Nicolas Cage - Interview

MM: We're about the same age, and I know how strange this time can be in terms of growing up and growing older. How did you feel when you turned thirty?

NC: I felt mortality. I don't really think metaphysically and I'm not religious, but when I turned thirty I became aware of how transient this is. I really want to know what happens next, but if you contemplate your existence too much it can drive you crazy. I have a certain amount of faith that it's not gonna be all that bad, because everybody does it--dies, I mean--and if anything, it's just nothing, rather than something. This is something--what we're doing right now. I do think there's an electrical current of energy that surrounds all living things, and you have to wonder where that goes when somebody dies. It doesn't seem like it would just stop. It's been said we return to the primordial swamp of life, whatever that is. Maybe part of us will come back as a grasshopper, and part will be a cow. . . .

MM: If you did come back, do you think you'd come back as a higher or lower species, according to the moral definition of how you've lived your life?

NC: The question is: How do we know what's lower? Let's put it this way--I just don't want to come back as a dashboard. That I don't want to come back as. But I have a feeling that could be more likely than not. [laughs]