The deal with stars' trailers is that whatever production the actor happens to be working on pays the rent for whatever conveyance he lodges in during the shoot. It's the kind of rider that agents like to stick in contracts -- the trailers go from little "honey wagons" up to huge, visible expressions of clout. One look at the land whale that Cage is occupying right now (it's an adapted bus, about the size of a Greyhound, accessorized today by his Bentley Turbo R parked alongside) tells you he's got a rich sense of his status very near the top of the Hollywood food chain. "I like it 'cause it's like a train," says Cage, who's impossible not to enjoy in this mode of a kid locked overnight in the toy-shop of his own stardom (you're tempted to call him, in the words he ad-libbed for his Leaving Las Vegas character, "the kling-klang king of the rim-ram room").
Painted on the metallic gray of the bus's massive side is a fuzzy green rendering of the planet Saturn, emphasizing the leviathan vehicle's role as parttime outpost of Cage's own Saturn Films production company. Soon Cage will be overseeing the editing of Shadow of the Vampire, starring John Malkovich and Willem Dafoe.
It's been a slightly extraterrestrial year for Cage; on Valentine's Day he spent considerable money on a chunk of rock from Mars. "A romantic gesture on my part," he says. "Patricia and I walked in haphazardly to this auction, and I got this little pink sapphire for her. Then this Mars rock came up, and I thought, 'Well, wouldn't it be romantic to, you know, be together, and at the highest moments of, whatever, I could drop it in her hand and say, "We are going into space"?'"
When a pair of framed snapshots of Cage's son Weston are remarked upon, he speaks of missing him during his current period of overwork. Cage speaks carefully of Enzo, Arquette's child from an earlier marriage to businessman Paul Rossi. "She takes the lead with that, and she's a wonderful mother," says Cage. "I feel that I'm able to provide an objective and very friendly force in Enzo's life, which I'm proud of. I feel there is a closeness there. I wouldn't really be able to go into detail. I have to respect their privacy."
Cage has attributed an increasing reticence in the last couple of years to an agreement he made with his wife. But almost everyone who's been inside the cinematic work bubble with Cage refers to a new poignancy they've seen in him, without specifying its source.
Perhaps no one felt more empathy than Bringing Out the Dead director of photography Robert Richardson, whose troubled brother died of an overdose of prescription medicine just before last winter's holidays, deep in the shoot: "Nic would share personal grief he was feeling about different subjects, and that allowed me to open up and relieve myself of a burden and of pain. Nic absorbed without judgment. It was lovely."
Cage's best work shows what a responsive filament he is for deep feeling. He has said that he used the death of his cousin Gian Carlo Coppola, Francis' son, as a touchstone for his performance in Leaving Las Vegas. Cage strives just as hard to maintain emotional balance in his personal life. "I cut all the coffee out of my diet, so I don't get anxiety attacks anymore," he says. "I have to be in a good place, and what I mean by good isn't necessarily happy but where I'm functioning, where I know that I feel well. So that means I need to exercise at least an hour and a half for five days a week. I know that I have anxiety problems. I'm attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder, and I've been that way all my life. I have to be careful with what I drink; I can't have coffee, 'cause I'll just get totally just hyper. So I take this Saint John's Wort stuff to help me be balanced and not have obsessional thinking."
This Cage creed has given him a new feeling of responsibility that he tries to pass along to his family. "I try to teach the value of the dollar," says Cage, who has instructed Weston to break down his allowance in three different ways: "One-third you're going to save, one-third you're going to spend on what you want and the last third you're going to give to charity."
Cage reports that his own charity is dedicated to the treatment of mental illness. "It's OK that I talk about it, 'cause my mother's OK with it, and she's fine now," he says. "But, I mean, what pisses me off is that she went through so much of it for so long. And nobody had a clue, you know, no one knew what the right stuff was to help her, what the right medicine was, and -- and it was unnecessary: this unnecessary suffering, for years, which could have just been fixed with the right doctor."
This is a time of healing for Cage, who has reconciled his sometimes strained relationship with his father. "We talk a lot on the phone, and it's been very warm and supportive," he says. "We are starting to have holidays together in Los Angeles." As for that elusive peace of mind? "For me it: comes from knowing that I'm taking care of the people around me. Somebody once said, life is, you suffer and you suffer so that for two minutes everybody's OK. That's what you get: You get two minutes where everybody's OK."
If so, Cage is determined to enjoy his time. He and Arquette live in a Bel Air home that was built in 1945 and has a legacy. "It was Dean Martin's house," says Cage, who may yet portray Howard Hughes for Brian De Palma. "And I like to imagine the parties that probably went on there with Dino, Sinatra and the Rat Pack, you know, at the bar."
Cage, then, is living the second act that so many people, and the great preponderance of film actors, are denied. What had looked like a series of career gambles has emerged as a coherent body of work; and what looked like an emotionally dangerous and hurtful sequence of relationships -- well, that's an ongoing story. "This whole thing has been kind of an invention of myself, you know," says Cage. "I was a skinny, kind of weak kid who had a dream of being the Incredible Hulk. And on some minute level, I still use those fantasies to try to transform myself from that skinny little kid -- who is really, still, who I am."
From across the table in the trailer that he has no plans to destroy, Cage leans forward to sum up the awareness that has been so difficult for him to attain: "After I shed my skin of wanting to be the rebellious, angst-ridden, broody actor, which I think is a very adolescent state of mind, I realized I didn't have to be that guy to be cool. And suddenly, I enjoyed my life more. I became free."
Contributing editor FRED SCHRUERS did the question-and-answer thing with Tom Peny in RS 816/817.
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"Logical consequences are the scarecrows of fools and the beacons of wise men." ~~~Thomas Henry Huxley~~~