Nicolas Cage On ‘Dream Scenario,’ Resurrecting Superman And Working In Television: “I Never Would’ve Considered It Five Years Ago.”
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Even by Nicolas Cage’s standards, Dream Scenario is a strange movie — but mostly in that there is nothing at all unusual about the character he plays. A mediocre biologist whose research is routinely stolen by other scientists, Paul Matthews becomes famous overnight when he starts appearing in other people’s dreams. How and why is never explained, but Kristoffer Borgli’s surreal satire has a lot to say about today’s social media-driven society. Speaking from his home in Las Vegas (“The more romantic way of saying it is: I’m in the Mojave Desert”), the actor explains how he saw himself in this most unlikely premise.
DEADLINE: So, we’re talking about Dream Scenario. How did that project come to you?
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NICOLAS CAGE: What happened was, I had been communicating via email with Ari Aster, and he had heard that I’d wanted to work with him as a result of seeing Hereditary and Midsommar. He suggested I look at an episodic television show he was working on, which was certainly unique. It was about a television star from the 1970s, and you can imagine the fun that could be had with that. But I had really hoped to try and do a motion picture with Ari, and I wasn’t quite ready to go into television. At that time, at least. And then he suggested that I take a look at this script called Dream Scenario — which he was going to produce but wasn’t going to direct — and two short films that the writer, Kristoffer Borgli, had directed.
One was called Eer, and I flipped out. I thought, not only were they creative and inventive, but I also thought [Borgli] was terrific as an actor in those shorts. He had a kind of an almost Adaptation-style of film performance. I asked him about that when I met with him, and he said, yeah, that was one of his favorite movies. So we hit it off right away. But perhaps more importantly, I really thought the script was perfect. I didn’t think I’d want to change a word of it. It was the perfect place for me to kind of express some of the feelings I’d had. I’ve spoken a lot about my “memeification” in the past, and that was also on my mind: I knew that I could play Paul’s dreamification authentically as a result of that.
DEADLINE: It’s a very rich metaphor. It’s also a reflection of the way pop culture absorbs and dispenses with people. How a movie star can be huge one minute and then forgotten the next, and how people in music and the arts have their ‘phases’.
CAGE: Yes, and I think that’s speeding up, too, as a result of the internet and as a result of memeification. There was an interesting article in the New Yorker by Isaac Butler, and he was saying that the internet had kind of reduced movie stars to punchlines, and I certainly know what he means. I’ve felt like that at times, with the way the internet has reduced the complete two-hour narrative of a character to one image [with the caption], “You don’t say?” or a freakout scene from Vampire’s Kiss or Ghost Rider.
So, it is something that was on my mind, and it’s speeding up almost exponentially now, to a point where it’s becoming increasingly difficult — especially with the amount I like to work — to not wear out your welcome. And so that’s why I’m thinking about other formats. I never would’ve considered television five years ago, but now I’m thinking about it. Because of the speed at which the internet is moving things along, it might not be a bad option.
DEADLINE: How did you come up with the look of the character? You obviously didn’t have much time to work on this, working as quickly as you do.
CAGE: Well, that’s a good question, because it was important to Kristoffer that this Paul Matthews looked nothing like me. And he had sent me a series of photographs of actual evolutionary biologists and actual professors like Robert Sapolsky, and he sent a few pictures about guys who had a sort of Benjamin Franklin horseshoe look, where the hair is removed at the front, but there’s a little horseshoe rim of hair in the back of the head. And I said, “Why do some men like to wear their hair like that?” And he said, “Well, I think it gives them a kind of academic seriousness,” and I think that’s true. It’s a very professorial look. So, we immediately went with that, and then he wanted me to change the shape of my nose to just slightly alter it. So, you’re not thinking of Nicolas Cage, you’re thinking of Paul Matthews.
We also added some weight to the character, and the clothes we selected very carefully, like that Eskimo jacket I’m always wearing, that winter jacket. But it was important to me to change my voice too, because I do have a kind of Mojave drawl that I’ve become more recognized by almost than anything else. Kristoffer and I met at a little place in downtown LA, a private suite in the Doubletree Inn, which is a little hotel in Little Tokyo, and we just went through all the various looks, and I started experimenting with the sound of the voice. It happened very quickly. We hit it off really quickly and found the character together.
DEADLINE: There’s also the political dimension of cancel culture. It’s a bit of a cliché now, but is that something you wanted to bring out in the story?
CAGE: Not so much. That part of it wasn’t really on my mind, although I think the movie works on many different levels. It’s a bit like peeling an onion, it has different layers. On my mind was more of my own memeification and how I was trying to process waking up in 2009 and foolishly Googling my name and seeing those ‘Cage Loses His Sh*t’ memes, and thinking, well, I signed up to be a film actor. I didn’t sign up to be an internet meme. I don’t know what this is. I had no reference point for it. I found it frustrating, but I also found it stimulating. I thought it was confusing, but I had nowhere to put it.
So, when Dream Scenario came along, I quickly thought I might have, in some strange little way, the life experience to play Paul’s dreamification, because what he’s going through is not really unlike that: People start dreaming about him overnight and then they start talking about their dreams and it goes viral. And I thought, I can make it real for myself and real within the performance because of my memeification. I don’t say this with any complaint anymore or with any ill will. I’ve made friends with it, subsequently, and I’ve decided that, if anything, it’s kept me in the conversation. And it’s also given people a kind of id release. I mean, when they see these meltdowns, I think there’s some vicarious enjoyment to be able to kind of play out those fantasies that we can’t really do, because we all want to behave in society, you know?
DEADLINE: Do you see a thread running through your career? There’s a kind metatextual trilogy now, with Adaptation, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, and now this. Is it an approach you enjoy going back to?
Well, maybe you could clarify in what way is Adaptation metatextual?
DEADLINE: In the sense that you’re Nic Cage playing [the film’s director/screenwriter] Charlie Kaufman and his twin, who doesn’t actually exist in real life.
CAGE: Oh, right, yeah, indeed. Yeah, that one threw me because the relationship in Massive Talent was definitely me because the character’s name was Nic Cage and this one, Dream Scenario, was me processing my own life experience through the channel that was Paul Matthews, even though we look and sound nothing alike. But with Adaptation, yes, I was experiencing very lengthy interview sequences with Charlie Kaufman, which I promised him I would destroy, and I did, but I would watch him and try to create his sound and every move was sort of dialed in through those interviews I did with Charlie Kaufman. Yes, I think the answer to your question simply is that I think that the metatextual style, as you so well put it, is like painting. It’s cubist. Even Face/Off, on some level, has a metatextual idea within the idea that John Travolta is playing my interpretation of Castor Troy and we’re swapping faces and I’m playing John Travolta’s interpretation of Sean Archer.
All of it has that sort of metatextual, cubist style to it, which I find challenging to act, and that’s always interesting when you have a challenge and you have to stretch and you have to push yourself into new zones that are not comfortable so that you can hopefully land on something that satisfies one, creatively, and also pleases the audience. And two, I think it’s unusual storytelling. It’s an unusual narrative to take on, and I like things to be a bit exotic and a bit original in the style, although now it’s becoming more, there are more movies like it that embrace that metatextual approach, I think for me it was a challenge.
DEADLINE: How do you maintain that quest for the exotic while working as often as you do. You seem to find great scripts on a regular basis. Pig, for example, or Sion Sono’s Prisoners of the Ghostland. How do you find the time to find them?
CAGE: I think a couple of things happened, and it came to me clearly when I was meditating on my next steps. It became very apparent to me that I wasn’t getting a heartbeat from what I would like to call the Silverback Directors, or the Old Guard, or the Keepers at the Gate. I felt they’d already made up their minds about me and weren’t that interested in working with me. I had been blessed to work with some of the finest filmmakers in the industry, but at some point it seemed like I’d almost worn out my welcome. They weren’t calling. And so I said to myself, ‘Well, let’s think about what could happen. What could change the dynamic in a really positive way for me?’ And I immediately thought that a young filmmaker was going to come along, and he or she is going to remember me from an old movie that I might’ve made, and they may have seen that movie at a very impressionable age, and they may be excited by the idea of working with me and have a concept as to what to do with my so-called instrument.
I was quickly rewarded for putting that out there, putting that thought form out there, when Michael Sarnoski called and wanted me to be in Pig. That was his first movie, and it was just a great experience for me. Everything coalesced, without any effort. It just flowed. And I could tell right away on the set that I was working with the right kinds of people, people that were passionate, people that were imaginative, people that weren’t jaded, people that didn’t have their dreams whipped out of them, so to speak, by corporate thinking or the industry. That inspired me, and that gave me life and fertility. And then it happened again with Kristoffer Borgli and his script. These are homegrown scripts from young minds that are full of imagination and excitement, and that is an extremely stimulating environment to be around. And then on top of that, I realized if I go to different places to make movies with directors from other countries, they might be excited to work with me and they might have a vision that is fascinating from a cultural standpoint or from even, what I like to call the genius loci, of a place.
Sometimes the place itself becomes a character in a movie and you can absorb the genie of a place, the spirit of a place, and it informs your creativity. And so I wanted to go to Japan and make a movie in Japan. So many of my favorite movies are Japanese classics in cinema. Movies like Ugetsu (1953) and The Bad Sleep Well (1960), these are movies I grew up watching, and I always thought it’d be romantic to go to Japan and make a movie. So that’s the other thing that kept me stimulated and interested and where I got a pulse, I got a pulse from working with younger filmmakers, and I got a pulse from going to different countries and working with directors from different countries.
DEADLINE: Has your attitude to acting changed at all over the years since you first started? Do you want something different from your work now, or do you think you have always wanted the same thing?
CAGE: Yeah, it’s been almost 45 years, if you can believe that. I think that, yeah, the needs do change. At one point, early on, I felt that naturalism — that infinite obsession with the 1970 style of acting that came out of Midnight Cowboy and Taxi Driver and The Godfather, which suddenly became the arbiter of what everyone considered to be good acting, and it is good acting — had run its course. I felt that I had done that, or something like that, or tried to approach that with movies like Birdy and Leaving Las Vegas, and it became kind of a dead end for me, and I wanted to try something else. I wanted to look at, what can I do with different styles in acting? And so Moonstruck and Vampire’s Kiss, those are two examples of me trying to see if I could bring back a kind of choreographed acting and just insert it into a modern style of filmmaking. If you commit to it, and back it up with genuine emotional content, can you bring that style back to life?
Even in Face/Off, I was looking back at old James Cagney movies like White Heat — “Top of the world, ma.” I mean, James Cagney, to me, was an actor who, by today’s standard, some people would say was over the top, but, to me, no matter how big he got, he was always truthful. Some people say it’s not real, but you can’t say it isn’t truthful. There’s an emotion behind it that I believe, and I look at all the old Howard Hawks movies, Billy Wilder movies, like Double Indemnity. Those guys have so much energy: Edward G. Robinson, Fred MacMurray and Barbara Stanwyck, they have so much energy and pop and buzz and electricity to them. And I look at movies today and I’m like, “You guys, it just feels flat. It’s like it’s been done. Look at Billy Wilder’s style — look at the buzz on that stuff.”
So, when you asked me, am I looking for different things? I think I’ve done pretty much everything I’ve wanted to do with cinema. But I do think that now more than ever, it’s becoming more personal. So movies like Pig, in particular, I’m processing my grief that I went through with my dad passing on, and in movies like Dream Scenario, I’m processing my memeification. It’s a very personal experience, both, for me. So I think the movies are becoming more like, for me, hopefully, some folk songs that we may both admire, where it’s like I listened to the personal stories that you hear in some of these old folk or country western songs, like Johnny Cash or even John Lennon — his soul music is so profoundly personal. It’s hard not to feel like you know the guy, you know?
DEADLINE: Bringing Out the Dead is probably one of your most underrated performances. How do you feel about that particular performance? That was in the middle of a very prolific period for you, in terms of big movies, but yet, strangely, it seems to be the most underrated.
CAGE: Yeah, I love that movie, and I think it will stand the test of time. I watched it again recently. I think Paramount+ has it. It hasn’t gone to a high-def digital format yet, but I’m looking forward to maybe doing an interview for the movie with Martin Scorsese for Paramount+, because I think the movie is worth another look. I really believe that that is one of my best movies. I was in-between Snake Eyes and National Treasure, and I thought it was the most unusual style of filmmaking. It was perhaps the most abstract I’ve seen Martin Scorsese get with his style, and for me as well. But I think it was misinterpreted. The movie was marketed in such a way — probably because I had been making adventure films — that people thought it was going to be an ambulance action/adventure movie. Well, that’s not what it was. It was a very painful character analysis of a burned-out paramedic, based on a very good book by Joe Connelly. But it was misunderstood, and I think that movie, maybe when it goes to high definition, will get another breath of life.
I always thought it was of a pair with Taxi Driver. It was the opposite of Taxi Driver, the story of a guy trying to be good — as you say, a burned-out guy trying to redeem himself. There’s not really much redemption in Taxi Driver.
CAGE: That’s exactly what it was. I think your perception of it is the exact same perception of it that mine is, which is that it’s no secret that Marty brought in Paul Schrader to adapt the book, Paul Schrader, who did Taxi Driver, as a kind of flip-coined Taxi Driver. Whereas Taxi Driver ends in violence, this ends in a mercy killing of sorts. It’s a different look, but it’s a similar theme of the lonely man, and the two different trajectories of Travis Bickle and Frank Pierce.
DEADLINE: I’ve got to say, though, I do love the National Treasure movies. Were they fun to make?
CAGE: Oh, well, thanks. Yeah, well, they’re a lot of fun. I mean, I enjoy them too, and I think Jon Turteltaub made a couple of classic films for the whole family. I’m still kind of amazed that Disney hasn’t wanted to make a third one. I thought the movies brought a lot of joy to the public, and it’s certainly interesting about history, and I think all of that is worthwhile filmmaking. You can dig deep and go into the more abstract stuff, like Bringing out the Dead, or Pig or even Dream Scenario, or you can open it up and make a movie that pleases a lot of people and hopefully gives families a chance to escape a little bit from whatever may be going on at home or in the office. I think they’re all valid.
DEADLINE: You’ve talked a little bit recently about retiring. That can’t be true — surely, you can’t be thinking of giving up?
CAGE: No, I mean, what I’m thinking about, just let me be specific about it, is switching formats. That’s not to say I’m not going to keep making movies, but I’m going to be more severe and stringent with the movies that I make. Maybe I’ll do one a year or every other year, I don’t know. But I’m thinking about maybe trying television. I’ve never done that. Because my mantra has always been to be a student. Well, what does that mean? That means I’m looking for an education. That means, I don’t know what else I have to learn in cinema. Unless… [Pauses] And this is the other idea, and I admire Bradley Cooper because he’s done it. Jerry Lewis used to tell me, “You’ve got to be the total filmmaker.” Jerry Lewis would say, “You’re not really a filmmaker unless you write, direct, star, and compose your own music. Then you’re a filmmaker.” I’ve not done that, and that scares the crap out of me. But that’s the kind of thing I’d like to be able to do. So it’s that, and television scares the crap out of me. I’ve never taken on that kind of workload — you need a lot of stamina, I’m told, to do it. And also, Broadway scares the crap out of me. I’ve never done that. So those are three areas, three ways, that I could start learning again. One is Broadway, the other is become the total filmmaker, and the third way is television. So I’m not retiring, but I am looking at different points of expression.
DEADLINE: After The Flash, have you made peace with the Superman movie that never happened now? Is that something that’s out of your system, or do you think that will ever come back in some way?
CAGE: Oh, no, I don’t think that’s coming back in any way. And listen, I wasn’t angry about the situation. I really wasn’t. I was just confused. I was mystified by what happened [in the first place], because [Tim Burton], one of the greatest directors in the world, had wanted to make the movie and already had kind of defined the way to make the best comic book based storyline with the Batman franchise with Michael Keaton. So I couldn’t understand why that studio, who had such success with that fantastic, brilliant director, would pull the plug.
But that was a long time ago. And then subsequently what happened with The Flash… I wasn’t upset, I was just perplexed. I was just like, “It wasn’t what I shot,” and I was worried about it. Like, “Did you just tell me that I was witnessing the destruction of the universe so you could take pictures of me and then animate me?” Whether it was through CGI or AI, that wasn’t the conversation we had. So I was confused.
But I was still happy to look at it. I still wanted to see Colleen Atwood’s suit, which I maintain is a beautiful suit, and 50% of that [character] was my design. I wanted Superman to have the long, kind of black Samurai hair and a vulnerable feeling — almost no blinking, a stillness in his eyes. And so it was 50/50. It was Tim and myself, we had designed something, and it never came to light, so when I saw it moving, I was very happy that Andy Muschietti wanted me to do it. I did get some satisfaction from seeing the character, but to me it didn’t look [right]. But then, Superman is an alien. Kal-El is from another planet. So in that way, the CGI kind of looked right, because it’s alien. It doesn’t look real. It doesn’t look like it has a heartbeat. So I can look at it that way and think that it worked.
DEADLINE: What’s next for you? Obviously, you’re taking off time off for the holidays. What are you going to be doing next when you go back to work?
CAGE: I have a couple of projects that I have yet to fulfill my contract on which got pushed, as I’m sure you can imagine with the double strike and also the pandemic and everything that we went through, and I don’t know really when they’re going to come to fruition. There’s a couple of things I’m talking about, and I haven’t really announced anything yet. It’s still being discussed, but in other formats, like you and I discussed, television is a possibility, and then there’s a couple of scripts that I like that fall into the vein of working with the younger filmmakers that I get so much energy from and so much vitality from. But I can’t put any titles or names to any of it right now until it gets more real.
DEADLINE: What would be your New Year’s message to the world?
CAGE: Well, with the risk of sounding very archaic and trite, it’s a good message and it goes back to who we just talked about: John Lennon, who I admire so much. Give peace a chance.
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