The actor who directs Nicolas Cage’s every performance: “A big impact on me”
Say what you will about the quality of the movies he chooses, but Nicolas Cage is, without question, an unparalleled actor. That doesn’t necessarily mean he’s the best of all time. In fact, his particular brand of acting often deliberately undermines that argument. But that unhinged, unpredictable, explosive energy that he brings to every film is unlike anyone else.
Since the 1980s, Cage has been gracing us with his singular screen presence, turning otherwise unremarkable side characters into scene-stealing cult icons. Who can forget that maniacal moment in Peggy Sue Got Married in which he sneaks into Kathleen Turner’s bedroom at night, considers suffocating her with a pillow, and then entices her down to the basement, where he proceeds to break down into howls of heartbreak over her infidelity?
Who can forget that tour de force of a performance in Face/Off when he starts singing a made-up song with a gun pressed to his forehead or dances to a choir singing Handel’s ‘Messiah’ as if he were in a nightclub? These are all precious moments in the history of cinema and point to the actor’s stated goal of being the Pablo Picasso of acting.
Cage always seems to be marching (and shrieking and flouncing and wailing) to the beat of his own drum, but according to the actor himself, he does have another guiding light in addition to the surrealist painter. During a 2018 interview with Rotten Tomatoes, the Oscar winner said that his first viewing of Apocalypse Now, which was, incidentally, directed by his uncle Francis Ford Coppola, made an immediate impression on him and introduced him to an actor he would come to idolise.
Unlike most people, Cage got to watch the movie with many of the people who were involved in making it, including Coppola, Marlon Brando, and Dennis Hopper. “They were watching the movie for the first time,” he said, “And I must’ve been about, gosh, what was I? 12, 13? I don’t know, but it really put a big effect in me.” Hopper’s performance stood out in particular. “I mean, he was really going off the rails in that, and that had a big impact on me as well, in terms of my own later choices with film performance,” he continued. “I wanted to get a little more Dennis Hopper or less Dennis Hopper with some of the stuff that I was doing, so that had a big impact.”
In Apocalypse Now, Hopper plays an American photojournalist and crazed acolyte of Brando’s Colonel Kurtz. It’s a brief but electrifying performance and one of the most memorable in a film stuffed with memorable performances. In one scene, he confronts fellow American Captain Ben Willard (Martin Sheen) to tell him about Kurtz’s genius. He starts casually, as if he’s merely making small talk, only to work himself up into a fever pitch of self-inflicted outrage.
It’s easy to see how such a performance, which is so unpredictable and magnetic, would inspire Cage, who’s made a career out of wild bursts of raw energy that seem to come out of nowhere. He might have turned that inspiration into an acting style of his own, but it isn’t difficult to trace it all back to Hopper’s performance.
