Didn’t Sean Penn make a crack about you: “Nic Cage is no longer an actor”?
Yeah. That was his opinion and, you know, we’ve since left it all behind us. But I think any time an actor does something unusual it’s going to be met with a certain amount of criticism. I’ve actively searched for that.
When I did Peggy Sue Got Married I wanted to play the character with this ridiculous voice and look, and I knew that it would be criticised, but I thought that it’s much more interesting to take the bad critical hits and know that you’ve really done something.
What’s the point in just getting good reviews? At the end of the day, I want people to go, ‘Well, what the hell was that?’ What’s that line in Tootsie? Bill Murray leaves the movie theatre saying, “I don’t want people going, ‘Hey, that’s great!’ I want people to go, 15 years from now, ‘What the **** was that?’”
If you screened Raising Arizona and Face/Off for some people, they probably wouldn’t believe it was the same man...
Yeah, that’s really what I want to achieve. I want people to be concerned they’re not seeing the same person. That would be great and yet, on another level, I still want to project a style, a charisma, if you will, that’s coming from me.
Do you ever regret changing your name from Coppola to Cage?
No, I needed to recreate myself, reinvent myself. Nicolas Coppola had a hard time believing he could do it.
Every time I would go into a casting office or talk about acting with a casting agent, I was talking about my uncle’s illustrious body of work and it was getting in the way of the movies. It was making me feel like I was a victim of nepotism and no one would really take me seriously.
You dropped out of high school to act, didn’t you?
Yeah, I started out very young. I was basically a child actor at 17. Anyway, I was getting a lot of pressure from other actors who basically thought I only wanted to be an actor because my uncle was Francis.
It was always a bit uncomfortable for me. When I changed my name and went into an audition and got the part, it was this incredible weight off my head because Amy Heckerling [director of Fast Times At Ridgemont High] didn’t know I was related. It felt like I’d been given this opportunity because of what I did, not because of what he did.
The irony is that your role in Fast Times got cut back to almost nothing and it was a part in your uncle’s Rumble Fish that got your career back off the ground...
Yeah, that’s right. Fred Roos, the producer, called and said, “Could you help us out by just coming in to read with the actors auditioning?” I said fine. I went in to basically help other people get their parts, so the pressure wasn’t on me.
And then Fred went to Francis and said, “Why don’t you give Nicolas a part, ’cos he’s pretty good? ” Francis said, “Well, okay, let’s try that. ” And I was shocked to know that I had gotten a part in Rumble Fish.
Total Film has this image of a mythical Coppola family Thanksgiving dinner with you, Francis, Sofia, maybe Spike Jonze and maybe your cousin Jason Schwartzman...
Ha! Yeah. I think the last mythical Thanksgiving dinner I had with everybody was 15, maybe 10 years ago. There have been family gatherings but everyone’s doing their own thing. It’s hard to co-ordinate schedules.
You’ve not worked with Sofia yet, but you did cast your brother Marc [Coppola] in your directorial debut, Sonny, didn’t you?
Yeah, he came and acted for me. I actually go on his radio show in New York a lot, he has a pretty successful radio show out there. It’s funny, every family member’s got their own area and he’s sort of king of the airwaves.
Any more plans to direct?
I do want to do it again. I just haven’t crystallised my thoughts on a script, but I’d like to write it.
But not appear in it? You only gave yourself a small part in Sonny, after all...
Yeah, at the very end. It was the only way I could get the movie made with the cast I wanted. The money people wanted me to cast a bigger name actor than James Franco at the time.
Then after I cast him, he went on to win the Golden Globe for his performance [in a 2001 TV movie] as James Dean and then they were all relieved.
Before that, they said the only way I could cast him was if I played one of the parts, so I chose the part I could disguise myself the most with to sort of not be in the movie. So I played the gay hustler, the pimp, at the end.
You had a rep for going the extra mile when you were younger. Would you still do any of that cockroach-eating stuff now?
I think that I would if I thought it would really help the role, but it’s been 25 years and I’ve become a little more seasoned in the work that I do. In the first five years, I was desperately grasping for ability, so I felt like I had to ‘live the part’ to play the part. It was very taxing on my relationships, on my social life, on my mind.
I cultivated a pretty bad reputation because of some very crazy behaviour on the set and, right off the bat, I was labelled as a very strange, difficult actor. De Niro had just done Raging Bull and everyone was talking about the weight-gain, so I thought, ‘That’s what I’ll do, I’ll just live these parts.’
And the thing is, it works, it really does work, it’s just very, very demanding. It’s one element to acting, but it’s not the complete bag of tools. There are so many other things that I learned down the road.
Living the part of, say, Sailor Ripley in Wild At Heart must have been fun...
I was starting to come out of that whole style of Method acting at that point. By then, I was learning to have a sort of mischievous sense of fun while playing parts.
It was David Lynch who made it clear to me that if you’re not having fun then the audience isn’t going to either. That movie was very playful and there wasn’t a whole lot of time to think about things on the set because David would come in with new monologues on the day and actually trying to memorise any of it was just absurd. You couldn’t over-analyse, you just jumped in and did it.
You’re a legendary comic-book fan...
I’ll always have a soft spot in my heart for the comic-book. I don’t read them anymore. I did when I was a boy, when I was 10 years old.
When you talk about changing your name, you make it sound like an alter-ego, almost as if Nic Cage is Spider-Man to Nicolas Coppola’s Peter Parker...
Yeah, it was almost like Clark Kent and Superman; I needed something like the S or Batman’s mask to make me feel I could do it. I needed to recreate myself.
Speaking of Superman, you were linked to that for a long time...
Yeah... Well, what’s interesting is that movie’s now coming out with another actor. I’m sure it will be very good.
You were linked with Constantine for a while and weren’t you pencilled in to play the Green Goblin, too?
I was gonna do Constantine, but that just didn’t work out. And they came to ask me to play the Green Goblin, but I said I’d rather, at that time, do Adaptation.
Which brings us nicely to Adaptation. In a sense, your De Niro weight-gain movie...
Except I approached it from a different angle. At this point I had already decided not to go down that path with the process so I went more Lon Chaney than De Niro on Adaptation.
I decided to find other ways to create the fat effect without actually eating myself into oblivion. I had wires and different displacers built to push my cheeks out to make me look bigger.
