was front-and-center in a major studio film.
“The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” allows him to play around with the notion of a comeback. In the film, he’s desperate to score better parts than the birthday party he has been offered $1 million to attend.
The movie was an opportunity to wrestle — usually comically, sometimes physically — with his own exaggerated mythology.
Gormican was turned down several times by
Cage before a heartfelt letter finally convinced the actor to make the film. The issue was that Cage, even at his most outlandish, has never put quotation marks around his performances. He tends to invest fully in even the most unhinged characters. Cage initially feared Gormican’s film would be self-mocking parody, and while it has those elements, Cage steers it in more unpredictable directions.
But the actor does reach
some gonzo heights in the film. After one scene, Gormican was honored to hear Cage say: “That was the Full Cage. You got the Full Cage.” Another scene features the two Cages making out, after which the younger exclaims, “Nick Cage smooches good!”
Cage’s exotic tastes — he once had to return a dinosaur skull he purchased that had been stolen from Mongolia — have contributed to his legend. But he insists that he is normal in his life so that he can be extreme in his work — and that some of his selfpromotion was itself an act.
Cage last year married Riko Shibata, his fifth wife, and they are expecting a child. (Cage also has two grown sons; a sticking point in “Unbearable Weight” was that he not be shown as an absentee father — one fiction Cage wouldn’t permit.) After an unusually introspective press tour for the film, Cage is looking forward to returning to the desert outside Las Vegas, where he lives.
But “The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent” wraps a chapter for the actor. He’s finally out of the red after making some 30 video-on-demand films over the last decade to pay off the IRS and his creditors. He makes no apologies for those films. They made him a better actor, he says.
“I was practicing. I managed to keep my access to my imagination at my fingertips. It was a much better way for me to get this financial crisis off my back than doing something like a Super Bowl commercial — and believe me they offered,” says Cage. “That was also a point for me, that I’m not a salesman, I’m an actor.”
Having started professionally at 15, Cage has been doing this a long time. To him, his path began, appropriately enough, with an audacious performance.
Cage’s father, the actor says, had a massive influence on him, exposing him to books, early films and paintings. But he could cut his son down with words.
“And I just wasn’t going to take it,” says Cage. “I knew that he thought more of me than he let on. I tricked him once, and I did something that I’ve never done ever again. I lied. I said, ‘Dad, I wrote this song.’ And I played him Joe Jackson’s ‘Is She Really Going Out With Him?’ And he believed me. He said, ‘Wow, Nicky, that’s incredible.’ Then I got the positive affirmation that I needed to believe in myself. That was the one time a lie saved me.”