The one movie Nicolas Cage didn’t want to make: “I must have said no five or six times”
Until recently, there was an incredibly simple way to guarantee that Nicolas Cage would participate in a movie: ask him, and he’d do it because he’d be getting paid, and he desperately needed the money.
Even the Academy Award winner’s most ardent supporters would struggle to make their way through his entire filmography, with Cage’s years of rampant overspending and financial mismanagement plunging him into a debt-filled hole that took him a decade to work his way out of.
He made 31 films between 2011 and 2018, and how many of them were good? A handful, and even that’s being generous. While he could never be accused of phoning it in because Cage simply has no idea how to do that, he’d be the first to admit the overwhelming majority of his output was crap.
Thankfully, those days look to be a thing of the past, with the meme-generating maestro of Nouveau Shamanism currently in the midst of a resurgence that’s on track to be remembered as the most creatively fertile and fulfilling period of his professional life. He’s finally in a place where he can say no to things, and he looks to be making the most of it.
He did try saying no before, though, and it didn’t go to plan. Cage was keen to avoid the whiff of nepotism following him around when he was trying to make a name for himself, so after adopting his stage name and playing small parts in Rumble Fish and The Cotton Club, he attempted to distance himself from the sprawling Coppola dynasty.
An obstacle was presented when his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola, kept asking him to star in Peggy Sue Got Married, which led to an ultimatum being issued. “Yeah, I didn’t want to make that movie,” he confessed to The New York Times. “I must have said no five or six times. I said, ‘Uncle, why do you want to make this movie at all?’ He said, ‘It’s like Our Town!’ By the way, I couldn’t stand Our Town.”
His hatred of the 1940 stage adaptation aside, Coppola wouldn’t let his nephew turn him down. Deciding that the best way to underline his disinterest was to do something absolutely preposterous with the character he was being asked to play, Cage turned up at the rehearsals with a plan that ended up irritating his most frequent scene partner.
“I said, ‘Look, I’ll do it if you let me go really far out with the character,'” he explained. “‘How far out?’ ‘I want to talk like Pokey from The Gumby Show. So I went to rehearsal, and everybody was rolling their eyes because I was talking like that, and my co-star Kathleen Turner was very upset. It did not go over well.”
It was good enough for Coppola at the time, although he came to regret it. In fact, he hated Cage’s Peggy Sue Got Married accent so much that he refused to work with him ever again.
