Which is exactly what Wild At Heart is. This is the movie that Cage himself has repeatedly said is where he learned to have fun:. And that sense of fun is obvious, the way his Sailor gyrates, sneers, leers, and croons at everyone in the movie is a joy. His Elvis impression reminds me of the star in the movie Jailhouse Rock , a young man heading towards dying young and leaving behind a pretty corpse.
All with the bonus that you can tell he is having a blast playing Sailor Ripley. Part of the reason for doing so was to work with the producing team of Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson , as well as to prove that he could make a big blockbuster. What we get is Cage flexing his muscles, working with a star like Sean Connery , who signed onto the movie only because he wanted to work with Cage, who the year before won the Best Actor Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas One of the clearest additions to the character from Cage himself was having Goodspeed not swear, and in one memorable romantic scene, he starts talking about peach sorbet.
Pure Nicolas Cage! This is probably one of, if not my favourite, Nic Cage movie. For those expecting a section on those two amazing action movies, sorry to disappoint. The next movie on our list shows Cage in a very different mood.
In , though, he wrote a script that was even darker than Seven. The second movie to garner him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, the Charlie Kaufman written and Spike Jonze directed reflection on creativity, is at once hilarious, poignant and quite awkward to watch, with a brilliant acrobatic performance from Cage as the brothers Charlie and Donald Kaufman.
But as we all know, from our struggles greatness comes, and Charlie Kaufman is the king of this. It was the only idea I had, I liked it, and I knew there was no way it would be approved if I pitched it.
So I just wrote it and never told the people I was writing it for. As Charlie Kaufman the character, Cage plays a miserable man who struggles with almost every single emotional problem a creative person can suffer from.
It doesn't bother him, overly. What bothers him these days is — brace yourselves — craft. It's not about putting things on, it's about taking things off. And trying to be as naked as I can be as a film presence.
Music, he has decided, is "the highest 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 see it in his acting, the way he delivers his dialogue, it's musical.
He comes from the non-acting branch of the Coppola family: his father August brother of Francis is a comparative literature professor and his mother, Joy, a former dancer.
Although Cage's manner is courtly in what seems like the southern style, he comes from Long Beach, California, and went to Beverly Hills High. He grew up, he says, in "modest circumstances.
Extremely modest. My father was living on a teacher's salary. He took a path that doesn't always lead to fame and fortune, but that was his passion. Was he the black sheep? And he was also an outstanding educator. But it still got into my consciousness and came back in my work as I developed into a man. He had this little projector and he'd play it in the house and we'd all watch, and I'd have nightmares. Just nightmares. But then I grew to love it. I said, OK, can I do that today? If you look at Vampire's Kiss, it's all about that memory of Nosferatu; that Germanic, expressionistic acting style.
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 great in its weirdness and in which Cage exposes himself fearlessly to ridicule, not least for appearing in a horror movie in the first place. His father wasn't a snob in these matters, nor in the larger matter 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 role in his high school production of West Side Story and, when he didn't get it, opted to leave. He told me he was very frustrated with the academic world and you'll probably do better if you go out and try 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 depression, which, Cage says, affected him less than it might have.
It's whatever you want to call it, but I was happy in the bubble of my imagination. These days, his mother takes great pride in his success. She watches my movies when they come on television and gets excited. Quite childlike about it, actually. Look at how you're moving: all that strange energy is like modern dance. To hear him describe it, Cage's own moods only exist to service his work. Being happy or sad is not the point, he says, with magnificent grandeur: "I invite the entire spectrum, shall we call it, of feeling.
Because that is my greatest resource as a film actor. I need to be able to feel everything, which is why I refuse to go on any kind of medication. Not that I need to! But my point is, I wouldn't even explore that, because it 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 home life — his wife, Alice, and their seven-year-old son, Kal-El. He has a grown-up son from a previous relationship. As a young man, Cage says ruefully, he scorned the idea of stability. It's the thing — along with buying and losing all those houses in Europe — that makes people think Cage is nuts.
He is an Elvis fan, and one imagines he gravitated towards Lisa Marie for what, in that context, was her superior celebrity. Cage looks rather surprised. Well, celebrity is a word I take great umbrage with. I'm actively anti-celebrity. I'm about creative expression. That particular relationship was really based on humour. We had a lot of laughs together. So that's what that was. Much was made about it because of her father and whatnot, but we had a simple relationship in my opinion.
That was a different time in my life. Many lifetimes ago. Not all of these movies were good — not by a long shot. But it was clear that Cage could do pretty much anything. Even when the movie around him fell short, critics seemed to agree, Cage was pretty interesting to watch.
At the same time, the actor was self-consciously constructing a persona as an outsider, an artist, a bit of a weirdo. But he volunteered one detail: that he would like you to know he did recently purchase a lizard. A few years later, in , a longer LA Times profile of year-old Cage opened with the actor showing off his pet baby octopus to the journalist before speaking thoughtfully about the movie business.
He was clearly wise, tuned in to both the craft of acting and the business of filmmaking, but also unconventional — a persona that would persist into the next phase of his career.
In , Cage won an Oscar for his leading performance Leaving Las Vegas , in which he plays Ben Sanderson, an alcoholic screenwriter who leaves Hollywood for Las Vegas, where he plans to drink himself to death. Cage beat out a formidable field of contenders for the trophy: Richard Dreyfuss Mr. It would seem Cage had established himself as a prestigious performer who gave every role his all.
Movies like Gone in 60 Seconds, in which he plays a reformed but notorious car thief, and the fantasy comedy The Family Man followed in The sheer variety of his roles is wild. His movies range from earnest dramas to rambunctious schlock. You might be forgiven, watching all of his films in a row, for thinking Cage is a chameleon, or able to divide himself into multiple personalities. Tom Hanks was originally cast in the role.
In the film, Charlie is twitchy, phobic, and ridden by anxiety; Donald is cool-tempered, breezy, full of confidence. His narration creates the desperate agony of a man so smart he understands his problems intimately, yet so neurotic he is captive to them. He headlined the critically panned but wildly successful National Treasure franchise, the first installment of which launched in His star seemed to start falling in , with the release of the widely derided remake of The Wicker Man , but he kept working, starring in box office winners like Ghost Rider and Knowing In , this public image hit an inflection point.
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