PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND
With PRISONERS OF THE GHOSTLAND, Nicolas Cage finds an equally wild spirit in subversive Japanese director Sion Sono
Director Sion Sono discusses what Nicolas Cage says “might be the wildest movie I’ve ever made”. Which is really, really, really saying something.
THESE DAYS, EVERY new Nicolas Cage film comes with a certain weight of expectation: he’s going to do something crazy! Again! Even so, Cage himself insisted — speaking at the Macao International Film Festival in 2018 — that Prisoners Of The Ghostland ups the ante. “It might be the wildest movie I’ve ever made, he explained. “And that’s saying something. I wear a skintight black leather jumpsuit with grenades attached to different body parts, and if I don’t rescue the governor’s daughter from this state line where they’re all ghosts… they’re gonna blow me up. It’s way out there.”
How did Nicolas Cage’s infamously singular mind find something way out there, even for him? The answer: a similarly singular mind in Sion Sono. Having made his name in Japan with provocative ultraviolent fare like Suicide Club
(a gruesome horror about a wave of mass suicides) and Love Exposure (a four-hour epic featuring full erections, perverted Catholics, and genital gore), the subversive Japanese director makes his English-language debut here. Clearly, with Cage, it was a meeting of minds.
“We immediately clicked,” Sono says, through interpreter and producer Kô Mori. “It didn’t take much explanation for Nicolas Cage to understand what kind of role we were talking about here. We had the same vision together. So that was easy.”
That vision — of steampunk ghosts, nuclear explosions, and a best friend called ‘Psycho’ — started with a shared love of Westerns. “Nic really loves Once Upon A Time In The West,” Sono explains. “And especially Charles Bronson’s role. That’s what I wanted anyway.” It’s Bronson’s steely gaze that Cage is channelling, even as his left testicle gets blown up by the skintight leather suit he’s wearing.
Cage was also able to adapt when Sono suffered a heart attack during pre-production, and the shoot switched from Mexico to Sono’s native Japan. The move ushered in script rewrites and a bizarre mash-up of eastern and western influences: cowboy hats and katanas, side-by-side. “Nic immediately made that adjustment himself,” Sono says. “We started doing samurai action, instead of Spaghetti Western action. His Charles Bronson character now became more like a Toshiro Mifune character,” referring to the prolific Japanese actor famous for his roles in Akira Kurosawa films like Seven Samurai.
The result is a baffling fever dream of a film, a truly distinct collaboration. But is it really Cage’s “wildest” film ever? Sono is unsure what to make of that declaration. “I felt a little pressure when I heard that,” he says. “The whole thing stuck in my head and made me a little nervous.” But for the Japanese auteur, who has nearly 60 directing credits to his name, it’s a mere drop in the crazy ocean. “I’m not sure if this is my craziest film,” he says. “It is my Hollywood debut and I feel great about it. Eventually you will see my craziest movie — soon enough.” With Sono confirming that he and Cage will work together again (“That might be his very next film,” he teases), the bar for “wildest movie ever” could be raised yet.