The Oscar Winning Actor who says he built a career on being "unpredictable and frightening" reveals a side nobody knows
Nicolas Cage's natural walk is a dreamlike lope, stately, with long strides, a little slouch in the hips, a walk that doesn't advertise the slabs of muscle on his shoulders and chest. But the Cage who walks onto the set of Martin Scorsese's "Bringing Out the Dead" is subtly stooped, and his feet seem weighted. His eyes, too, are different. It's impossible to say where canny makeup gives way to his own investment in his character-emergency paramedic and ambulance driver Frank Pierce --but tonight Cage has the raccoon eyes of a man who's been losing sleep to nightmares.
From screen roles as diverse as the suicidal alcoholic of "Leaving Las Vegas" to the otherworldly romantic of"City of Angels," Cage has always been a master of transformation. And nowhere more so than in his own life. It wasn't long ago that Cage was a Hollywood samurai, so pissed off at himself and the world that he'd self-mutilate to play a part and self-medicare by punching walls.
"Nic looks like a man who's haunted," says Scorsese. For good reason. Those eyes carry a troubled history: The confused son of a mother who was institutionalized for schizophrenia and chronic depression. The skinny kid who the girls rejected as a weirdo. The simmering outsider who envied the cars, the clothes and the houses of friends and family. The struggling seventeen-year-old actor who was so teased when his famous uncle, director Francis Ford Coppola, gave him a role in Rumble Fish that he changed his name from Coppola to Cage -- after comic-book character Luke Cage -- and set about inventing himself as a bad boy. "That self-obsessed rebel was me," says Cage. "But that is no longer me." The Nic Cage of 1999 is an Oscar-carrying member of the Hollywood establishment, a $20 million man able to pull off roles as an action hero (The Rock, Con Air, Face/Off) or a romantic lead (City of Angels). At thirty-five, Cage is quick to point out that he has responsibilities. He's a father to Weston, 8, his son by former girlfriend Kristina Fulton; a stepfather to Enzo, II, the son of actress Patricia Arquette. Cage married Arquette in 1995, two weeks after she proposed to him on the phone -- they hadn't seen each other in eight years.
"I have people who I take care of," Cage says. "Back then, I was living out my fantasies of what I thought an exciting man should be. I wanted to be unpredictable and frightening, and I guess I was. I mean, Patricia says that at the time I was pure testosterone. I can't really imagine myself getting that angry now. I haven't punched a wall in years. So I don't really know what happened. I mean..." -- here Cage halts for a moment of seemingly sincere self-inquiry -- "should I be punching walls?" Right now, Cage is being called to face the cameras as Frank Pierce, the paramedic whose life is coming apart during three nights on the job. To get those three nights on film, Cage and Scorsese had to shoot for seventy-five knackered days. Dressed in green uniform slacks and a dingy white shirt with a City of New York arm patch, Cage steps into a fluorescent-lit madhouse as Scorsese rehearses his troupe. Salsa star Marc Anthony, dread-locked as the local street wack Noel, is strapped to a gurney and exchanging insults with an older man whose gurney sits toe-to-toe with his. Spooky blowups of head-trauma X-rays glow from the walls, and this emergency room -- actually in Manhattan's notorious Bellevue Hospital but dressed to stand in as the fictional Our Lady of Mercy (a.k.a. Misery) -- is littered with bloodstained, dazed and vaguely threatening patients, and a few frantic doctors and nurses.
"No no no no no no, don't even think about it," barks the ER's triage nurse as Frank tries to bust his heart-stricken patient, Mr. Burke, ahead of the line for treatment. Burke's worried daughter Mary, played by Arquette, is huddled with her family in the doorway -- and Frank wants to ease her pain. "Work out a rhythm so you don't overlap," instructs Scorsese as Cage and the nurse spar. Then, suddenly, the gurney holding the old man slips a latch, tilts and seems sure to dump him headfirst and helpless onto the rock-hard linoleum below. In the next quarter-second, quicker than the collective gasp of realization comes, Cage has a free hand under the gurney. He absorbs the lurch, jacks the thing level, and looks around patiently for help from the still-immobilized crew. "A hero in real life!" exults Scorsese. Ragged applause rises from the extras and even the normally deadpan city-rat crew. Cage, smiling shyly, mutters more to himself than to anyone, "I'm not Superman." Cage mumbled a mouthful there -- he had recently told producer Jon Peters and director Tim Burton that he'd star in their much vaunted super-hero project, sometimes known as Superman Reborn, before it chewed up two star screen-writers and got tabled by Burton. Cage says he planned to play the Man of Steel as "a beautiful freak."
In fact, Cage has made a career of playing beautiful freaks, memorably off-the-wall heroes, such as the vet with the bandaged head in Birdy. He seemed part Wile E. Coyote and part Jerry Lewis as the trailer-trash dad to a kidnapped baby in the Coen brothers' Raising Arizona. As a baker, shy one hand and a few brain cells, he romanced Cher in Moonstruck. There was his comic Elvis turn in David Lynch's Wild at Heart. And the "sunshine trilogy" of Honeymoon in Vegas, It Could Happen to You and Guarding Tess, before Cage found his Oscar-winning role in Mike Figgis' Leaving Las Vegas. Still, Scorsese stood "at the top of the list" of directors Cage wanted to work with. "When Superman fell out, I knew I could do this," says Cage of Bringing Out the Dead. "And since Marty only makes a picture every four years or so ..." Cage's Uncle Francis made the call to Scorsese that first put the two together. "Nic's eyes reveal a great tenderness," says Scorsese. "Like the scene when he's having pizza with Patricia. It's a very simple scene, but the simple ones are the hardest ones." Cage wants to make a deeper point about the spiritual crisis of this paramedic who's trying to do good in an amoral world: "He's not the bang-bang, shoot-'em-up kind of hero. In Frank, you're looking at a very lonely, troubled person."
Cage relied on help and counsel from Joe Connelly, who wrote Bringing Out the Dead as a novel to tell Frank's story as fiction while using shards of his own purgatorial ten years as a medic. "Now I'm watching Nic play it," says Connelly, "and you look at his face, and Frank's history is all there -- what's going on in his head is right out in front of you." When Cage researched the role on a series of ride-alongs with Los Angeles ambulance drivers, he encountered plenty of grim reality. "I saw a woman who'd been slashed -- all these... what looked like cables in her neck. And the worst was this nine-month-old infant who couldn't breathe and had brain damage from it. In those moments you could really see how it is a microcosm of life where everything is dark, everything is negative. The days where nobody is saved. The paramedics say you can't think about all that when you're on the job. But when I'd go home at night, I'd think, 'That can happen to my kids.' Then the images start haunting me, and that's what's happening with Frank Pierce on the job. He's being haunted by this one young lady, Rose, who he couldn't save."
In Paul Schrader's script -- his first collaboration with director Scorsese since the days of Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980) and The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) -- the book's Rose is subtly melded into the character of Mary. Arquette's burden, says Cage, is "to be the heart of the movie in that she's the person who we all will be able to relate to, the person who's going through the very human and real circumstance of her father dying." Cage and Arquette report for work not as a married couple with their own remarkable love story but as professionals, willingly taking Scorsese's cue that they keep separate trailers and pursue their own actors' truths. "If you didn't already know that Patricia and Nic had a relationship," says director of photography Robert Richardson, "you would not have known. Certainly on the set, they treated each other as if they were two actors who were more or less unknown to each other." Persistent rumors cast Cage and Arquette as less than ecstatic in their real-life relationship. Cage, usually the soul of self-scouring candor, will allude in our meetings to a personal emotional slough he refuses to define: "From the outside, it looks like I've got everything made, and I understand that. I never want to come off like I'm complaining. But as a human being, I have issues, just like anybody else. And some people look at those and go, 'My God, how are you getting out of bed?' But I'm OK." Arquette is similarly stressed. During the shoot, her father was ill, and her mother died of breast cancer a year before the start of filming. Arquette refers to "my own inner monologue of frustration. I was feeling pretty self-obsessed and singular during this movie." Add to that the pressure on Cage and Arquette of acting together for the first time. "I was very nervous initially," says Cage, "because I was afraid that we would trip each other out just by the fact that we're married. And that we wouldn't be able to relax. That quickly went away, about two weeks into it." Continues Cage, speaking "as a fan and not a husband, Patricia has a remarkable quality to be honest. She's not going for flashiness, she's going for truth. To stay in the scene with her, I'd have to find the same level of reality."
