Complexity is a beautiful trait in an actor. It enables them to reach the furthest corners of creativity in producing a landscape that makes them brilliant to watch.
The trouble with complexity often comes with the cameras are turned off for the simple reason that the intricacy for which they make great movies stays turned on.
If anyone has discovered this across a tumultuous career and personal life, it's actor Nicolas Cage. From incredible highs on-screen, Con Air, Face/Off, Gone in 60 Seconds, City of Angels – to devastating lows off it – financial ruin, four failed marriages – the 59-year-old Long Beach-born actor and film-maker is a high-roller whose own life would provide a great script for a box office blockbuster.
Cage likes to see himself as relevant and active, which is impressive given his time in the industry now totals four decades. Many of his contemporaries have lost interest and gone off to do something else with their lives, but not Cage.
Instead, he's looking for new variations of old ideas. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent was a brilliant style shift into playing himself. In contrast, in Renfield, in which he plays lead man Dracula, is an intelligent reworking that proves Cage's resurgence is not just in watchable, original content.
A workaholic, Cage, by his own admission, still can churn out run-of-the-mill movies, proving he is either a man lost in an ether of scripts and ideas or just supercharged on a mission to perform. While even he appears unsure which it is, he's perhaps never been more content with his lot.
STRIPLV: You seem to be on another upward curve with Renfield. Would you agree? CAGE: It's a movie that shifts expectations, and if there's one thing I have learned throughout my career, it's that expectation is everything. As an actor, sometimes it's the lead-up rather than the delivery, and to be a part of projects that get people talking – for the right reasons – makes me feel alive. Renfield really ticked every box for me. The script is funny but fearsome, the cast was brilliant, and the genre is one I've probably not been in enough. I look back on some of the stuff I've done, and I think sometimes I've stayed in the same circles too long, and that's easy to do. I want to move out from that again now. STRIPLV: So, are you philosophical about your career? CAGE: I think you have no choice but to be philosophical. I would rather be that than anything else. I would rather take a long view over the things that have happened because that means I have processed them. I don't want to be that person wishing for a time machine so I can go back and repair things or make different decisions. That's not an option, nor would I want it to be. We live and die by our decisions, whether or not they end up being good ones. In the whole, I have had an incredible career. I count myself as one of the very luckiest people on the planet. What do I need to change? STRIPLV: Isn't it true that joy and disappointment come to all of us no matter what lives we lead? CAGE: That is true. It's all relative. Having money or being on the big screen, or being able to drive a car really fast does not make you immune to the things that make human beings sad, nor do those talents or possessions make people perennially happy. Over time, I think the world has a firmer grip on health and well-being and what really puts people in mindsets where they feel accomplished, and it's nothing really to do with anything material. STRIPLV: Moving on, over your career, you have played characters formed from both fiction and biographical roles. What do you prefer? CAGE: Well, any time you can get the opportunity to meet someone who was there at the time of something biographical, it's a Godsend. They can describe any experience to you, and that will make your performance better. Sometimes, I just listen to what they are saying, and I let the words swirl around in my head, with me playing the conversation over and over in my mind. I sleep on it. I try to let it resonate in a dream and then take the form of visuals. I remember speaking to a guy for the film USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage. A total of 300 men sank with the ship, and almost 600 died floating on the water, waiting to be rescued. This was the single greatest loss of life in the history of the US Navy. He remembers he was holding tight onto a potato which he had when the ship was torpedoed by the Japanese during World War II. He said, other than that potato, the only other thing he possessed was his faith. He said it was almost as if should he let go of that potato; it would be a signal that he may also lose his life. So, he held onto that potato until he was found and brought to safety. You cannot stimulate that sort of insight from nothing. A biographical role has all that added decoration around it. Though with that comes pressure. It's not like it's a blank canvas, nor that the canvas is even your own. It's someone else's. You have to stick to the blueprint of a person, or you'll have everyone coming out telling you what a poor job you've done, family members, close friends, it could be historians. You have to accept you will always be critiqued from every point of view. STRIPLV: So you do feel pressure when you act? Because you always seem like a cool guy. CAGE: (Laughs) Well, of course, I am still a cool guy. But seriously, because I care so much about my craft, my reputation, and also the industry, which has been so kind to me over my career and life, I always try to deliver my best performance. What I've learned is you can't go back and fix things with a magic wand. When things don't go to plan, you have to move on from them. The movie industry actually has a very short memory, and it serves every actor well to remember that. I maybe used to get bogged down in the feedback from a role when others around me were moving on with the next project or the project after that. Life's too short. STRIPLV: You inspire so many, but who inspired you in the past? CAGE: When I was working on World Trade Center with the great director, Oliver Stone, he told me and the other members of the cast that the job in hand was there to do and that we shouldn't be dwelling on any added pressure we may have felt given the backstory. Of course, I was never going to approach the movie in the same way as I would have playing Cameron Poe in Con Air or playing Dr. Stanley Goodspeed in The Rock, but when a director acknowledges what everyone is thinking, that's sometimes enough. STRIPLV: What's the most challenging role you've played? CAGE: There have been lots, but it's ironic to say the toughest acting gig was perhaps the one where I played myself and, by logic, didn't have as much to act out. I knew The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent was always going to be surreal, and I suppose it was an interesting role to be asked to play. "Just be yourself" isn't always the answer you're expecting when you ask a director how they want you to perform when the cameras start rolling! And actually, being yourself in an acting situation isn't easy. Which version of myself? (Laughs) The final version we had isn't myself anyway. I was told by those people whose thoughts and critiques I trust Mike Nilon, who is my manager, is one of those very people that thought the movie was good. That's good enough for me. As a producer on it, I should have known that, but the approach flipped everything you expect, so it was even more difficult than normal to step outside the production and assess it as you normally would. It's a bit like if a director tells you to walk down the street naturally, it actually can become very difficult to put one foot in front of the other. Try it. STRIPLV: Does that make it difficult to watch back? CAGE: I'll never know - it's not a movie that I will ever watch. (Laughs) I mean that in its sincerity. In the bulk of the movie, I play an extremely high, neurotic version of myself, and I don't know if I am ready to see that played out on screen, as much as the audiences may well enjoy it. Director Tom Gormican wanted me to do it that way, and we did have conversations about how unwatchable that might be for some people, me included. STRIPLV: Did you clash with Tom over it? CAGE: I wouldn't say that 'clash' is the right word, but we certainly did have moments where we may well have gone in separate directions. I went with what he wanted, and I'm told by the people that I trust that it works. To be able to really critique it for myself, which would be even weirder. (Laughs) I would have to sit down and watch it a few times. But I can't say that that is ever going to happen.
Five Nicholas Cage films with randomly high (or low) ratings on Rotten Tomatoes
In Red Rock West (97%-rated), Cage plays an unemployed ex-Marine who finds himself in a situation where he is offered $10,000 by a bar owner to kill a man's wife, who mistakes him for a hitman. However, Cage tells the wife, who wants to kill her husband, when the real hired killer turns up.
Pig (97%-rated) is a relatively recent and interesting angle on a truffle hunter (Cage) who lives alone in the woods and finds that his pig, who forages for the valuable fungus, has been stolen. Cage's character, Rob, returns to Portland to find the perpetrators.
The 2002 movie Adaptation (91%) is a profound, comedic, and original piece directed by Spike Jonze and starring Cage as Charlie Kaufman, a screenwriter in Los Angeles, dealing with many different emotions and complications in his life. It co-stars Meryl Streep and Tilda Swinton.
For Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance (17%), who exactly were the director's Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor aiming this vengeance at? Perhaps the paying general public who were naïve enough to go and see it. The sequel to the original 2007 film is even worse than its forefather.
As astonishing a feat is that a film such as Deadfall can get a 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes, the cast in this is as impressive. Michael Biehn and James Coburn join Cage in a film hyped as 'the ultimate con.' Maybe it was to get them involved in this monstrosity!