“It’s a very universal film”: the 1990 movie Nicolas Cage called his ‘Wizard of Oz’
Many actors and filmmakers would love nothing more than to emulate The Wizard of Oz, mostly because they’ve said as much, and Nicolas Cage sounded pretty confident that he’d managed to tick that box.
Joel and Ethan Coen have admitted they spent decades ripping off the seminal 1939 movie in the hopes that nobody would notice, and while you can never truly take anything the siblings say at face value, there’s enough evidence in their filmography to suggest they weren’t talking out their shared arse.
Sam Raimi went one step further by directing Oz the Great and Powerful, which somehow came within inches of earning half a billion dollars at the box office, despite the fact that you’d completely forgotten the 2013 fantasy blockbuster existed until it was mentioned right now.
The Wizard of Oz is also James Cameron’s one and only favourite film of all time, and much like Victor Fleming’s revolutionary fantasy musical, he’s spent his career continually pushing the technological boundaries of cinema to new heights, so its influence on his trail-blazing filmography is clear.
John Waters is obsessed with it, too, but there was arguably no other auteur in Hollywood who was more synonymous with having a lifelong, unyielding, and life-changing obsession with Judy Garland and her ruby red slippers than David Lynch, with one film in particular being his most obvious love letter.
That would be 1990’s Wild at Heart, which happened to star Nicolas Cage in the leading role, so it makes perfect sense that the star and director would be in perfect sync about the Palme d’Or-winning crime caper’s ties to The Wizard of Oz, the bedrock that informed his performance as Sailor Ripley.
“It’s a very universal film, operating on different levels,” he intoned. “It operates on a comedic level. It operates on a real level. And also on that absurdist level. Like, there’s this gritty road movie, this gritty love story on the road, emanating through a Wizard of Oz tonality, which gives it more texture and colour.”
Cage, who played a wizard once in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, another film you’d completely forgotten existed until it was mentioned right now, and who’s starred in a few fantastical flicks over his prolific career, hasn’t come close to recapturing the magic of the ‘Golden Age’ masterpiece, which is probably because he never had a maverick auteur like Lynch lighting the way.
Of course, Wild at Heart‘s allusions to The Wizard of Oz were far from subtle, and you might have a hard time explaining to someone who’s seen the latter but never heard of the former that they’re two peas in the same spiritual pod, but it was to the film’s benefit that Cage and his director were on the same page.
