The director Nicolas Cage would work with again in a heartbeat: “One of our great geniuses”
No actor should be reduced to simplistic internet memes, but without them, it’s hard to say whether Nicolas Cage would have become such a staple among the new generation.
Through these short glimpses into his work, Cage is constantly endearing himself to new audiences, letting people in on the world he’s curated across years and years of unwavering dedication, because after all, Cage is an art lover through and through, a journey that started young when he discovered some of the most expressive voices in film history.
For instance, when Cage was 15, he already had a hefty handful of classics on rotation, including Ingmar Bergman’s The Seventh Seal, Federico Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits, and Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, but the one that really did it, though, was Elia Kazan’s 1955 classic, East of Eden, with James Dean being the one who inspired him to greatness.
“When I saw [James] Dean in that, it really put the hook in me because I felt like him, and I knew then the power of film acting, and I knew then what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do to try to move people with motion pictures,” Cage told Rotten Tomatoes.
From there, Cage gravitated towards actors and stories with an emotional core, letting it inform the decisions he’d make on set, so that someday, someone would hopefully watch one of his movies and it would have the same impact on them as East of Eden had on him, but what he likely hadn’t expected was that he’d experience the same sense of goddamn awe in his own projects, with other actors or directors that inspired him to push himself even further.
Like Brian De Palma, with whom Cage had worked on his 1998 thriller Snake Eyes, which had a strange resurgence recently, with people drawing comparisons to the events and characters surrounding the Charlie Kirk assassination last year, but beyond that, it received mixed reviews upon release, despite the promising nature of its premise.
Perhaps that’s why Cage would like to work with De Palma again, especially after watching shows like Breaking Bad and witnessing how much room there is for exploration in different formats, like “immersive television”. Either way, whether a longer series or a sequel, Cage would drop everything to work with the director again.
“I don’t usually watch my old movies, but I might watch that one because there was a lot there that has not been uncovered yet that could be rediscovered,” he told Forbes. “To answer your question, yeah. I would work with Brian De Palma again on a sequel to that in a heartbeat. I think it was a good character. Brian’s one of our great geniuses in cinema; I’d love to make a movie with him.”
It takes a lot for Cage to call someone a genius, and it holds more weight in this scenario, given the fact that Snake Eyes isn’t ever really on people’s list of best Cage movies. Perhaps a sequel would work given the nature of audiences today, although it’s likely they’d be gripped by a different project from the pair, one that really shows off their respective skills and withstands the test of time.
