Nicholas Cage in The Sourcer's Apprentice, photo by Christopher_Aquino Flickr.com
He is a creative genius, but he’s also eccentric, and individualistic.
He comes from a family of cineastes, the most famous: his uncle Francis Ford Coppola. To avoid taking advantage of his family connection he changed his name early in his career.
He is a method actor, taking his characters to the ultimate consequence. While he plays, he morphs with his character, and that’s why he's able to improvise on the film set to the annoyance of his fellow actors.
This is also why he evokes such strong feelings in his audience: they either love him or hate him. They tend to associate the real life individual with the character he is playing confusing both.
Nicholas lives in between states: between several parallel realities, fragmenting his ego amongst the many characters he plays.
Drawing heavily from mythological concepts, both ancient myths and modern ones through Comics which he considers modern mythology, he has been able to completely immerse himself in the collective consciousness and unleash deep emotions.
He is a dark magician of the film industry:
Able to conjure light and darkness to create a figurative mirror where we watch the reflection of Nicholas Cage playing a character playing Nicholas Cage, and reflecting back at us the symbiosis of both until we are no longer certain of who we are watching.
Cage has a great sense of humour, childish but somewhat dry and ironic. Throughout his career he's been been linked to rumours of a connection to the supernatural, which he has dismissed with a few jokes.
As incredible and ridiculous some rumours have been, such as the latest claim that he is a vampire, there is clearly a strong attraction to the occult and the desire to explore the subconscious in Cage.
One of his favourite Comic characters which inspired the film sequel Ghost Rider is a supernatural creature travelling through past lives into the present to face his enemies and avenge the past, its superpower is to suck out everyone soul. Nicholas has this skull in flames tattooed on his forearm.
He also has a racing monitor lizard with a hat tattooed on his upper back. These are symbols of his acceptance of his own underworld or subconscious, they are also symbols for deep personal transformation.
Nicholas Cage has played over fifty films, but one theme that keeps reappearing in his cinematographic career from time to time is that of “Faust”: Goethe’s character whose soul he sells to Mephistopheles in exchange for knowledge and pleasure.
Cage has more than a passing fascination with the Gothic. He’s owned and lived in several properties resembling castles, and according to him in a haunted property.
Quotes from Nicholas Cage:
On his new movie: Ghost Rider, Spirit of Vengeance: "He’s dark, literally. He looks like he crawled out of hell and straight into your face. We just think, immediately, you’re going to know you’re in a different world."
Explaining the subtle difference between playing a living dead, and a living man turned into a demon: "They’re totally different. In Drive Angry, I was playing a living dead man. This is a living man who turns into a demon, so it’s a totally different kind of energy. A living dead man has to be a little bit more dead, whereas a living man who turns into a ghost can still be very alive when he’s living."
About eating a cockroach in the film Vampire's Kiss: "Every muscle in my body didn't want to do it, but I did it anyway."
Nicholas Cage acting method:
"To be a good actor you have to be something like a criminal, to be willing to break the rules to strive for something new."
"There's a fine line between the Method actor and the schizophrenic."
"I am not a demon. I am a lizard, a shark, a heat-seeking panther. I want to be Bob Denver on acid playing the accordion."
“Hollywood didn't know if I was an actor or a nut or if I was this crazy character I was playing. I had developed an image of being a little bit unusual, different and wild.”
“Pablo Picasso said art is a lie that tells the truth. What if you just want to tell the truth and not lie about it?”
“I needed to change my name just to liberate myself and find out I could do it without walking into a Hollywood casting office with the name Coppola.”
“It's good to make movies that are tragedies, where people can think about things in life that are undeniable, that everyone has to deal with. But at the same time, it's also healing to make movies that are entertaining, that are a lot of fun, where you don't have to think about your problems.”“When I did Vampire's Kiss I got so wound up. It was so important to me that this vision I had of Peter Lowe's character get on film exactly the way that I wanted it, that I frankly don't think I was very easy for anyone to live with. Certainly, I was not easy for myself to live with. I remember that I wasn't drinking or anything at the time. One night I felt so wound up that I was about to snap. I ordered a martini. And I just relaxed, and I could tell my body really needed a rest. From then on, I learnt you can do good work without torturing yourself.”
On channelling his performances: “I think that Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance was mentally taxing, if only because I had to go to a Christmas party shortly after I had wrapped photography in Romania at 2 in the morning as the Ghost Rider. The invitation had a Christmas ornament on it with Ghost Rider's face on it as a tree. I had a couple of schnapps and went to the party; I had not entirely let go of whatever magic I had been channelling, and all hell broke loose. In fact, I think I kept saying over and over: "Merry Christmas, you assholes!" I am lucky I'm not in a Romanian prison.”
“What happens is, you become different people in your path as an actor. When I was doing those things, I was a very new actor. I didn't have a lot of training, and I was trying to make some sort of impact, because that was what was important for me at the time - to get on the map. There were things I would do that were more shocking, or approaches I would do to try and live the character, because I didn't have the training. But then, as I went on, I started to find other methods, ways to get into characters that weren't exactly destroying my life.”
“we are all going to get older, and there is something to be said about doing some of your best work when you are younger, when you still have that virility, something visceral and raw.”
On the toughest aspect of preparing for "Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call -New Orleans": “Trying to figure out how I was going to entertain you while playing a guy who was completely out of his mind on crack. At the same time, trying to be responsible so it didn't become an advertisement for doing drugs. The other thing is, I wasn't sure I could play the part totally sober, which I was. I was trying to look at it more impressionistically from a landscape of maybe 25 years ago to see what would come out of that filter of my imagination. I was doing a scene (on "Bad Lieutenant"), it was in my second day of shooting -- and we all know the imagination and preparation (required) to think I was on cocaine (for the character). There was a little bottle of baby powder, and I'm snorting that.”
“Usually it's very cathartic. The hard stuff is when you're not feeling great and you have to do a really happy scene.-- on the personal toll acting can take on a person.”
Asked if he wanted to do theatre work: “No, I have stage fright. I don't like it. I've never gotten over it.”
Self-doubt: “I know what I want to do, I'm doing it, but I'm still very much a student of the craft and I think I can go further. I still torment myself. I have a lot of self-doubt.”
About his marriage to Lisa Marie Presley: I'm sad about this, but we shouldn't have been married in the first place.
Nicholas Cage traumatic experiences:
“I was being stalked by a mime - silent but maybe deadly. Somehow, this mime would appear on the set of set of Bringing Out the Dead, and start doing strange things. I have no idea how it got past security. Finally, the producers took some action and I haven't seen the mime since. But it was definitely unsettling.”
“I remember my prom was a complete disaster. I used bonds my grandmother had given me to rent a tuxedo and a limousine so I could go to the prom with this beautiful girl. And at the end of the night I went to kiss her and she responded. I was so nervous that my stomach got really nauseous and I said, "Excuse me" and just threw up on the street all over my shoes and my rented tux. The limo driver wouldn't let me in the car. He split and I had to walk home. That was my prom night.”“Years ago I was driving a car I'd bought, an Austin Healey with a V-8 engine, sort of a makeshift Cobra. I had taken it to a mechanic to put an automatic shifter in it. The mechanic did a really sloppy job. If you barely knocked the shifter it would go into separate gears. I was driving on the Hollywood Freeway and I accidentally bumped it into park. I was doing 80 mph at 10 p.m. and I started doing 360s. I wound up facing traffic, and then a Mack truck was coming at me. I thought, 'This is it, I'm dead'. The truck driver had a CB radio and said, "Put the car in reverse." I did and drove backwards until I got off at the exit, backwards!”
Religion:
“I do not have a religion in my life, I wasn't raised that way. My father always believed that if I was going to have a religion I should discover it on my own and not have it crammed down my throat at a young age. I kind of wish I had some religion.”
An encounter with a reptile and some strange eating habits:
“I was once surrounded by rattlesnakes in a rattlesnake patch with my cousin Roman when we were 16 or 17. We were fishing in Napa Valley and walked right into it. There was a huge one coiled in front of us. A bigger one, to the left, was uncoiled, so I knew he wasn't a problem. We had to go over the coiled one, so we felt trapped and paralysed with fear. There was nowhere to run, we were surrounded. I saw this pole with a nail through it, and I knew that I had to do something, so I grabbed the pole and pounded the snake. Then it came up and started rattling and was about to strike. I killed it, but felt bad about it. I felt anything you kill you've got to eat, so I took it home, cut the poison glands out, took the rattles off and cooked it.”
"I actually choose the way I eat according to the way animals have sex. I think fish are dignified with sex, so are birds, but pigs not so much, so I don't eat pig meat or things like that. I eat fish and fowl"
Nicholas Cage homeopathic remedy is Mandragora:
Mandragora is part of the Solonaecea family which also includes Belladonna, Stramonium and Hyociamus. All of them contain a combination of atropines which act upon the nervous system causing neuralgic disturbances to some extent, with a wide range numbness and tingling sensations, visual disturbances, and headaches. The headaches are all of hepatic origin resulting from liver problems.
Psychologically mandragora is the more controlled of the four, less inclined to rage or to outrageous behaviour, we could say that there is method in its madness, but there is also a delusion that they are possessed by a dark entity.
Mandragora is only a small remedy in the Homeopathic material medica: it’s not used often, and it’s symptoms are mostly physical. They relate to blurred vision, blurred speech, worse from alcohol intake, and as if alcohol induced, dizziness, a sensation that the head is surrounded by fog, strong heat sensation on the head, colic and diarrhoea.
Mandragora or mandrake has a long tradition of use since ancient times, and a strong association with alchemy: there are tales of a connection to the underworld.
It’s said to be the herb that the Greek goddess of sex-magic Circe used in the Odyssey to turn Odysseus’ men into pigs. She invited his crew to a feast of cheese and meal, sweetened with honey and laced with wine, but also laced with one of her magical potions, and she turned them all into pigs with a wand after they gorged themselves on it.
Mandragora was also according to traditional lore attributed to Hecate, the Greek goddess of the crossroads and of the un-dead, of birth and death, the passage between light and darkness, and the doorway to the underworld.
Described by Theokritos as: “chasing whining dogs, while walking across the graves of the dead, and through dark streams of blood”, Hecate was often depicted in a triptych form: as three maidens facing different ways in a reference to parallel realities, surrounded by dogs and snakes which are well known symbols of the underworld.
During the medieval ages Mandrake was a prised talisman against all sorts of ailments, supposed to bring wealth to those who possessed it. It was also used as an aphrodisiac.
Its connection to witchcraft and magic was strengthened by the believe that the herb grew from the last ejaculation of a hang man, and that mandrake represented an unnatural sexual connection between man and land, a conception without the female intervention, without sex or a womb.
The root of the plant often resembles a human body without the head, giving rise to speculation that those who were exposed to the plant would lose their mind. There was also the perception that the plant represented animalistic impulse without human morality, and a physical body without a soul.
All these tales and traditions have become embed in the human psyche, and through them we find a connection to Faust: selling his soul in exchange for success in the material world; the Ghost Rider a dark entity from hell with his skull on fire: a body without a soul.
Nicholas Cage’s obsession with dark characters and the underworld, his quirky eating habits: a reluctance to eat animals such as pigs because of their undignified sexual habits has a resonance to the myth of Circe in the Odyssey.
His deliberately drawling voice as if permanently intoxicated, his dipping into alternate parallel realities with the multiple characters that he lends himself to when he acts are all resonant with the mandragora psychological character.
