Nicolas Cage names his wildest movie: “And that’s saying something”
When most A-list actors claim their new movie is the wildest they’ve ever made, it’s usually taken with a pinch of salt. Hollywood royalty rarely deals in films that are truly unhinged in subject matter or filmmaking style. They may pay lip service to it, but audiences know they’ll likely get something fairly safe in the end. Nicolas Cage, on the other hand, has built a career on starring in films that are genuinely bizarre, chaotic, and unlike anything most actors would dare touch. So when he called a film his wildest yet, people sat up and took notice.
In 2018, Cage was at a weird point in his career. He was still firmly mired in the direct-to-video wasteland where he’d spent much of the 2010s, with the likes of Looking Glass, The Humanity Bureau, 211, and Between Worlds all releasing that year. You’d be hard-pressed even to find a Cage superfan who remembers the plots of those movies, let alone whether they were any good. However, 2018 also saw Cage star in Mandy, a genuinely deranged horror movie from Panos Cosmatos that broke free from the DTV dreck, receiving rave reviews and developing a cult following.
Over the next several years, a ‘Cageaissance’ would take place, spurred on in large part by Mandy. In the early 2020s, Pig, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Dream Scenario, and Longlegs put Cage back on the map as one of Hollywood’s most fascinating performers. He did it on his own terms, too, because every one of those movies was an idiosyncratic big swing – with no standard studio programmers to be found.
Nestled nicely in this period, though, was Prisoners of the Ghostland, a horror western action movie directed by subversive Japanese filmmaker Sion Sono. It was released in 2021, after being initially announced in 2018, when Cage told a Film Festival audience, “I’m thrilled about it. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever read before. It might be the wildest movie I’ve ever made, and that’s saying something. It’s out there.”
These words hold extra weight with someone like Cage, a man who regularly swings for the fences with the movies he picks and the performances he gives. Hearing the movie’s elevator pitch, though, makes his claim seem perfectly valid.
“I wear a skintight black leather jumpsuit with grenades attached to different body parts,” Cage grinned, “And if I don’t rescue the governor’s daughter from this state line where they’re all ghosts and bring her back, they’re gonna blow me up.” To give a little insight into the sheer preposterous nature of the movie: those grenades attached to different body parts that Cage mentioned? They’re stuck to his testicles, and they’ll explode if he gets too aroused.
Cage later revealed to Entertainment Weekly that he was all-in on the gonzo film as soon as Sono, an auteur he refers to as the “Warlock of Cinema,” pitched it to him. He mused: “I wanted to make a Sion Sono movie because I knew in his vision I could play with some of my more abstract ideas as to where I could go with film performance – what I like to call my more ‘Western kabuki’ approach to film performance.”
Ultimately, making Sono’s ultra-violent, absurdly funny movie lived up to Cage’s initial impression of the project. He was also tickled by the fact that his quote – “the wildest movie I’ve ever made” – was emblazoned on the film’s poster. “I actually said that before I even shot the movie,” he chuckled. “I said it based on my interview with Sono-san, and reading the script, and looking at the storyboards for the movie…But that’s fine by me. Go, man, go! If you want to use it, use it!”
