The one director Nicolas Cage is desperate to work with: “His movies have a whole new energy”
Common sense would dictate that if an actor is a massive fan of a director, and that director also happens to be a huge fan of the actor, they’d end up working together. Frustratingly for Nicolas Cage, though, the name sitting at the top of his wish list has yet to be ticked off.
While he was hardly operating at the top of his game during his decade in the straight-to-video wilderness, Cage’s recent resurgence has placed him right back at the forefront of the conversation. Debt-free and rejuvenated, the Academy Award winner is currently doing some of the best work of his career.
Of course, everybody with a pair of eyes and half a brain has known for decades that Cage is one of the most dynamic, dedicated, and singular talents of his generation, if not ever. There’s nobody quite like him, and as a result, his idiosyncracies have worked their way into projects hailing from a remarkably diverse array of auteurs.
He’s partnered up with his uncle Francis Ford Coppola, the Coen brothers, David Lynch, Michael Bay, John Woo, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese, Spike Jonze, Ridley Scott, Werner Herzog, Paul Schrader, and Panos Cosmatos. In almost all of those cases, he was in top form. Take Cage, put him with a single-minded director of renown, and wait for the sparks to fly.
What makes it even more frustrating is that the Oscar-winning writer and director in question has spoken glowingly of the ‘Nouveau Shamanic’ pioneer on numerous occasions, and time is running out for Cage to make that dream a reality, not that he was in the mood for sugarcoating it when David Sheff asked him to name the one filmmaker he wanted to work with the most.
“Tarantino,” he replied. “He has a great command of humour and an understanding of cinema all at once.” The closest they came was when Cage played Fu Manchu in Rob Zombie’s fake trailer Werewolf Women of the SS, which played during the intermission of Grindhouse.
“He’s a great director,” Cage continued. “His movies have a whole new energy. It’s a relentless kind of energy. It’s like certain kinds of music that I listen to; uncompromising, angry music. It comes out as sort of an assault.” It’s been almost three decades since he outlined his intention to work with Quentin Tarantino, and the mutual appreciation society has been in full flow ever since, but it still hasn’t come to pass.
With Tarantino planning to bow out of directing following his next feature, if he doesn’t cast Cage in whatever that film turns out to be, then it’s going to be a major missed opportunity. Not only for them, but for the army of audience members who’ve long fantasised about what Cage could bring to the table with a Tarantino screenplay to work with.
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