“They don’t make them like him anymore”: the director who demanded maximum Nicolas Cage
In his storied career, Nicolas Cage has worked with many of the great directors of the last 50 years. He’s lent his unique acting chops to pictures helmed by Martin Scorsese, Ridley Scott, the Coen brothers, David Lynch, Oliver Stone, Brian De Palma, Werner Herzog, and his uncle Francis Ford Coppola, to name but a few. Many of them have allowed him to unleash his inner Cage-ness in their movies, and it’s always had thrillingly wacky results. There is only one director, though, who demanded maximum Cage from the star – and it wasn’t one of these icons.
In 2011, Cage returned for a second taste of flaming skull-related comic book nonsense in Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance. This sequel to his 2007 Marvel adaptation went down about as well as the first one—i.e. not well at all—but it at least saw the star connect with a director he wanted to work with again.
Spirit of Vengeance was directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor, the directing duo responsible for the similarly batshit Crank movies with Jason Statham. After all and sundry lambasted it, though, they decided to forge their own paths, with Neveldine directing the 2015 horror The Vatican Tapes and 2022 Mel Gibson actioner Panama. Taylor, meanwhile, wrote and directed the lion’s share of Syfy’s Happy!, an ultra-violent TV show based on a Grant Morrison comic book.
By the time it came for Taylor to make his cinematic directing debut as a solo act, though, he knew he wanted to reunite with Cage. This time, instead of playing a demonic motorcyclist battling the forces of Hell, Cage would play a family man named Brent Ryan. A family man who, along with every other parent in the United States, develops an insatiable urge to murder his children, of course.
The film was 2017’s Mom and Dad, a black comedy horror romp that co-starred Selma Blair. Cage, naturally, got to go full nutcase in the film and when Taylor was asked by The Skinny if there was anything he wanted Cage to mine from their previous collaboration, he simply answered, “I just wanted to tap into Cage again because there’s just nothing quite like that guy.”
“He’s just a one-of-a-kind,” continued Taylor. “They don’t make them like him anymore, and they didn’t make them like him before him.”
In truth, though, Taylor didn’t just need maximum Cage from the performance. Instead, he needed Cage to do what he does best, which is to find humanity in an outlandish situation. He knew that without Cage’s genuine ability to allow audiences to understand and empathise with a potentially off-the-wall character, Mom and Dad wouldn’t work.
“If this movie succeeds for people, that’s the level at which it will succeed because it’s touching on something that’s human and true,” explained Taylor. He was ecstatic that Cage “responded to that really strongly and instantly” and felt that he went above and beyond to bring something personal to the role, instead of just going through the motions. He mused, “That’s just not Nic. He’s a very intense, passionate dude, and if he wants to make a movie personal, there’s nobody else who does it quite like him.”
Indeed, Cage’s dedication to balancing his ability to chew the scenery with a more recognisable human core made the first half of the film play even better than Taylor imagined.
He marvelled: “There’s a sort of subtle madness in just being a parent every day, even without any crazy virus that causes everybody to become homicidal…I love the way he was able to convey that in a really contained way, but you can just feel it”.
