The most “joyful” director Nicolas Cage ever worked with: “I never had more fun on a film set”
Nicolas Cage has always been a rather eccentric star, and when he’s at his best, it’s because he has somehow managed to find a like-minded filmmaker who fully understands him, which is surely no easy feat.
Just look at some of the roles he took on during the early 2020s, which you could consider to be a period of career renaissance for the star. He found a new bout of success because he wasn’t afraid to work with directors who seemed to understand his bold ideas, like when he played a fictionalised version of himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, directed by Tom Gormican.
Then there was Kristoffer Borgli’s Dream Scenario, one of Cage’s most acclaimed films of recent years. Portraying a man who keeps appearing in people’s dreams, this surreal story was the perfect vehicle for Cage to express his weirder side, and he received a Golden Globe nomination as a result.
While Cage has clearly found some great collaborators over the years, it appears that none have ever come close to a certain fellow eccentric, with whom he felt like he could completely let go and simply have fun, and that was, of course, David Lynch, who cast him in his 1990 road comedy-drama Wild at Heart, a surreal blend of campy humour and intense themes, like violence and sexual abuse.
Cage starred as Sailor, an Elvis-loving snakeskin jacket-wearing Southerner who, returning from prison after killing a man in self-defence, finds himself breaking parole to run away with his girlfriend, Lula (played by Laura Dern). Meanwhile, Lula’s mother is doing all she can to split the pair up, even going as far as hiring a hitman to hunt Sailor down.
There are many bizarre moments in the film, like when the pair go to a speed metal gig, only for Sailor to stop the music when a man hits on Lula, leading him to perform a pretty impressive rendition of ‘Love Me Tender’ in front of everyone. The film is further filled with outlandish moments and unforgettable characters, like Willem Dafoe’s slimy Bobby Peru, and even Sheryl Lee’s cameo as the Good Witch, but it’s Cage who stands out as the most perfect element of Lynch’s crazed road-trip film.
The actor had an unparalleled experience working on the film, and reflecting upon the experience in the wake of Lynch’s passing in 2025, Cage told Deadline, “I never had more fun on a film set than working with David Lynch. He will always be solid gold”.
Calling him “a singular genius in cinema, one of the greatest artists of this or any time,” Cage continued, “He was brave, brilliant, and a maverick with a joyful sense of humour”.
The pair would collaborate again on Lynch’s concert film Industrial Symphony No 1: The Dream of the Brokenhearted that same year, which also featured Dern, although Lynch and Cage would never make another proper feature together following Wild at Heart.
It’s a shame that the actor didn’t become one of Lynch’s regular collaborators, because he fit into the filmmaker’s strange world really well, especially when he was impersonating Elvis.
