‘Mandy’ Star Nicolas Cage on Channeling Bruce Lee and Jason Voorhees for His Craziest Role Yet [Interview]

nicolas cage interview

If ever there was a match made in heaven, it’s filmmaker Panos Cosmatos and actor Nicolas Cage. The two have similar boundary-pushing sensibilities that coalesce in Cosmatos’ thrillingly imaginative followup to Beyond the Black RainbowMandy, which co-stars Andrea Riseborough and features Cage as lumberjack Red Miller going on a blood-soaked journey for revenge. The Academy Award-winner has made many remarkable and sometimes almost otherworldly transformations throughout his career. Whether he’s wielding a chainsaw or an axe, the actor’s presence is often epic in Cosmatos’ anamorphic shots.

While Cosmatos’ revenge tale is sometimes like an acid trip gone wrong in Hell complete with its nightmarish and grand imagery, the hypnotic aesthetic is made all the more transfixing by some visceral emotions from Cage and Riseborough . Mandy has great fight scenes, including a next-level battle involving chainsaws, but one of the reasons why the movie is so special is the palpable sense of loss. There’s one scene in particular where Cage lets out a lot of pain, and it hits like a ton of bricks.

We recently spoke with Cage about that scene, along with studying Bruce Lee and silent films, punk rock performances, Prince, and more.

Originally, you were offered the role of Jeremiah Sand, but what was it that drew you to Red Miller instead?

Well, when I first met with Panos, he told me he wanted me to play Jeremiah Sand, and I said, “Why?” And he said, “Well, I see him as the California Klaus Kinski.” And I said, “Well, I am the California Klaus Kinski, but I want to play Red.” And he said, “This is a movie about age versus youth.” At the time I was doing Army Of One, so I had long white hair and a long white beard, and I looked like I was full Gandalf mode, or Saturn mode or something, Chronos. And it just didn’t connect. But I did have a very fascinating conversation with him, and he was talking about how he remembered seeing his figurines, action figure toys melting, whether by some sort of heat, whether it was the sun or something. I thought this is not like a conversation I’ve had with anybody, and I can tell that there’s something humanly artistic.

I’d seen Beyond A Black Rainbow, which I thought was profoundly affecting and I didn’t sleep for a week after it. It was unlike anything I’d seen before, so I knew I was in the presence of an original artist. But nonetheless, I did not want to play Jeremiah Sand. I felt that I had gone through enough life experience. Not that I can’t work from the imagination, I normally do, but I had enough life experience contending the failure of my third marriage and still trying to recover from the loss of my father after many, many years. Still not just quite over it. As I look at these footnotes here from the talking points that coincide with Panos himself, that I … having had experiences with loss, certainly family loss, I was in step with that.

I felt I could play Red authentically and organically and put those feelings of loss in a productive place as opposed to a destructive place, and a constructive place. And so, that’s why I gravitated towards Red. I just felt that I could go after the cult and the demon bikers in a way that was in his world, but had some sort of sound of truth.

Red Miller isn’t as stylized as some of your punk rock performances, but because of the style of the movie and where the character goes, do you still consider Red Miller a punk rock performance of yours? 

I certainly think maybe more of a metal sound, or a darker metal sound, if we had to make a comparison. But I do think that there is a sound that comes up when I’m fighting, which … I always enjoy watching Bruce Lee, and I loved his wonderful catlike sounds that he would make, but even since I did Con Air, I found there’s like a growl, or almost like a combination of a high pitched scream with a low based growl that seems to be my sound when I fight. I would say that, that would go more towards a metal vocalization than a punk vocalization.

You’ve talked before about sometimes wanting to bring a musical quality for dialogue and a melody. Even though he’s not a big talker, for Red Miller, was there a melody you wanted his dialogue to have at any point?

In that particular portrayal, I wasn’t really thinking about the music as much, not at least in terms of dialogue, because I didn’t have a lot of dialogue. I was thinking more about the music within. The word, person, actually means where the sound comes from. Persona, means where the sound comes from. I guess, Ancient Greek, but I was really more focused on the internal, if you will, opera that I was listening to.

Note: The next part of the answer sounds better than it reads, so we wanted to share this excerpt from the conversation with Cage breaking down a line delivery and showing how he wanted the melody to sound:

I wasn’t hearing the melody in terms of dialogue quite as much, although I would say that the fight sequences did have some melody. There was one line after the demon rips my shirt, and I say, “That was my favorite shirt.” I think you go in there and I say, “Did you rip my shirt? Did you rip my shirt?” That was clearly a melody in my head for that line, yeah. “Did you rip my shirt? Did you rip my shirt?” They wanted me to change it from a question to a statement. And for me, it wasn’t a statement. It was a question, but it was a question that was being … an assault of a question, so that it was a statement. But I was reminding her that you did in fact rip my shirt by asking him or her the question.

Maybe this is a stretch, but I’ve heard you talk before about how much you love silent film, and how you studied it. Since Red Miller is often silent, so did your studies of silent movies influence you at all? 

It certainly has influenced me in the past, when I was cutting my teeth on movies like Vampire’s Kiss, where I was looking at Nosferatu or Fritz Lang’s Metropolis for Moonstruck, where I like that kind of German Expressionistic larger than life gesture, but not so much with Red. I actually think Red is one of my more subtle portrayals. I was going more from the emotional content. Trying to go into the well of memory and conjure up something more along those lines, as opposed to some sort of stylization, which I have been known to do in the past.

However, I would say that the fighting style for Red transforms quite a bit prior to him drinking the skull juice, which is a kind of supernatural drug. Red is a much more ferocious, almost catlike fighter. I even looked at a Bruce Lee shot from Enter The Dragon and showed it to the cinematographer as well as to Panos, where the camera goes from a wide shot into an extreme close up of Bruce breaking somebody’s neck, and I said, “That’s a great shot. Let’s try and get that.” I’m happy to say that something approaching that made it into the movie. But then after the skull juice, Panos wanted me to look at Jason [Voorhees] movies.

There was one in particular [Friday the 13th, Part VII: The New Blood]. The number, I don’t remember, but he was contending with supernatural telekinesis in a young lady, and Jason was fighting. So, he wanted a style of fighting more like a monolith or statuesque, which I immediately thought of as the golem. Not the Gollum from Lord of the Rings, but the ancient Jewish golem, that was a statue that a sorcerer would bring to life to wreak havoc. And so, that was a collaborative transformation that Panos and I designed together.

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The post ‘Mandy’ Star Nicolas Cage on Channeling Bruce Lee and Jason Voorhees for His Craziest Role Yet [Interview] appeared first on /Film.




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