“I can’t pretend to know what people think or want to think about me,” he said. Not the Toronto International Film Festival, he clarified - the one in Transylvania.
He explained that he’d been busy preparing for a trip to TIFF. In person, he’s tall, with a jangly energy complemented, on this day, by oversize sunglasses, a dragon ring the size of a walnut and a black velveteen jacket over a Bruce Lee T-shirt.
And then the door to the room swung open and in flew Cage, hopefully to provide some answers. Cage is a walking why, a performer who sees possibilities in art - and maybe life - that no one else does. He also, as if living according to lines from a surreal folk song, has owned pet cobras and castles, was forced to return a stolen dinosaur skull, has made and lost a fortune and is keeping a pyramid waiting for him - as a tomb - down in New Orleans.īut why has he done all of these things? I sat wondering in a private room at a small Italian restaurant not far from the Las Vegas Strip. Which is what’s so enthralling about the alien intensity and oddball flourishes that Cage has brought to art-house fantasia (“Wild at Heart”), whimsical romantic comedy (“Honeymoon in Vegas”), bleak drama (“Leaving Las Vegas”), cerebral comedy (“Adaptation”), sensational Hollywood blockbuster (“Con Air”), balletic, high-concept action (“Face/Off”), quiet character studies (“Joe”) and psychedelic horror (“Mandy”). Unlike most movie stars - who are walking answers, machines who reliably fill expectations rather than confound them - Nicolas Cage rarely does the obvious thing, whether in his choice of roles or how he plays them. (His most recent release: the straightforwardly titled thriller “A Score to Settle.”) But mostly I wanted to know the method behind the seeming madness that informs so many of his performances.
I wanted to know why Cage, Hollywood’s greatest surrealist, whose personal and creative unpredictability has led him to attain near-mythological status in certain corners of the internet, acts in so many movies - 20 in the last two years - and why so few of them make mainstream ripples. I wanted to know why this divisive, mercurial actor has waged a career-long, one-man war against naturalism, refusing to let staid ideas about how people might behave in “real life” dictate his performances. There are questions I’ve wanted to ask Nicolas Cage for years.
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