Nicolas Cage: From Hollywood A-lister to king of the B-movies

His films hardly ever get released at cinemas anymore, but the Oscar-winning actor still throws his life and soul into the roles, says Geoffrey Macnab

Nicolas Cage has 37 films to his name in the past six years including 'Primal' (2019) in which he plays plays a big-game hunter (Lionsgate)

Twenty years ago, Nicolas Cage was one of the highest-paid actors in Hollywood. He seemed a little embarrassed about the fact. When he was at the Berlin Film Festival with thriller 8mm (1999), directed by Joel Schumacher, a journalist pointed out that several entire European films could be made for the $20m fees that he was receiving for his films such as The Rock and Con Air. “Whatever the market rate is the market rate,” Cage mumbled in response. Schumacher, meanwhile, pointed out that Cage was only getting what he deserved. “Nobody in Hollywood is paying that kind of salary for nothing. If their relatives could do what we do, they [the studio executives] would hire them instead.”

By then, Cage had an Oscar for Leaving Las Vegas (1995). He was one of the few stars who could move seamlessly between huge-budget, high-concept blockbusters, and quirky independent pictures. He did it all: action, comedy, romance, and drama.

No performance was the same. “You never know where he’s going. You know, certain actors, you watch them and you know their mannerisms. You know what they’re going to give you. With Nic, you never know what’s going to happen, you know, how he’s going to take a scene, what he’s going to do with a scene, what he does with a character,” producer Jerry Bruckheimer told Collider in a 2007 interview.

During his career, Cage has worked with top directors: David Lynch, Werner Herzog, Alan Parker, Oliver Stone, Spike Jonze, John Woo, the Coen brothers, and his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola, among them. Early on, he took inspiration from James Dean, sharing Dean’s self-destructive rebelliousness and intense, method-style, heart-on-his-sleeve approach. However, Dean made only three films. Cage has now acted in around 100 and has claimed he wants to reach the 150 mark.

Cage won an Oscar for Best Actor for his role as a suicidal alcoholic in ‘Leaving Las Vegas’ (1995) (Rex Features)

Over the past decade, Cage has also undergone a strange transformation. The former A-lister has turned into the new king of B-movies. Whereas his pictures with Bruckheimer would be released on tens of thousands of cinema screens at once, his more recent films have hardly been seen in theatres at all. Even before the Covid-19 crisis, his projects were going straight to video. He has been turning out new pictures at the rate that battery hens lay eggs. In 2019 alone, he starred in six different features. He has 37 films to his name in the past six years, most of them lowish-budget thrillers or sci-fi dramas that cost a fraction of the salary he once received

New Cage movies used to be very big events. Now, they appear without fanfare and often without the critics even noticing.

Cage’s financial problems have been well chronicled. He is said to have “blown $150m” on houses, cars, exotic islands, European castles, and divorces, not to mention the dinosaur skulls, pythons, octopuses, and comic book collections or the run-ins with the tax authorities. “The funny thing is,“ Cage told The New York Times last year, “my real estate buying spree was what the real problem was. It wasn’t these other things like shrunken heads that the media liked to talk about.”

It is easy to regard Cage’s story as a modern-day rake’s progress. Like his friend Johnny Depp, he appears to have a wilfully self-destructive streak and to be blithely unconcerned about seeing his privilege and status seep away. An alternative view, though, the one shared by most of his fans, is that we’re lucky that we are getting so much out of him. He is not one of those fussy perfectionists like Daniel Day-Lewis, who would spend years preparing for any given role. His instinct has always been to jump in headfirst.

“With video on demand, I felt that if I made more movies, not only was it good for me financially, people would be able to tune in at home and go, ‘What’s the next movie that Nic made?’ They’d have a large selection. So I’m not worried about too much supply and not enough demand,” the star once said.

Over the years, Cage has given many mannered, incongruously flamboyant and eccentric performances, but even his detractors acknowledge he has never been dull. His presence in what might otherwise be a routine genre thriller means a few sparks are bound to fly.

It is instructive to talk to one of the filmmakers who worked with him recently. Ken Sanzel directed Cage in Kill Chain (2019). He describes Cage as an ardent movie buff who loves making films almost as much as he enjoys watching them.

Kill Chain is a modern-day film noir shot on a tight schedule in Bogota, Colombia. Cage plays Araña, the owner, barman, security guard and concierge of a seedy but atmospheric hotel. He is “a violent man who can never find peace”.

“He (Cage) is a very serious-minded actor,” Sanzel tells The Independent.

On their first day in Bogota together, the director and star visited the set, which was still under construction, to talk through Sanzel’s script. “He (Cage) proceeds to run the entire f***ing movie. He had it all memorised before he landed in Bogota. He knew the script better than I did. He is just a really, really immensely prepared guy. He is a very easy guy to talk with and deal with. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of film and a voracious reading appetite.”

The poster for Cage’s latest film ‘Primal’ (Lionsgate)

This may have been a low-budget thriller but Cage didn’t cut corners. He had studied Toshiro Mifune in old Kurosawa movies to prepare for his role. Sanzel also showed him the cult 1972 crime thriller Hickey & Boggs with Robert Culp, and Cage took some inspiration from that too. “He just comes loaded. When you get into editing, you realise he has given you five times as many things as you even thought he was giving you while you were shooting.”

Cage even did his own stunts wherever possible. “He has been doing it a long time. He is certainly very adept at handling guns and dodging squibs,” Sanzel says.

In Richard Stanley’s recent sci-fi horror movie, Color out of Space, adapted from an HP Lovecraft story, Cage is cast as farmer and family man Nathan Gardner. He wears spectacles and dresses in fluffy cardigans. However, the moment we see him on screen in a rocking chair on the porch, we expect him to do something crazy, and he doesn’t let us down. When a meteorite lands in the front yard at the very moment he is making love to his wife for the first time in months, the quietly spoken and seemingly strait-laced Nathan soon begins to change.

Early on, Cage is in low key. We see him milking his beloved alpacas and cooking casseroles. However, as the meteor causes mutation, contamination and chaos, his behaviour becomes ever more erratic and violent. He has tantrums, raging against his kids and becoming increasingly unhinged. Cage spends much of the latter part of the film covered in blood and wielding a shotgun. It’s virtuoso hamming. One moment he’ll be speaking sotto voce. The next, he will be roaring. He’s able to undercut the horror with sly, winking humour without allowing the film to drift too far towards camp. “Drink? I am having one,” he’ll suddenly say at a moment of maximum tension. The film won’t win him any acting awards but his performance is wonderfully lurid and over the top.

Cage and Kathleen Turner in ‘Peggy Sue Got Married’ in 1986 (Rex Features)

The veteran star is in similarly flamboyant form as a boorish, cigar-smoking, beer-swilling big-game hunter in another of his most recent films, Nicholas Powell’s Primal. We see him taking on a white jaguar with little more than a penknife. Although it has a 15 certificate, the film has the feel of a matinee adventure for kids. Its settings quickly switch from South American jungles to the ship on which he is returning to the US. This vessel is packed not just with deadly animals but with an even more deadly criminal, a Hannibal Lecter-type terrorist under arrest for crimes against humanity. The killer gets loose and so do the animals. In other words, the premise is almost as absurd as Cage’s performance. Primal skirts close to self-parody but that is its pleasure.

Old action stars such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger began their careers in an era when VHS was underpinning the industry. That tradition seemed to be withering with the demise of video and DVD. A few weeks ago, the last surviving Blockbuster video store, in Oregon, was turned into an Airbnb. However, Cage is engaged on a one-man quest to ensure the kinds of films that used to pack the video shelves in the Eighties and Nineties will continue to be made for video on demand (VOD). Still only 56, twelve years younger than Liam Neeson, who also reinvented himself as an action star late in his career, he has plenty of action thrillers left in him.

On one level, his desire to make one cheesy B-movie after another is perplexing. We remember his brilliance in Peggy Sue Got Married, Raising Arizona, Wild at Heart, Birdy et al. No one is going to claim that his recent work compares to films like these. Nonetheless, Cage remains bankable. Financiers and distributors back films they would otherwise avoid because he is in them. One critic, Chester C Jones, recently argued that Cage’s B-movies should be judged together, as a single, gigantic endeavour, an “ongoing meta-performance art cycle that is seriously giving Matthew Barney a run for his money”.

You could just about imagine it; the Guggenheim in New York or the Hayward Gallery in London putting on an exhibition of Cage’s B-movies in which the films could be shown on a permanent loop. The galleries could also display some of the artefacts that Cage has been collecting, all those reptiles, dinosaur bones, and comic books.

Cage as Cameron Poe in ‘Con Air’ (1997) (Rex Features)

It would be as wrong, though, to suggest Cage is having a joke at his audience’s expense as to explain away the movies as the actor’s attempts to pay his bills. The reason his fans still revere him is that he never short changes them. Whereas other actors become jaded or even cynical, Cage attacks every movie he appears in with the same reckless energy he showed at the very start of his career.

“I think he enjoys making films,” director Sanzel says of Cage. “He loves making stuff. I also think his brain is so fertile that he likes going from small movie to small movie. He gets to inhabit a character, work all the way through it and then move on to the next character. I got a sense of a guy who really wants to explore as many different stories as he can … he just wants to play.”

Inevitably, Cage’s breakneck schedule has been interrupted by the lockdown. It’s unlikely he’ll complete six new films this year. However, the trade papers are full of stories about yet more new Cage projects. The latest are an animated feature called Hellfire in which he’ll voice an alcoholic dragon and a dramatised version of Netflix’s hit series Tiger King in which he, of course, is Joe Exotic. When the dust finally settles, Cage will leave behind him one of the richest, strangest, and largest collection of acting credits in Hollywood history.

‘Kill Chain’, ‘Color out of Space’ and ‘Primal’ are all available on Amazon Prime