Nicolas Cage

Interview By: Rocco Passafuime
RoccoPassafuime@TheCinemaSource.com

In his over 25 year career, Nicolas Cage has not only managed to impress audiences with his fantastic acting skills, but his incredibly diverse movie roles. They range from a petty criminal in Raising Arizona to a suicidal alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas to an illegal arms dealer in Lord Of War to playing both Charlie and Donald Kaufman to a code-deciphering historian in the National Treasure movies to even a Chinese villain in the fake trailer Werewolf Women Of The S.S. for the Grindhouse double feature.

But even after a Best Actor Oscar win, a Best Actor Oscar nomination, and plenty of devoted fans, the now 44 year-old actor has not relented at all in his pursuit for the next challenging and exciting role. Cage’s latest such endeavor is as assassin Joe in the new Americanized remake of the critically-acclaimed 1999 Thai film Bangkok Dangerous. Nicolas first shared with us what motivated him to be a part of appealing this new remake to Western audiences.

“Jason [Shuman], one of the producers, brought it to me and The Pang Brothers were already attached. I was aware very loosely of the original film,” Cage recalls, “But I was thinking more and more about being more global in my work, which means going to foreign countries and working with foreign filmmakers, hoping that they would give me a new take on my work, a new point of view, keep it fresh, reinvent me in some way. And that’s largely why I made the movie.”

But the Americanization process, Nicolas says, was not without bringing a few changes to the original. In the original film, the Thai counterpart for Joe was a deaf mute, which may not have effectively benefited in utilizing Nicolas’s star appeal in this new, slightly more Westernized version.

“I thought it worked out better to have the leading lady in that aspect to her behavior,” he notes, “It made her more emotional.

My interests were more about having this white man in a largely Asian world, trying to fit in, trying to connect in some way with the culture.”

Despite this change, Nicolas believes that the involvement of an all-Thai crew, including the film’s original directors, The Pang Brothers, keeps intact the film’s distinctly East Asian roots fundamentally intact.

“I have to say it still has an Asian look because it’s The Pang Brothers and it’s their point of view,” Cage believes.

Remakes in this era have become frequent and routine in Hollywood and have contributed to perpetual criticism of an industry suffering from an embarrassing dearth of new ideas. However, Nicolas believes that doing a Hollywood remake, whether it be of a foreign film or an older American film, is not the easy task it appears to be on the surface.

“Remakes are always a challenge and they’re always sitting ducks,” he notes, “But in this case, this remake has the same filmmakers. And I felt that they were going to try to improve upon their movie or at least introduce new elements in the movie, because they felt that they could. I didn’t really factor in the original film at all. To me, this is a much different film because it’s the story of a white guy in the middle of an Asian culture.”

“And that automatically gives the movie an inherent dramatic tension that you find when you find when you see pictures with different races and different cultures interacting,” Nicolas adds, “In this movie, the female lead Charlie is the one who’s deaf so it gives it a kind of tenderness that was perhaps not in the original. But this movie’s really independently spirited. It’s not like anything I had ever done before. I really have no expectations. I just know that I connected with the character’s feelings of isolation and enchantment.”

Bangkok Dangerous is not the first film from The Pang Brothers that has attracted the attention of

Hollywood. Early this year, their subsequent film, The Eye was remade for Western consumption as a vehicle for actress Jessica Alba. Nicolas believes The Pang Brothers’ appeal comes from a unique filmmaking style that carries a cross-cultural global appeal, not unlike Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo.

“The only similarity I would say is that there’s a kind of a dream logic that comes out of Asia that is unlike anything that we have in the States or in Europe or really anywhere else in the world,” Cage notes, “There’s a way of being naturally abstract that still somehow has a logic to it that I admire.”

“All three directors do not master shots, but I would say that if I had to make a comparison, which I don’t really like to do, it would be more like a jazz musician and the Pengs would be like a marvelous illustrators,” he continues, “The Pengs draw their movies like graphic novels and they don’t deviate from that at all, they don’t change it, they just stick to what they do. So they had the movie made before photography even happened and that’s it. But it was a very fast process.”

It’s this unique cultural experience that, he says, was one of the great fringe benefits of working on a film like Bangkok Dangerous, both professionally, as well as personally.

“As myself, as Nicolas, going to Thailand and working with an all-Thai crew and having the opportunity to live in that beautiful country for a couple of months, I was amazed and enchanted by the amount of time that the Thai people take to bless one another and show respect to one another,” Cage recalls, “The time it would take me to walk down the street in Los Angeles to go home, in two minutes, that would be twenty minutes in Bangkok.”

“You bow and you make the triangle hands and you bless everyone, it doesn’t matter who you are, and that to

me is very heartwarming,” he continues, “It was also interesting me because it is a monarchy. I never really been in an active monarchy before and it was one of the examples of how it works. It’s a good monarchy, the people there love their king, and it makes you feel totally safe. Because if you wear the king’s insignia on your shirt, you’re invisible because no one would dare to do anything to that person because they would wear the king’s symbol. And that’s interesting to me.”

However, Cage recalls a moment where the experience of filming turned incredibly frightening when he found himself squared in the middle of a military coup d’etat going on in the country.

“I was on the set, I was outside. It was about 1:00AM,” he recounts, “The man in charge of the weapons said we can’t fire the guns because there’s a military coup takeover happening right now and that if we fire the weapons, they may start firing back. And I don’t know what to make of it, it was completely abstract. There was nothing in my world that could relate to that. So one of the Chinese directors, there were two of them, Danny and Oxide Pang, one of them looked at me and said, ‘Hey, look, it’s Bangkok Dangerous!’”

“And I realized that I was going to do whatever I could to keep my family safe,” Nicolas adds, “So I walked over to the Chao Phraya river, went on a boat, put on a boat to the hotel, wake my wife up. My father-in-law was staying with us. I said we’re going and I took them to the airport, put them on a jet to South Korea, dropped them off in Seoul, got them back on the plane, and flew them back to Bangkok. All the while, I did this with visions of my mind of things burning. And I gave myself 50/50, I didn’t know what could

happen. But I finished the scene and the next morning, people were putting flowers in the tanks and I realized that I was out of the woods. But it was not like anything I had ever experienced before.”

When asked about whether Nicolas was able to maintain his fairly likable on-screen appeal with audiences while playing a fairly merciless assassin like Joe, he says it’s the similar fish-out-of-water cultural disconnect he shared with the character that ultimately connected him to the character.

“I don’t really think about it in those terms,” Cage insists, “I just think about whether or not there’s something organic for me, something sincere, if I can tell the story in a way that for me seems honest. In this case, I could because I have my own feelings of enchantment and bewilderment in my life.”

“Being married to a Korean lady, I really didn’t know how to fit into her culture or there are feelings of wanting to do the right thing, but fearing that I would make a mistake and all that connected with Joe in Bangkok Dangerous, those feelings of isolation,” he adds, “But I think that the best characters are the ones that manage to be both attractive and repulsive at the same time, because if you do that, you’re at the center of the universe. You could speak to everybody if you can find characters that are more ambiguous or raise more questions than answers.”

A more superficially intriguing aspect to Joe is his sleek hairstyle. This coming from an actor whose character’s looks are as wildly diverse as their mannerisms, we asked Cage if he consciously makes his character’s hair just as distinctly defined as his persona.

“I kind of learned early on that one of the tools that an actor has is to use hair and makeup to want to transform himself and try to create new characters, so you can lose yourself in the character,” Nicolas replies, “And it

does help with believing that you can become somebody else. It all goes back to Lon Chaney, who was the master of disguising himself. There’s always an aspect of disguise that I liked about film acting. But there has been much talk about my hair in this movie and I think, at this point, it does require some sort of response.”

“I’m playing a hitman who’s going to Asia and obviously, in Asia, if you’re a hitman, you don’t want to stand out, you don’t want to look like a target,” he adds, “The jet black hair look was really from the perspective that the character was trying to blend into the look of the culture so that he wouldn’t stand out. There was a scene where Joe was going to dye his hair on camera. I still wish that we would have shot that, but it was an idea that I had come up with that before he had got onto the plane, he had dyed his hair to fit into that world. What’s also interesting to me about it is that the villain is an Asian guy with ultra-blonde hair. You got this kind of yin-yang thing happening where the white guy has the jet black Asian hair and this Asian guy has the ultra-blonde white guy hair.”

With Bangkok Dangerous now under his belt, Nicolas shared with us a fairly wide variety of new film projects he has over the horizon.

“Well, I just finished Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans in New Orleans,” Cage notes, “I got Knowing, which I just finished with Alex Proyas in Australia. I’m going to work with Matthew Bond in England on something called Kick Ass.”

“With Kick Ass, whenever I try to work in film, I always want to keep it as organic and honest as possible and I am that kid. I’m that kid that would dress up like a superhero and would sneak out of the

house at 10:00 at night and fly around and pretend like I was fighting crime. It was a good match. So it’s all very diverse and international kinds of movies.”

We were intrigued to learn that one international movie Cage has already committed himself to yet another one with fairly Asian origins. It’s none other than a film adaptation of Astro Boy, the first domestically and internationally successful Japanese manga and TV anime.

“Well, I play the mad scientist father who creates Astro Boy and it is an animated movie,” he explains, “Astro Boy was just one of those marvelous, iconic cartoon characters that I grew up and fell in love with because the character was so endearing and so powerful. It was kind of a science-fiction version of Pinnochio, which was always a story that my father liked and told me when I was a boy, so I thought that was perfect.”

Another international project was hinted upon when we asked the actor if he was planning a sequel to the immensely popular film adaptation of the Marvel superhero comic Ghost Rider.

“Yes, actually, I had a nice meeting with the studio about three months ago,” Nicolas mentions, “We talked about even going international with that character, taking him into Europe, having him go on a motorcycle tour through Europe and he’s connected with the church, if you believe that. So it has elements to it that are very much in the zeitgeist, like The Da Vinci Code and things like that.”

A noted comic book fan, we ended by asking Cage if there was any comic book series he himself would love to see made into a live-action Hollywood film.

“I think what would make a beautiful movie would be the The Sub-Mariner, but I don’t know how many people would go,” he believes, “But it would be a beautiful story because he has a daughter. But that one would be one I’d hope many people would go see.”