The one movie that made Nicolas Cage want to be an actor: “It broke my heart”
As a member of the distinguished Coppola family, Nicolas Cage was quite literally born to be an actor. The Adaptation, Face/Off, and Con Air star is the son of August Coppola – the brother of Apocalypse Now director Francis Ford Coppola. Being a nephew to one of the most powerful people in the film industry certainly had its benefits, and Cage, despite adopting a different last name to separate himself from the Coppolas, made the most of his connections.
That being said, Cage doesn’t seem to have fallen into the acting profession simply because it was the path of least resistance. He was surrounded by members of the film industry as a child, and acting may have felt like a way of connecting to his Italian roots. The actor’s paternal grandparents – immigrants originally from Basilicata – were composer Carmine Coppola and the actress Italia Pennino, after all. Cage is also a cousin of directors Roman Coppola and Sofia Coppola, film producer Gian-Carlo Coppola and actor Jason Schwartzman.
In the end, of course, the person responsible for getting Cage into acting wasn’t a Coppolla at all, but an actor called James Dean. Cage had already developed a taste for classic cinema, having been introduced to the works of Ingmar Bergman, Orson Welles and Federico Fellini. “I was 15, and I’d seen Bergman’s Seventh Seal and Fellini’s Juliet of the Spirits and Welles’ Citizen Kane — great films,” the actor told Rotten Tomatoes.
A collection of some of the most beloved movies of all time highlights that Cage isn’t just an actor but a true cinephile. But while those movies will likely find their way into a critically acclaimed top 100, it was another picture which stirred a fire in his acting potential.
The film that made the most impact was Elia Kazan’s 1955 picture East of Eden. “When I saw 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 continued
An adaptation of the John Steinbeck novel of the same name, East Of Eden stars James Dean as Cal Trask, the son of a California farmer. Jealous of his brother Aron, Cal seeks to win the favour of his disapproving father but ends up face-to-face with his estranged mother, the owner of a backwater brothel. Things get even more complicated when Cal – entirely against his will – starts developing feelings for Abra, Aron’s girlfriend.
Intended as a symbolic reinterpretation of the Biblical Abel and Cain story, East of Eden left Cage reeling. The performances, most notably of Dean, were enough to pinch his soul and spin it into action. “It broke my heart,” he said. “It was not like anything I’d experienced before, in terms of art, and I’d seen a lot of movies at that point”.
Convinced of his own ability, the newly-inspired 15-year-old approached Francis Ford to try to convince him to give him a screen test. According to a career-spanning feature in the New York Times, Cage was sitting next to Coppola in the car when he announced, “I’ll show you acting”, Apparently, the outburst was met with grim silence. Make of that what you will.
However, as the years have gone by, Cage has positioned himself as one of the most expressive actors in the industry. With a resume as varied as a kaleidoscope, Cage has routinely given his all to every project he has been involved in. While it’s hard to pinpoint what Cage’s life would have been like without that movie, it’s clear that he most certainly devoted himself to acting after seeing it.
