“Five scripts in 45 years of doing this”: Nicolas Cage names the only movies of his career he had to make
Looking at how he spent a decade of his career trying to dig himself out of a financial hole, it’s stating the obvious to say Nicolas Cage hasn’t got a reputation for being the choosiest or most selective of actors in the business.
The Academy Award-winning meme generator slummed it through dozens upon dozens of straight-to-video thrillers that were routinely torn limb-from-limb by critics. Even during those wilderness years, though, Cage could never be accused of phoning it in.
Regardless of how terrible the movies regularly were – and some of them were utterly objectionable insults to the good name of cinema – he was at least trying. Plenty of slumming stars and fallen idols have blatantly sleepwalked their way through an onslaught of VOD dreck, but that’s never how Cage has approached the art of acting.
He’s been credited in over 120 pictures since making his screen debut in 1982’s cult classic comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and in the four decades since, he hasn’t left many stones unturned. Cage’s career has covered the good, the bad, and the very ugly of the moving image, but in all that time, there are only five films he’s felt compelled to make.
That’s not to say Cage thinks he’d only ever been in five good movies, but there’s just a quintet of screenplays that captivated him from page one and maintained his attention right through to the final scene. In terms of percentages, it’s not the greatest hit rate in Hollywood history, although each one of them represents the maverick actor at his best in a completely different way.
“I said there are only five scripts in 45 years of doing this where I feel I have to, have to, have to make that movie, and those scripts are Leaving Las Vegas, Vampire’s Kiss, Adaptation, Bringing Out the Dead, and Dream Scenario,” he told Collider. “I didn’t want to change a word. Now, other scripts I’ve made have been great but most evolved. It wasn’t necessarily on the page, the other movies I’ve made.”
Of course, Cage won his Oscar for ‘Best Actor’ in the haunting Leaving Las Vegas, earned another nomination for the Charlie Kaufman-scripted Adaptation, gave one of his most underrated turns in Martin Scorsese’s Bringing Out the Dead, spawned a thousand memes with Vampire’s Kiss, and labelled Dream Scenario as being worthy of the masterpiece tag.
While there’s potentially a glaring lack of self-awareness on the part of an actor who was credited in 14 features between January 2018 and December 2019 alone, saying there are only five movies spanning more than 40 years that he absolutely had to make, it’s clear those titles left behind the biggest impact on Cage as both a person and a professional.
He spent a lot of time saying yes to just about anything, but clearly, it takes a truly special screenplay to captivate Cage when the exclusive club is so light on numbers relative to the volume of onscreen appearances he’s made.
