“Gone way out”: Nicolas Cage reveals how he managed to freak out Werner Herzog
There aren’t many industry figures who exist on the same plane of eccentricity as Nicolas Cage. However, the evidence is stacked sky high to put Werner Herzog firmly among that number, which made their first-time pairing so exciting for fans of idiosyncratic cinema. “To this day, I couldn’t tell you what colour my eyes are,” Herzog recently wrote; you imagine Cage might be miffed by the same predicament.
On the one hand, there was the offbeat leading man who smothered his toes in hot yoghurt to get into the mood for a sex scene and cartwheeled his way to talk show infamy. He also ate a live cockroach in the service of his character, embarked on a real-life quest for the Holy Grail, and generally lived a life that was every bit as wild off-screen as it was when the cameras were rolling.
On the other, there was the maverick auteur who’d seen his plot to murder friend and collaborator Klaus Kinski thwarted by a dog, brushed off being shot by an air rifle mid-interview, dragged a 360-tonne boat over a mountain, hypnotised chickens, and made a short film that depicted himself eating a shoe after he’d promised to do exactly that after losing a bet.
Needless to say, anything less than batshit insanity would have been a crushing disappointment, but 2009’s blackly comic crime thriller Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans lived up to its tantalising billing as the meeting of two equally deranged minds.
Not that the project existed solely as a means for the two to try and outdo each other in the weirdness stakes. Still, there was plenty of that to be found in a mind-bending and engrossing descent into drug-addled madness and psychedelic flights of fancy that proved beyond doubt that Cage and Herzog were cut from the same outlandish cloth.
As the substance-addicted title character Terence McDonagh, Cage decided that he was going to snort a ridiculous amount of artificial sweetener saccharine to give him the requisite edge and place him firmly in the mindset of a coke-reliant corrupt cop. Remarkably, though, Herzog was aghast.
“I think I freaked Werner out a bit,” Cage admitted to The Guardian of his propensity for rampantly hoovering up a substance through means that don’t come recommended by medical professionals, which created an unexpected after-effect. “Which then freaked me out because you really have to have gone way out to freak out Werner.”
It’s not entirely surprising that Cage freaked himself out by freaking Herzog out because he realised a line had been crossed when the freaky filmmaker was suitably freaked. Still, it’s also entirely reflective of their individual standings in the Hall of Fame for cinema’s most irregular icons.
Sparks were expected of their first feature together, and that’s exactly what they delivered, regardless of the director showing genuine surprise at the sheer volume of sweetener disappearing up his leading man’s schnozz.
