Nicolas Cage showcased his 2002 directorial debut 'Sonny' at the 2011 Sedona International Film Festival. After the showing, Nic answered questions giving insights into the film, his experiences and approaches as a director and an actor, and much more.
Here follows a transcript of the film introduction and the Q & A after the showing.
Part 1
Nic: I'll talk very little about the movie, just to give you a little bit of a runway, because the energy of this room is very positive and wonderful and I feel it. The movie is quite dark, it's about subject matter... it's about a family of outlaws. it's actually based on a true story, the writer's name is John Carlen, he's no longer with us, he wrote this script while he was in prison, and originally I wanted to play the part back in the eighties when I was still the right age to play this kind of part. Then I kept thinking about the script, it kept haunting me, and one day I said 'no, this movie has got to be made, I'm going to direct it.' This is the first and only movie I've ever directed.. [applause and cheers] ..It's exciting that the star of the movie was one of my favorite, and still is one of my favorite, actors of his generation, Mr James Franco, who on Sunday is up for best actor for his magnificant performance in '127 hours', he's also hosting the Academy Awards. So without further ado, please enjoy Sonny and thank you all for coming tonight.
Q & A
Nic: well, if you have any questions and you'd like to talk about what you just saw, or anything else, I'm happy to talk about it.
[about shooting his movies in Louisiana]
Nic: Louisiana is a place that I first when to, specifically New Orleans, when I shot a movie called Zandalee. And I had an amazing time there, it's hard to put into words, but it's almost like I grew up there, in some way. Although I was born in California, I had an immediate connection with the City of New Orleans because even though I was born in California, you could say I was reborn in New Orleans, because I had this awakening where I started to open my mind to other possibilities, and that's why I've always had a close connection to the city of New Orleans and why I've wanted to put characters in that city, because I have a personal connection for myself.
Audience Question: I'm sorry I'm going to go straight off topic, what's on page 47 and are you going to make a movie?
Nic: Well page 47, I added that line, it was an improvised line because I knew if there was another National Treasure it would have to be really, really exciting and life altering, and that led up to the improvised line. So I hope so, they're talking about it, there is some discussion about starting to write again, the third National Treasure, so it could happen very quickly, but there'll be more to come.
Audience Question: Hey Nic enjoyed your movie. Nic I was wondering, what's the significance of the color red in almost every shot, I just happened to notice red
Nic: That's the first time I've ever been asked that question. That's exciting for me. And I'm going to give you my usual answer which is, the meaning of the color red and the significance of the color red is whatever you want it to be.
[laughter and applause]
Audience Question: Hi Mr Cage, I just have a question, what creative responsibilities did you enjoy most as a director?
Nic: when I had made the decision to direct my first movie I had done a series of action adventure films in a row and started to feel it was time to get inspired again and go back to my roots which were independent movies, movies like Vampire's Kiss, Wild At Heart and Raising Arizona [cheers from audience] and I wanted to work with these actors, Brenda Blethyn I'd seen here in a movie called Secrets and Lies and I just thought she was amazing, and Mena Suvari, I thought that she was one of the best actresses out there, I mean just watching the movie tonight again, I remember just how incredible she was to work with and how excellent she is in this film. And then James Franco, I saw him play James Dean in 'The James Dean story' and it was like seeing a reincarnation. And Harry Dean of course who never does a false moment. So I thought I could get the best actors, in my opinion, together with this script that I believed in, that somehow they would reignite the spark within me to go back to my roots of independently spirited films and somehow stimulate my imagination, which is exactly what they did. What i thought was the difference as a director, i didn't have the camera on me anymore, which is an enormous pressure for anyone who wants to become a film actor, because, you know, they'll see it. If there's nothing going on in a closeup, they'll see it. And if there's something going on in a close up they'll see it. So I didn't have that pressure, but I had the pressure of every night before a scene or a day of photography, I'd have to not only think about one person's arc or trajectory in terms of their character development, I had to think about Brenda's, had to think about James' and Mena's and Harry Dean's and male or female I had to get into the minds of those characters. So I had the added pressure of no longer being responsible for one character which would be my own character in any movie i would act in, but for four characters in this little family of outlaws. So that was a bit more work in terms of that. I hope that answers your question.
Audience Question: i just have a question in terms of attention to detail, and how much you're responsible and in a film like this i was wondering if you were responsible for Brenda Vaccaro cast as kind of a connection with Midnight Cowboy, and were you also responsible for the Adam West affectation in Kick Ass with Big Daddy, because I just want you know how much I appreciate that, that was an awesome thing and that was the thing I enjoyed most that really connected with me the Adam West.
Nic: Well thank you, yes I'd seen Midnight Cowboy, as you can imagine I'm a big fan of that movie and John Voigt and Dustin Hoffman's performance, I think that was one of the movies that really inspired me to become an actor. And so coming across the script for 'Sonny; I wanted to do that, and having Brenda, who I think is a great actor and is remarkable in the film, was kind of my way of saying thank you to Schlesinger, Jon Voigt, Dustin Hoffman from Midnight Cowboy. 'Kick Ass', what happened was I started rehearsals with Matthew Vaughn and he showed me this yellow utility belt and said, "what do you think about that for Big Daddy do you think Big Daddy should wear that?" And I said, "you know I know I know what that is, that's the bat belt from the original Batman tv series." And I said "yeah I'd love to wear it I think it's really cool, let's do it. But if we're gonna do that why stop there, let's go all the way and let's channel Adam West." And then later on once the movie came out I tried to find Adam West because I wanted um invite him um go on the Jay Leno show with me just to kind of because of the fun of that, because he was someone who had inspired me as a child. and I found out later that people would ask Mr West, "how do you feel about Nic Cage channeling you in Kick Ass?" He said "you mean, trying to channel me." [audience Laughter]
Audience Question: Hi Nic
Nic: Hi
Audience Q: I really enjoyed the composition of the photography it's really great and i want to ask you in the cough syrup scene and the rage that James has, as a director do you how do you get then to have that kind of a rage as an actor did you show them how and how how many times did you have to do that scene.
Nic: Yes, James Franco has all that within him and i was aware of that, it was something I could sense about him in his early work and also just talking with him that that could come out. That was a tough day. It was a difficult day for both James and Josie Davies because they had to get naked and that's never easy for actors to do, so the emotions were very high. But it was important to me that there was that kind of fragility, the bareness of the skin and the broken glass on the ground because of all the codeine bottles, that the fragility, without talking too much about it, says something about the fragility of his character and her character. The sadness of the situation. But I didn't really have to prompt them, once the decision was made that we were going to do this naked, naked with our soul, bearing our souls and our bodies, then everything just flowed very quickly. Although we had difficulty with the sound that day and I remember it was the only time I lost my temper while making the movie, and it's been 32 years of this now, i felt so bad for the both of them because they couldn't get the sound to work and they kept doing the scene over and over again, so that might have added to his temper tantrum. [audience laughter]
Audience Q: Is there a character or type of character you've never played that you would like to play?
Nic: Well I have been asked that question a couple of times recently and the truth is I would love to play Captain Nemo from 20000 Leagues Under The Sea. I really love that character, I think I could do something with it, I could be smoking a seaweed cigarette. [audience laughter]
Audience Q: What compelled you to do the movie, what inspired you to do this type of movie?
Nic: because I really wanted to do a movie that was featuring actors, because that is what I felt like I knew and I wanted to make a movie where I could dig deep with character studies, not a movie that was designed to dazzle you with special effects and fantasy realms, but more like a very down, funny but tragic kind of family drama about these outlaws living in Louisiana. Family drama is probably the hardest kind of movie to make and have it not go into schmultziness or corniness. I'm a big fan of Robert Redford's 'Ordinary People' and that movie always stayed with me. And also Leo Kazan's 'East Of Eden'. So those are my personal tastes and if I do direct again I want to continue to make movies that are deeply personal and dealing with acting.
Audience Q: First of all, that was very dark.. Nic: Thank you [audience laughter]
Audience Q: Second of all you've played a number of roles and my question is, to what extent do you live your roles?
Nic: yeah, that's... now we're going to get into it. [audience laughter] When I began acting I started with maybe all of 6 months of training and it was really adhoc, and I grew up watching.. when i was in High School 'Raging Bull' came out in the eighties and I heard what Deniro did with living the part and the method acting and all of that, and so I thought that that was the shortcut that I would have to take, because I didn't have the proper training, if I wasn't a RADAist I wasn't learning the English style of acting, so I thought I should just live the part. And I did some things that probably weren't very nice when I had to play bad guys, to live the part, feel the part. I remember once I was in New York City in a movie Called The Cotton Club, and I was playing Vincent Coll.... mad Dog ....who was the most feared gangster in Harlem, in the twenties and I wanted to believe I was that character, I wanted to feel that I could be that scary and strike that level of fear in peoples' hearts before the day of photography, and I went out down on Bleaker Street and Christopher Street and some guy was selling remote control cars, and I looked at the car and I jumped up and I smashed the car and bits and pieces were flying all over the street and people were going 'he's crazy, he's nuts' and they were dispersing and then I gave the guy, I said how much is it he said 'fifty dollars', I gave him fifty dollars, I went to bed and then the next morning I went to work and I remembered it, and I recalled it, and I was that guy. And I meant it. Well, then I became a father and I realised you can't really do those those things, when you start going back to real life and have more of a normal life you have to be sociable, you have to be part of the community and I started caring about other people, I wasn't really an anarchist any more. I was more somebody that wanted to get involved and care about people. So then I started using more or less a style of preparing from the outside in, more the English style, of trying to find my roles by what the wardrobe was and what the look was of the character, and so I started blending it. And then now like in the last ten years, I don't really think about it any more, it just is. I don't really have any method. I could probably say what I am about to say here more than anywhere else in the country, i call my new style of acting 'Nouveau Shamanic', [audience laughter and clapping] That's my process, I'll probably have to write a book about it. It's not RADA, it's not actors studio, it's Nouveau Shamanic.
The other thing I would say though, what most people don't really know, is that that's what actors were at the beginning, even pre Christian, at the very beginning, the actor was the Shaman of the village that would act out the scene and get the answers out of the other dimension and the imagination, so today we still do it, except now we call it psychology or we call it something else. So that's my style in answer to your question.
Audience Question: Hi, Adaptation is probably one of my favouritist movies, and I just wanted to know what were your thoughts on Charlie Kaufman and do you plan on working with him again?
Nic: I would love to work with Charlie again, I had a great experience working with Charlie. What I did with him, because he looks nothing like the character that I played in the movie, he's actually not overweight so this was like an imagination of what his insecurities were. And I would spend, I think it was like two weeks with Charlie, and just tape record him and interview him and interview him, and it got quite exhausting for him at a certain point. But I promised him I would destroy the tapes at a certain point and I did, i destroyed them and threw them out and noone ever found them again. But that was just the process of trying to get as much Charlie Kaufman into my body as I could in terms of his vocal rhythms and the way he would talk, I would ask him to get angry for me and he would start shouting and it was on the tape recorder, he's a pretty good actor too. So I enjoyed that process and I would work with him again if I could.
Audience Question: Thank you for coming to Sedona Mr Cage. Nic: thank you [applause] Audience Question: i just want to go in a little bit different direction actually. As a youth, I'm really curious, as a youth, what spark happened in your life that gave you the image that you thought you might want to go on this type of creative endeavour. That's this first part of the question. And then as you started this endeavour, which is a little bit of a nebulous way of life in one sense, it's not the traditional department store or doing this or that, what catalyst gave you your early success?
Nic: The first memory I have of wanting to be an actor is pretty abstract, I was a child I might have been four or five or six, I don't recall, but I would sit on the living room rug and watch the television and try to find out how I could get inside the tv, because that world was so much more interesting to me than the world around me at home. That was the first memory. And then I remember walking to school and actually visualizing crane shots, I didn't know what a crane shot was, but I could see myself getting smaller, and the birdseye view from the camera, craning up and getting smaller and smaller walking to school. I had a pretty, for a child, I had a pretty glorified idea of myself that I could be in a movie. I don't know why, but there I was. It was like a dream. And then, I think the day that I really became liberated was, because I grew up with a pretty well known name in the industry, and I was quite frustrated because with my name Coppola noone wanted to watch the audition they wanted to know everything about what was happening with Francis Coppola, what movies he was making, so by the time it got to the audition, I'd forgotten all my lines that I had prepared and I had lost my character and it was, a mess. Well, when I went in on a little movie called Valley Girl ... [applause and cheers] ..I read somewhere that the Valley Girl is now extinct, [laughs] noone talks like that any more, but to I changed my name to Nic Cage because I'd learned about John Cage in music school and before that i liked Luke Cage from the comic books blah blah blah... and it's sort of a mix of the two and that's how my career turned out anyway. So I went into this audition for Martha Coolidge and apparently she had no idea who I was in terms of my relations. And she'd gone through a stack of head shots saying, "I don't want pretty boys, I don't want this guy, or this guy, I want a guy who looks like that!" and just put her finger down on it and picked up my picture. She said "call that guy in. This guy, what's his name Nicolas Cage, bring him in." So they brought me in and I auditioned for it and I got the part. And she had no idea what my name was and afterward she told me it would have coloured her perception of me had she known because she knew Francis and they had some other movie they were going to do together that didn't work out. Anyway, when that movie came out and I had that new name, I felt free, I felt like I could move, I could breathe. I was so loose and relaxed in that part. The other part I had done was Rumblefish and I was very tense and very stiff and restrained and so I needed to reinvent myself, I needed to find my surrealist self, which is probably my true self, which is Nicolas Cage, and that was the nebulous thing you asked me that was when i realised it could work. And then the movie came out and people liked it, and then I was free.
[applause]
Audience Question: Alot of us here are filmmakers and made films, you've had this film idea you said you'd been mulling it over for years, and there can't possibly be just one, what else can we expect from you if you at all plan on continuing directing films.
Nic: Well if I do direct again, there is a movie about one of the very first spiritualists of the victorian era, his name was D.D Home, and he was known as 'the man who could fly' and I have the script that I commissioned, and it's a pretty good script, i thought that would be something I would like to direct. But then I had this epiphony, about a year ago, when I was watching one of my favourite B movies, 'Midnight movies' 'The Masque of The Red Death' with Vincent Price and I said 'why isn't Roger Corman directing again.' and I called him up and said 'Roger would you like to direct me in a movie, I want to be in your movie, I want the mist, I want it to be exactly like the way you made those movies, it has to be experimental, we have to go back and get the same cameras, the same blood, same costumes, everything and anything that you did, I want to shoot it your way from the 1960s.' And he thought about it and he said "yeah, I'll do it." So I'm trying to put that together now and hopefully it will happen. I want to be in one of the great Roger Corman movie classics.
Audience Question: Hi Mr Cage, I'm a fellow actor, you talked about giving the arc of your four characters, as an actor and director, how do you find the line between directing your actors and letting your actors create their own characters and how their characters develop?
Nic: Well the first thing is, you have to let the actors have total freedom. The worst thing you can do as a director is fix something that isn't broken. And when you go in and start giving them direction it completely shuts them down. It shuts down their instrument. I cast actors that I totally trust and I let them come in with what the want, I'm always thinking about their through line and I'll tell them if they ask, but I usually keep it to myself. And then if after four or five takes and it isn't quite right, I'll go in and I'll make a suggestion socratic, I don't tell then I ask them what do you think of this? And then they go with it. Because actors, as you know, it's a very fragile delicate instrument that we have, our bodies and our thoughts, we can't hide behind musical instruments, we are our instrument, so we have to be very careful. And every actor is my brother, you know, I don't ever get competitive with other actors, if there's a good actor I'm working with they bring up my game, and visa versa. I know how hard it is how much pressure it is to bare you soul in front of a movie camera. So I'm very careful with the way I speak with actors and I love my actors when I'm directing them. I guess the best compliment that I got from my Uncle was when he said 'you really love your actors' and that made me feel pretty good, so I hope that answers your question.
Audience Question: Hi Nic it's been about 20 years since I've seen you, we did a movie together called Wild At Heart [audience cheers] I had the pleasure of dying in your arms in the car accident scene.
Nic: yes yes!
Audience member: and we had dinner ...it's been a long time and it's a pleasure to see you again.
Nic: thank you I'm so glad you came out tonight. Yeah David Lynch was amazing to work with wasn't he?
Audience member: yes!
Audience Question: Nic thank you for coming to start with. You mentioned a couple of transition points in your life, including the one with your son. And just a moment ago you mentioned spirituality again. How has yours developed, there seems to be a thread of sorts that goes through your movies that you've made and this growth, or this spirit or there's something, can you talk about your growth with that and what you use and obviously your parenthood has touched it somehow.
Nic: Yeah, well I, it's a good question, because, you know Picasso said art is a lie that tells the truth, but I think with acting actors get this reputation for being false because of the nature of our job, that we can act well, how can you trust these people, they could be lying, they could be acting right now. But to me to be an effective actor it's less about lying and more about accessing some truth even if it is artificial i know it sounds strange but that's sort of why I talked about Picasso's definition of art. Getting the truth somehow to me, whatever that may be, is a spiritual process. The truth has to go deeper than just my body, it has to go into my imagination and into my, it's almost like a trance you know, when it works, I don't want to think about the dialogue, i don't want to think about what the scene is at the moment of action, I have to feel it and go into a state where I'm almost out of my body and it's just happening it's just flowing, that's probably the only way I can describe it in the short amount of time that we have, but it's a rush, you know, I don't think it's any different than painting or music or any other artform. But when it's working, you go into another dimension, you bring it back and then you share it with people.
[applause]
~~~ Transcript by Cagealot Castle ~~~
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