The most ironic on-set mishap of Nicolas Cage’s career: “Isn’t that funny?”
More often than not, movie sets are rife with disaster, but then some incidents are much more extreme than others, like when several people were severely injured or even killed on the set of Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo.
Attempted murder, illness, and an intense clash between Herzog and Klaus Kinski only aided the film’s reputation as one of the most chaotic productions in cinema history, and keeping such incidents in mind, it’s miraculous that these films can still turn out impressively, although that’s not always the case. Sometimes, an act of disaster serves as a warning, a pertinent sign from some mysterious power indicating that the movie is doomed from the very beginning.
That might be a negative way to think, but you can’t necessarily argue when presented with the facts; I mean, in a cruel twist of fate, Nicolas Cage recently found himself face to face with the very culprits responsible for one of his most iconic, and hilariously bad, screen moments, ultimately foreshadowing the impending disaster of the movie he was working on when catastrophe struck.
The actor, or as he prefers to be called, thespian, was shooting The Carpenter’s Son, in which he plays Joseph in a shocking tale of religious horror, but it seemed like an act of divine intervention was trying to stop the movie from being made.
We all remember when Cage shouted “not the bees!” in that terrible remake of The Wicker Man (how that was greenlit still remains one of cinema’s greatest mysteries), but I bet the actor never thought he’d actually experience the horrific fate of his character in real life, and yet, during the filming of The Carpenter’s Son, Cage was swarmed by the bees.
Talking to Entertainment Weekly, Cage said, “Isn’t that funny? That ‘not the bees’ stuff,” he continued, “Well, what I would say about that, rather than some sort of mystical intervention, is that it was just stupid location scouting, and someone didn’t do their research.”
That’s what he’s telling himself, anyway: “The bees there, by the way, are protected. I would be pissed off too, if I was a bee and there was a film crew going into my hive and shining lights on everything. It was ridiculous. I don’t know whose idea it was. And then they kept saying, ‘Go back and shoot there with all the bees’, and people were getting stung and getting sick. I mean, it was really not smart.”
Cage added a bit sagely, saying that “It wasn’t any kind of divine mystical intervention. It was just stupidity. There was no regard for nature and our brothers and sisters in the animal kingdom”.
The Carpenter’s Son hasn’t been received particularly well by critics, and it has even been banned in the Philippines for its controversial depiction of a teenage Jesus, played by Noah Jupe; movies about Christ are always going to stir the pot, and this one, directed by Lofty Nathan, is no exception. The film sets out to humanise Jesus in a way, but what we’re left with is an undercooked and underdeveloped mess, and perhaps, those bees really were trying to warn Cage after all, because sometimes it’s best if things are simply left untouched.
