Looking every bit the movie star, Nicolas Cage received a Red Sea Honouree award at the closing ceremony of the Red Sea International Film Festival.
In his acceptance speech, Cage said everyone was in Jeddah to celebrate the film. “Because no other art form can reach so many people around the world so quickly. Cinema is a mirror that reflects all of our stories to remind us of how human we all are.”
Earlier in the day the Hollywood star sat down with the Lebanese presenter Raya Abirached to discuss his career as an actor. He did so in front of an audience of film lovers at the Ritz-Carlton Jeddah, who clapped and cheered whenever their favorite movies were mentioned.
One of those films was The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, an action comedy directed by Tom Gormican. In it, Cage plays a fictionalized version of himself. “I must have turned that down five or six times,” said Cage. “There was no muscle in my body that told me to play a character whose name is Nick Cage. That was the most high-wire act I’ve ever had to do. I was so worried it would be like an Andy Samberg SNL [Saturday Night Live] sketch. But Tom Gormican met with me and… he said: ‘I want this movie to have heart.’ And he seemed like a genuine enthusiast of the filmography. And so I knew then that he had more in mind than just some sort of slapstick comedy, like sending me up. I think he wanted to give the character some heart and pathos.”
The experience of playing himself, however, was a bizarre one. “I approached it much the same way I did any other movie, except that it got a little surreal because people were calling to Nick Cage on the set and the camera was rolling and I was like, ‘boy, this is trippy. Am I doing this? What’s going on?’ And that was different. It was definitely unlike any other experience I’ve ever had making a movie. I wouldn’t want to do it again. But I tried.”
Cage’s chat with Abirached was among a series of ‘In Conversations’ to have taken place at this year’s festival. High-profile attendees such as Halle Berry, Andrew Garfield, Chris Hemsworth, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Will Smith have all sat down in front of packed audiences.
Of particular interest was Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, which Cage said is among the five best scripts he’s ever had. The others are Raising Arizona, Vampire’s Kiss, Leaving Las Vegas, and Adaptation. In Dream Scenario, Cage plays Paul Matthews, a mild-mannered professor who begins to appear in the dreams of people around the world.
“I think it’s one of my two favorite movies I’ve ever made,” said Cage. “And I’m so happy that I was alive to do it. I’ve gotten to this place where I might be more personal with my choices. I don’t know, maybe it’s because I was listening to a lot of John Lennon’s solo albums, seeing that his music was getting to a place of deep personal emotion. And I thought, ‘well, maybe I could try that with film performance’.”
The film also provided Cage with the ability to process what he describes as his ‘memeification’. “When I signed up to be a film actor, we didn’t have the internet,” he said. “I wanted to be a screen actor. But then I made a mistake in 2009 of Googling my name. And I saw something called Nicolas Cage loses his sh*t. It was people just cherry-picking all these crazy meltdown moments from different movies, without any regard for the actor or how the character got there. And I thought, ‘Well, what do I do with this? I didn’t sign up for this. That’s not what I meant. And then it turned into t-shirts, and then it turned into Nicolas Cage this, and then ‘you don’t say’.
“I was confused by it, I was frustrated by it, was a little stimulated by it, but I didn’t know where to put it. And then I read Dream Scenario. I thought, ‘Yes, I know how Paul Matthews feels because he’s going through a dreamification, where everyone around the world is dreaming about him, and he doesn’t know why. He doesn’t know what to do with it. So I put my feelings of my memeification into Paul’s dreamification, and I’m here to tell you it’s a very personal and satisfying experience.”
Where next? Who knows, said Cage, who believes television is more important than ever.
“I do feel that after 45 years and well over 100 movies, I’ve pretty much said what I’ve had to say with cinema. And the student in me wants to try something else. I want to try a new format. We talked about television. Maybe there’ll be some Broadway, I don’t know, but I want to stay challenged. I’m not saying no at all to movies ever again, I’m just saying that my selection process is going to be very severe and very stringent.”/BGNES
