"What's in that vial?" Actor Nicolas Cage on his role in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New OrleansFew directors would mean it as a compliment to say their lead actor behaved like a swine on the movie set.
Yet Werner Herzog intends the highest praise of Nicolas Cage, describing how well the excitable artist followed his command to "turn the pig loose!" during the shoot of cop drama Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.
It's an old Bavarian expression for "go wild" that the German director favours, and Cage didn't need an explanation.
"He immediately knew what I meant," Herzog says. "And man, does he turn the pig loose! As an actor, he always understood the fluidity of the situation. The kind of musicality, jazz in particular, which allows you to improvise and stay within a certain mood and go wild."
Cage, 45, smiles when he hears of Herzog's commendation. He prefers to think of his uncaged "pig" as more "theatre of the imagination" than anything else, but for Bad Lieutenant, a loose remake of Abel Ferrara's 1992 original, he did get really physical. Cage plays a good cop turned evil by a combination of pain, addiction and wanton sexuality.
"The first thing I looked at was the physicality," Cage said in an interview during the recent Toronto International Film Festival, where Bad Lieutenant, which opens Friday, had its North American debut.
"The character had a serious back injury, and I thought that would give me an opportunity like Richard the Third to do something with my body language."
That's an understatement. Cage approached his Terence McDonagh character with such bug-eyed intensity, he looks onscreen like one of Ralph Steadman's surreal drawings of the late gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson. It's easily the most self-destructive character Cage has played since his Oscar-winning 1995 performance in Leaving Las Vegas.
Cage did such a convincing job using the fake cocaine for the role, he had Herzog thinking he was using the real thing.
"Werner, shockingly enough, would think I was really doing it, and he'd say, 'What's in that vial?' And I'm like, 'Oh, please! Don't ask me that now when we're about to do a take!' I got so frustrated one time I yelled, 'It's coke!' Just because you can't pull me out of my prep."
How exactly do you prepare for the role of cop who can barely stand upright, yet who manages to summon enough energy to consume mass quantities of illegal drugs, to wave a massive firearm around, and beat, rape and steal from the people he's supposed to be policing?
"I would start to psych up and do the physical thing with my back, and also just start ramping up in my mind that I was on this speed-like coke or crack, and get into it and really believe in it," Cage said.
"I didn't want to glamorize the drugs. I wanted to show the hideousness of the effect of them, both in terms of his behaviour as well as in terms of his physical facial expressions. I thought that different drugs would create different facial expressions as well."
The music of New Orleans plays a big part in the movie and in Cage's performance. Both Cage and Herzog feel a strong affinity with the swamp city, and it begins with jazz.
"I try to hear sounds and New Orleans is a city of jazz, the birthplace of jazz," Cage said. "I don't consider acting to be any different from painting or music. There really is no top when it comes to imagination, just as a painting isn't over the top or that a music you wouldn't say is over the top. Why not consider doing that with acting?"
Herzog marvelled at how quickly Cage tuned in: "In a way, he was reborn in New Orleans. Seeing him in that environment, I knew that he wasn't making it up."
A lot of people think there are two Nicolas Cages on the big screen. One who does small-budget dramas like Bad Lieutenant, where the character is often hard to like, and the other in Hollywood fare like the National Treasure franchise, where Cage plays a wise-cracking action hero type.
"I see one actor who's eclectic and who feels lucky to be eclectic," Cage countered.
"I know that when you make a decision to make more than one kind of movie there is a chance that it's going to ruffle some feathers, but I can't worry about that. I can't take that personally.
"As I get older and think about the power of film, and to me that power is the ability to change people's minds, the more I want to be responsible with it and the less interested I am in putting a big sign on my head saying, 'Look at me, I'm a star!'"
He is, however, willing to be a swine, but only for the right script and the right director.
1302415-917503.jpg | Lena Herzog photo Nicolas Cage, here with Eva Mendes, plays a self-destructive cop in Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans. | ;
