Nicolas Cage Breaks Down His Most Iconic Characters | GQ

the next day and I got on a bed on that side and I was in a bad mood and I started it, I said, let's start with Charlie today, so we leave everything one way, this is Charlie or Donald and then I take what I did, I put a headset in my ear and it played fine. I looked at a tennis ball. ball on a stand like that over there, you know, imagine I'm Charlie O'Donnell and talking to each other was probably the

most

acrobatic challenge I've ever had as an actor and I'm not even sure I can do it. do it again, I'm not sure I can do it, but anyway it's cool that my killer has this modus operandi because at the end when he forces the woman who is actually him to eat herself, he is also eating himself until die.

I've been saying Marlboros. That does not mean that word. I've written myself into my script, that's a little strange, you know? Meryl was Great and Chris was great and you know they got their Oscars, but great, everything's fine there, you know they were brilliant in the movie, but it was the biggest challenge I've ever done in my life. National Treasure. I didn't expect the National Treasury to do it. Go ahead, I knew I was working with a high school classmate named Jon Turteltaub who was the director, the two of us were crazy, I mean in high school we were always making jokes and laughing and he got the lead role. in our town and I got the bad end of Agent Warren and he never let me forget it and I got my revenge when I was on the cover of GQ and John admitted it to me and I went to the store and there you were on the cover. from GQ, how come Nick is on the cover of GQ and I'm not on the cover of GQ?

It was that kind of relationship between high school kids, but that kind of fun and joy went into creating the national treasure, so I think I really have to give John credit for the humor and the success of the movie and Jon Voight actually said, "You know, turtles are great, he knows how to make a soufflé, one wrong move, this whole thing is going to fall apart, but somehow Jon Turteltaub managed to fix it." in a way that was delicious and delicious, but I have to attribute the success of that movie to him. Bad Lieutenant Corner Paul knew that I was a big fan of Burners and Klaus Kinski and having seen all of his movies, I knew it wasn't much different from what I knew.

When I saw the bullying with John Woo, I knew where I could go with my performance and I really wanted to challenge Verner. I wanted to be the Klaus Kinski of California. I wanted to go to great lengths and even scare him at times to get to the core of that character. and I remember I had a bottle of something called inositol, which is like a saccharin substitute, it looks like coke but it's not, it's actually sugar or a sweetener and I would get nervous, you know, and I would snort this and try to get in in the Headspace and Vernon, everyone is going a little crazy because of my psychic process so that this shows because I'm going crazy and I'm high on coke and the burner was like now Nikolaus is in that jar and me and this .

It's right before the action and now I'm the Klaus Kinski of California. I don't have to say that it's not cocaine, you know, but because it's going to break the imagination because I'm psyching myself up. He was completely dry in that movie. Was not. drinking, it was nothing, there's an impressionistic performance, but it still broke my concentration and I said, have a coke, get off my set, yeah, New Orleans, this is my city, everyone was just like that and then they said action and I It was the boy. I was in the head space. I'll take 25 percent, even though I'm God, it means you get a premium price.

That's one way to look at it, the other is that you can keep 75 percent and not go to prison for the rest of your life. the man panis is truly a visionary he is a genius he is not like anyone else he makes a movie once every eight years he his movie black rainbow I didn't sleep for a week after I saw he originally wanted me to play Jeremiah and I was playing army of one at that time I was in Vancouver I had long white hair and a long white beard and he said to me: I want you to play Jeremiah Sand and I said well, why do you say because, you know, I think the

characters

are like a cloud California Klaus Kinski literally said that and I said well I'm California Klaus Kinski but I don't want to play Jeremiah Sand, I want to play Red and he said well this is a movie about age versus youth and don't watch your manager for that at that time I saw myself as the father of the time, I already was, you know Gandalf, so it didn't work out and then about a year later Elijah Wood was the one who brought us together and I'm grateful for Elijah that he did that, but he came up with the idea that I should play Red and Red was a character I wanted to play because I felt like I had the power of imagination, but I also felt like I had the life experience to play Red and Have You Been Through Love? and loss and you're going through what was going to be my third divorce and also my father had passed away and that really stuck with me and then I knew I had the emotional content to play red because red is really a being who's dealing with the loss, the loss of love and it's interesting because if you look at Paris' notes on the film, he was dealing with the same thing, not in terms of romantic love, but more in terms of familial love and loss, so we were in the same step.

All the way and I think we found a way to calibrate the amount of emotion, when and where, and then also in terms of body language in terms of the fight sequences before the red drinks, the kind of supernatural skull juice, already You know, hallucinogenic, so to speak, that transforms. in red he is much more fierce as a fighter and we thought of Bruce Lee and I showed him in an old shot of Bruce Lee and Enter the Dragon where the camera goes. I'm very fast and he takes something, it's like that, lucky, you know? His big eyes are fantastic, so I want us to try to photograph each other, you know, and we got that scene where the camera went straight in, so I got excited about that, but then after the skull juice panels, I wanted to be more like Jason from Friday. 13 to which I thought because no, I don't really watch slasher movies.

I saw the one he wanted me to see, but I thought more about the ancient golem, not the one from The Lord of the Rings, the ancient golem, the Jewish golem. which was a statute about life, so the red red becomes more of a monolith, so to speak, all those little details were planned with panels that together we formed.