A few weeks ago, Nicolas Cage surprised his fans by announcing his intention to retire from the film business soon. In the same breath, he added that it's a bit of a shame that the new film starring him, "The Man of Dreams," isn't his last.
"After 45 years in the profession, and having appeared in more than 100 films, I feel like I've pretty much said everything I have to say," he was quoted as saying in an interview with Uproxx, a website that quickly went viral.
"I'd like to end on a positive note and say 'adios.' I have contracts and obligations that prevent me from doing that right now, so we'll see what happens. But I'm going to be a lot pickier about my film projects from now on, and I'm interested in exploring other formats.
"I'm very interested in TV series right now. I saw an episode of Breaking Bad, where Bryan Cranston looks at a suitcase for an hour. We don't have time to do things like that in the cinema, so maybe TV is the direction that will be best for me.
"If it were up to me, I'd leave when I'm upstairs. I think I have three or four films that I need to complete, before I get to a place that will allow me to switch formats and find another way to express myself in the game. I did what I had to do with cinema, and now I want to move on."
You can understand Cage and his desire to change direction and slow down. For more than a decade now, it's hard to find a player busier than him, or one who works harder than him. So much so, that his willingness to say "yes" to (almost) every role offered to him has long since become a joke in itself.
Between 2016 and 2019, Cage made six films each year. Most of them you haven't heard of, yet in almost all of them he plays as if his life depends on it, demonstrating the intensity and totality that have become his hallmarks. He just doesn't know how to fake. Although he has calmed down a bit in recent years, in 2023 he has starred in no fewer than five films (not including a brief cameo appearance as Superman in the superhero movie The Flash).
But now, two weeks before he turns 60, and a year and a half after having a third child (he's married for the fifth time and the father of two grown sons), Cage seems tired of spending most of his time on the sets of movies that no one watches. And he's tired of watching him and his illustrious career — remind you, the man starred in classics like "Wild Heart," "Moonstruck," "Leaving Las Vegas," "Alcatraz Breakout," "Frontal Confrontation" and "Adaptation," among others — become the subject of ridicule, punchlines, and online jokes and memes.
In the past two years, the Oscar-winning actor has actually experienced a reassessment, and for the first time in a long time, his stock is on the rise again. In 2021, he did a wonderful role in Pig, an independent thriller drama in which he appeared as an eccentric loner searching for his beloved kidnapped pig. Last year, in the wild action comedy The Unbearable Weight of Huge Talent, Cage played a fictionalized version of himself, an aging Hollywood star named Nick Cage who had to degrade himself to be able to pay off all his debts. Now, in The Man of Dreams, he delivers another excellent performance reminiscent of his heyday in the '80s and '90s. So why settle for less?
"It's one of the five best scripts I've ever read," Cage says proudly at an online press conference celebrating the release of the new film. "The other four are 'Arizona Baby,' 'Leaving Las Vegas,' 'Kiss Bit,' and 'Adaptation.' I knew immediately that I had to make this movie, I just had to. I don't look like Paul, the main character, I don't sound like him or move like him, but I felt I had the right life experience to play him."
Balding and bizarre professor
"The Man of Dreams" tells the bizarre story of a bald, neurotic and incompetent professor named Paul Matthews, whose boring and pathetic life takes an unexpected turn when many people around him, even those he doesn't even know, begin to report that he appears in their dreams.
At first, Matthews thoroughly enjoyed the fame and fame lavished on him. He gets the attention he's always wanted, quickly becomes a celebrity and enjoys the VIP treatment he gets. But as you might guess, things are going in a dark, even very dark direction, and along the way the film cunningly touches on contemporary topics such as cancel culture, internet virality, hypersensitivity, trauma and the Mandela effect (a phenomenon in which a large part of the public remembers with certainty an event that did not happen).
In "The Man of Dreams". "I knew right away I had to do it," Photo: AP
"The idea for the story started out of a thought exercise I did," says Christopher Burgley, the 38-year-old Norwegian filmmaker who signed on to the script and directing. "I wanted to see what would happen if a horror movie like A Nightmare on Elm Street really took place, in today's cultural climate. I wanted to take a Twilight Zone-style scenario and put it into the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the times. How would the environment react if such a strange and unexplained situation happened in reality."
"Like Paul, I went viral," Cage explains of his attraction to Paul's character. "I may have been the first player to wake up one morning — I think it was in 2008 or 2009 — and make the mistake of searching for his name on Google. There was a clip called 'Nick Cage Losing His', which collected all sorts of crisis moments of different characters I played, but without the narrative context. That's how I found out I had become a meme. I felt like I didn't know what was happening to me. I couldn't stop it or control it, I couldn't do anything.
"When I read 'The Man of My Dreams,' I thought, 'I can use the experience of this experience to play Paul. Because people dream of him, and he has no control over it either.' So behind his voice, the way he moved, and his looks, I could display real emotions based on how I felt trying to deal with these viral web videos.
"Lately, I've been trying to be even more personal in my roles. I want to find characters that allow me to use my life experience – like I did in Pig. It's so I don't have to 'play' too much to get the right feeling."
While Burgley admits that the role was not originally intended for Cage (at one point Adam Sandler was supposed to star), he agrees that his presence loads the film with additional layers that did not exist on the page. "I'm a huge fan of his. He plays in so many movies that I love. But Nicolas Cage's persona undoubtedly overshadows the person himself. His character has already become a myth. It's a symbol, an internet meme. Everyone has definite ideas about who they are.
"Nick went through periods where he was loved and hated and there were times of everything in between. This adds a very interesting layer to the project, and there are definitely autobiographical elements here.
"Once we cast him, the big challenge became how to hide such a charismatic and energetic and famous actor in the image of an average loser, how to turn Nicolas Cage into a stuttering clumsy. I don't think we've ever seen him like that. The closest was in 'Adaptation,' perhaps."
Director, Christopher Burgley. "Fan",
Cage agrees: "My role in 'Adaptation' definitely made it easier for me to play the role this time, and Christopher really talked about his desire to do something in the style of Charlie Kaufman. It was very important to him that the audience saw Paul Matthews, not Nick Cage. He wanted to take a famous personality, erase it and present someone less successful, someone who didn't stand out in space. You could say that my appearance helped me lose myself, but also find myself, with how crazy it sounds."
Aside from inevitable comparisons to "Adaptation," the film's delusional nature and heightened preoccupation with dreams also evoke strong associations with David Lynch, another iconic director with whom Cage worked.
"Movies are dreams," he quotes Lynch's philosophy with a smile. "They have the same DNA. They are little thought expressions, 'bluffs' in the normal brain process. Dreams change the physics of narrative because their logic is different. I love the magic of dreams, I like to think of them as gifts. It's always fun to play with these things, because dreams are abstract territory. They don't make sense."
"There was something humiliating about that job."
Unfortunately, in the current cultural climate, there is almost no room left for films like "The Man of Dreams." The era when independent films dominated the discourse and left their mark on popular culture is long gone, and nowadays it is very rare to come across a work with an original and controversial artistic vision.
The company that continues to do this sacred work is the production company A24, which has built itself a high-quality repertoire in recent years, and which signed on to the film together with the hot creator Ari Aster ("Bo is afraid", "Hereditary").
"It's true that these kinds of movies are rarely made anymore," Burgley agrees. "I'm very happy that A24 has been able to carve out a niche for themselves and make the independent genre 'sexy' and economically viable. They are loyal to the artistic vision of the creators and go with it to the end. They don't let their films become capitalist products assembled by a committee trying to figure out exactly what the algorithm wants."
Cage: "At the end of the day, I always go back to independent cinema. That's where the originality is, and the budgets aren't too big. You don't get too many comments from the producers, there's no situation of too many cooks in the kitchen, there's no pressure to reach a certain amount at the box office. In the independent world, you have a lot more freedom, and a lot more room to work with the director and reach something fresh and new, something that creates sparks.
"I always felt that my work in the independent field enriched my work with bigger films. For example, when I did Kiss Bite I felt like I was in a lab, where I could use the acting style of silent films, embrace elements of German expressionism – and insert them into the modern character I play. It was a perfect way to get to abstract and surreal places, and it gave me the experience and confidence to try similar things in a big movie, like Frontal Confrontation. Of course, everyone there told me I was exaggerating, and that I should calm down, but I knew what I was doing was going to work, and I knew that this behavior would be perfect for the character I was playing there."
"I have three or four films that I need to complete before I get to a place that allows me to change format and find another way to express myself in acting. I did what I had to do with cinema, and now I want to move on."
Cage describes working on "The Man of Dreams" as an experience of catharsis, and alongside his extraordinary performance in "The Unbearable Weight of Huge Talent," it's safe to say that the veteran and experienced actor is still eager to learn new things about himself and his image. He continues to develop, improve, explore, take risks and push himself into new and unfamiliar territories. You have to appreciate it.
"'Unbearable Weight' was the scariest thing I've done in my 40-year career," he admits. "There wasn't a single muscle in my body that said, 'I want to play a character called Nick Cage.' Stand in front of the camera and be 'you'? I knew I was making fun of myself and that there was a humiliating dimension to it. It was like walking a tightrope. I would never want to do anything like that again. There is no way there will be an 'unbearable weight 2'. That's not going to happen."
The results in this case, at least for Cage, are more pleasant. "The Man of Dreams" has so far enjoyed good reviews, is warmly received by audiences and even landed Cage an unexpected Golden Globe nomination. "I never saw myself as a teacher," he concludes. "I always saw me as a student. On my resume I did a lot of things that people advised me not to do – action movies, for example. But I did it anyway, because I thought I might learn something from them. Every role I did, successful or not, was an experiment. So yes, I'm still a student. And I'm still looking for ways to learn."
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