The director Nicolas Cage calls a “jazz musician”
The lore surrounding the work of David Lynch is as mysterious as the man himself, with incredible behind-the-scenes footage of him interacting with lead actors and extras, with head-scratching notes such as, “Imagine you’re a beautiful doll” and his wonderful weather reports during lockdown.
After working with Naomi Watts, Laura Dern and of course, Kyle MacLachlan on many projects, Lynch has been able to expand on his unique approach to collaboration by creating a safe and open atmosphere on his sets. And after working with the auteur on Wild at Heart in 1990, Nicholas Cage had many thoughts about his directorial style.
Cage has worked with many independent directors over the years, collaborating with Spike Jonze, Kristoffer Borgli and Francis Ford Coppola, and Wild at Heart marked his first collaboration with David Lynch. Also starring Laura Dern, the film follows Sailor Ripley and Lula Fortune, who are madly in love and struggling to find a way to be together, with criminals and old enemies getting in the way.
But after many infamous tales about what it’s like to work with the director, Cage shared one anecdote about his time on set and why he thinks the director shares more similarities with a jazz musician.
The work of a jazz musician is characterised by spontaneity and improvisation, with the players literally making it up as they go along, acting on impulse and instinct to create an entirely new piece of music each time they play. When Cage was asked about Lynch’s creative approach, he said, “He’s a jazz musician director, you never really know what you’re going to do when you get to the set. I remember one day he came to the set and he said, ‘Uh Nicholas, you’re gonna sing opera today’. And I said ‘Well what do you mean?’ and he says, ‘well there’s going to be a cotton ball under your bed and I want you to have a bad dream and sing an opera song about the cotton ball’. Just like that”.
While many actors would turn in their graves at such a sudden request, Cage immediately understood the assignment and that he needed to trust the director’s impulses and instincts. Much like a jazz musician, Lynch constantly creates and evolves his own perception of the characters and story world in front of him, which exists as an ever-changing and constant force.
When asked to perform this operatic song about a cotton ball, Cage said, “I didn’t feel stupid about it, I felt like if it would work it would be in the movie. And he really believes that fun is essential on the set, it sounds like a trite word and it is a trite word but you have to have fun because if you’re not, the audience won’t have fun so the set is very fun”.
Fun is definitely the keyword here, and Cage is right—if you’re not having fun on set, then how can you expect this to translate to the audience? David Lynch’s peculiar and surrealistic world is no doubt due to this approach: never being settled on one idea and allowing the film to change and surprise you along the way.
