Setting the record straight on Nicolas Cage, with Zach Schonfeld
Setting the record straight on Nicolas Cage, with Zach Schonfeld
An interview with 'How Coppola Became Cage' author about getting the real stories behind one of Hollywood's most enigmatic actors.
Hello it’s me Dan Ozzi and welcome to my weekly book column. Usually I cover books about rock but I thought today I’d cover a book about the actor from The Rock. (Don’t worry, there are plenty more groan-worthy Nicolas Cage movie references below.) I’m also giving away signed copies of today’s book to two of my paid subscribers after the interview.
It’s amazing how many awful conversations Nicolas Cage has gotten me out of. Sometimes I find myself stuck chatting with someone I seemingly have nothing in common with. It’s going nowhere and we both know it. So I throw my go-to hail mary convo question: What’s your favorite Nicolas Cage movie? It’s amazing how quickly this simple question can turn a conversational vibe around. Suddenly we are no longer faking enthusiasm about the mundanity of our lives, but getting intensely animated about Face/Off vs. Con Air or doing our best Vampire’s Kiss impression. Such is The Power of Cage. His acting style is unconventional, and he’s got his share of detractors, but you can’t accuse him of being unmemorable. Over the past 40 years, he has amassed a filmography that has been brilliant, disastrous, and at times outright fucking baffling. So when I heard writer Zach Schonfeld had written a book charting Cage’s early years, How Coppola Became Cage, I knew we had to chat about it.
Actually, the way I learned of this book’s existence was that Zach asked me to write a blurb for the cover, which I did. He very kindly sent me two signed copies which I’d like to give away to two of my paid subscribers. So if you’ve got a paid subscription, follow the instructions at the bottom of this post and I will pick two winners and contact them. If you don’t have a paid subscription, feel free to sign up! It gets you access to all of my weekly book columns. Here’s 50% off:
Zach and I had a great talk about the challenges and joys of spending several years researching Nicolas Cage, the best and worst Cage movies, and why the guy’s name is so frequently misspelled (hint: it’s not Nic Cage).
Starting with the obvious, why write a book about Nicolas Cage?
Zach Schonfeld: I think Cage is the most interesting and provocative, and perhaps even the most versatile, actor of his generation. I'm fascinated by the way that he has achieved great things in so many different genres, from some of the independent films he was in in the 80s, like Raising Arizona and Valley Girl, all the way up to a rom-com like Moonstruck. And then he worked with David Lynch on Wild at Heart, and then he did Leaving Las Vegas and gave this incredible performance, and then immediately reinvented himself as this mega-budget action movie star in Con Air and Face/Off and The Rock. There's something fascinating to me about how much of a chameleon he's been throughout his career and how he has given incredible, transcendent performances in such wildly different genres and tones.
But the other thing that draws me to Nicolas Cage is that he seems to live his everyday life like he's starring in a Nicolas Cage movie. He's a true eccentric at heart. This is a guy who, when he first achieved fame and made some money in his twenties, he had a whole aquarium in his apartment with sharks swimming around and pet lizards and octopuses. He's just a true eccentric and he takes every role to the absolute limit. I feel like when you study Nicolas Cage's career, what you're really studying is the question of how far can one man go for the sake of a film performance. A lot of people know the story of how he swallowed a live cockroach in Vampire's Kiss or how he wanted to be drunk 24/7 when he was filming Leaving Las Vegas. When he did the film Birdie, he plays a Vietnam War veteran who is severely injured from the war. During that movie he wore bandages on his face for four weeks and he went around telling people that he got two of his teeth pulled so he could feel the pain of his character, which was actually not entirely true. It was an exaggeration. There are these stories and these myths that have followed him around throughout his career. I wanted to write a book that delves into the mythology surrounding Cage, obviously, particularly his early years, because that's what the book focuses on. I wanted to try to separate myth from truth.
It seems like he enjoys this lore around him that you're talking about, but do you think that it has also maybe prevented certain people from taking him seriously as an actor?
I think yes. I mean, the whole story of Cage’s career is the story of this guy trying to be taken seriously while a lot of people around him are dismissing him. And the reason that people are dismissing him has kind of evolved, because in the very early days of his career, people dismissed him as what we would now call a nepo baby, because obviously he is a member of the Coppola family. And he was very insecure about being dismissed as Francis Ford Coppola's nephew. So he changed his name so that people would take him seriously. And then in the late 80s, early 90s, people didn't take him seriously because of how wacky he was and because he had built up a reputation as this nutjob. He deliberately built up this mythos around himself because he wanted to get attention. He wanted to prove that he was this wild, crazy method actor. There's a story in my book about how he behaved like a nutjob when he was doing The Cotton Club because in that movie he's portraying this homicidal gangster character and he felt like in order to portray this character he needed to live the part of a crazed gangster 24/7. So he went around destroying his trailer and kicking vintage automobiles and using the n-word because in that movie his character actually uses the n-word. He wanted to get attention and show that he was as intense as Robert De Niro or Marlon Brando. And then people kind of had to take him seriously after he won an Academy Award.
And then if we talk about the more recent years of Cage's career, from about 2010 to present, the reason a lot of people aren't taking him seriously now is twofold. One is because there are all these internet memes that kind of turn Cage into a bit of a joke. You see gifs and reaction memes with his face from Vampire's Kiss, making these wild expressions. And there are these YouTube supercuts of Nicolas Cage losing his shit for five minutes just in different movies spliced together. That is something that he's been very sensitive to because he feels like his performances are being taken out of context and turned into this internet joke that he doesn't fully understand or have control over.
Your book covers the earliest part of Cage’s life and career, which is also the least documented. What was your research process like?
I did a lot of reading, obviously. I read this book by Lindsay Gibb called National Treasure: Nicolas Cage, which came out about a decade ago. She provides this whole overview of Cage's filmography, and she makes the case that he's been this misunderstood genius. I also read some of the early biographies that have been published about Nicolas Cage. There were some biographies that were kind of rushed to print in the late 90s. I read a lot of interviews with him, I was going through newspaper archives, reading old interviews that he did in the 80s and 90s, as well as more recent interviews like that amazing interview he did with David Marchese for New York Times Magazine a few years ago.
And how far did you get in trying to get Cage to talk to you?
When I went into this book, I knew that Cage probably wouldn't cooperate with me, but I still tried to get him to cooperate. I also knew that I wanted the book to be heavily rooted in original interviews with people who worked with him, and that was important to me. I felt like in order for this book to be worth anyone's time, I needed to really do the legwork of interviewing people, tracking people down. The book was heavily inspired by a piece that I did about Vampire's Kiss, which was published by The Ringer in 2019, where I interviewed the director and the producers and a bunch of people who worked on that film. And from my experience writing that piece for The Ringer, I just realized that everyone who worked with Cage at any point in his career has a story about what it's like to work with Nicolas Cage, just because he's so intense and he's so wildly committed to every performance. Everyone who worked on Vampire's Kiss with him, they all have stories like, “Oh, he insisted that he needed to have hot yogurt poured on his feet when we were shooting a sex scene because he said that that would help him get into the mood.”
So when I began working on this book, I just started contacting different directors and producers and cinematographers and casting directors who’d worked with him on different films. I started the book during lockdown, in the spring of 2020 was when I signed the book contract and got to work, which on one hand, was difficult because I was very depressed and the world seemed to be collapsing, and it wasn't an easy time to get a new project off the ground. But on the other hand, I kind of used that to my advantage because everyone was also at home with nothing to do. A lot of people were available to talk because film sets had been shut down. People were quarantining. I ended up interviewing over 120 people who worked with Nicolas Cage, ranging from super well known directors like David Lynch and Mike Figgis, who directed Leaving Las Vegas, and Andrew Bergman, who directed Honeymoon in Vegas, all the way down to casting directors and set designers and people whose names nobody would recognize.
“[H]e insisted that he needed to have hot yogurt poured on his feet when we were shooting a sex scene because he said that that would help him get into the mood.”
I’m sure you wanted the Cage interview, but were there any positives that came from him not participating?
Yes, because I knew that if he did participate in the book, there would be strings attached and he or his representatives would want to exert some amount of control over what goes in the book. And so I was definitely nervous about that. But it ended up being a moot point. There are stories in the book that are not totally flattering to him. There are stories of him when he was very young, kind of acting like a lunatic. And he didn't have any say over what went in the book. It's a fully unauthorized book. And because of that, I had full control over what stories I would tell.
But at the same time, I feel like if he had participated in the book, people would take the book more seriously, because I think “unauthorized biography” has kind of a sleazy connotation. People think of unauthorized biographies as being somehow inherently trashy. And so I kind of had a chip on my shoulder where I felt like I needed to prove that this book is more than just rehashing old stories by interviewing as many sources as I possibly could. I had some imposter syndrome there. Like, who am I to be writing a book about Nicolas Cage? I don't I don't know him, I'm not friends with him, and I'm also not able to interview him for this book. So I felt like I had a lot to prove.
In addition to all the reading for research, I know from following you on Letterboxd that you also did a lot of movie watching. Can you tell me how watching a movie for research differs from watching one for pleasure?
If I'm watching a movie for research for a book about Nicolas Cage, obviously, I'm going to be paying more attention to Cage's performance than any other performance in the movie. And I might be taking notes about what makes this performance interesting. The book covers his career from approximately 1981 to 1995, so obviously I watched every movie that he did during that period and a lot of movies that he did after that period. But I basically spent my quarantine just sitting on my couch watching Nicolas Cage movies, taking notes, and cold emailing people who worked on some movie with him 35 years ago. That is how I spent a lot of my first year of the pandemic.
I'm wondering what the impact of thinking almost exclusively about Nicolas Cage for over two years has on a person's brain.
I don't think it's healthy. [Laughs] I don't think that writing a biography is the most psychologically healthy thing. Because in my experience, you kind of start to live vicariously through your subject in creepy ways. For the years that I was working on this book, I started thinking about Nicolas Cage's formative experiences and his formative memories, almost as much as I would think about my own formative experiences. And I read so many interviews with him talking about his childhood or talking about his fraught relationship with his father or talking about the torment that he went through, being made fun of for being a Coppola. I spent so much time thinking about Cage's formative experiences that it's almost like I started to absorb his memories in a way, and they became my memories, which is an illusion. They're not my memories, I didn't live these experiences, I wasn't there. But it's like your brain starts to do these unhealthy things when you're living vicariously through someone else.
What was the hardest part about researching a guy like Cage? It seems like nailing Jell-O to the wall.
I think I became obsessed with trying to confirm details that aren't really that crucial. To give you an example, in the first chapter of the book, when I'm talking about Cage's high school years, I was trying to piece together the timeline of: when did he drop out of high school? Because in some interviews, he says that he dropped out in his junior year. In some interviews, he says that he dropped out in his senior year. In some interviews, he said that he dropped out specifically because he was mad that he didn't get cast in the high school play West Side Story. But then when I interviewed some of his classmates and they pulled out their high school yearbooks, they said that West Side Story was actually the high school play their senior year in 1982, which would contradict what Cage said about dropping out in his junior year. Is that really crucial? Does it really matter exactly when he dropped out? No, it's not really that essential, but I became obsessed with wanting this book to be the definitive account of Cage's early years. And I felt like I needed to nail down these little trivial chronological details.
Another thing that I struggled with is like, on one hand, I was very much relying on old interviews with Cage, things that he told interviewers early in his career. But on the other hand, I became very conscientious of the fact that Cage is not always the most reliable narrator of his own career, because it became apparent to me that he would frequently exaggerate things for dramatic effect. Like, in many interviews over the years, he's talked about his performance in Peggy Sue Got Married, where he does this, like, very nasally voice that was inspired by a cartoon character in Gumby, where he talks like the talking horse in Gumby. And in multiple interviews over the years, Cage has said that all of the studio heads at TriStar wanted to fire him because they were so freaked out by his performance in that film. And he tells the story about how his uncle had to cook a spaghetti dinner for the heads of TriStar Studios in order to convince them not to fire Cage from the film. But when I interviewed various people involved with Peggy Sue Got Married and some of the guys who ran TriStar at the time, none of them remembered that happening. They were like, “Oh, yeah, some people at TriStar were uncomfortable with Cage's performance, but no one was gonna fire him. That didn't happen.” And so a lot of the reporting process of this book was basically trying to fact check things that Cage himself has said about his own career.
I want to do a lightning round here. In going through Cage's filmography, do you have an absolute favorite?
I go back and forth between Raising Arizona and Vampire's Kiss. I would say that those are my two favorite performances that he's ever done and both for very different reasons.
Do you have one that you would describe as the most underrated or overlooked in his filmography?
There were some films from this period of his career that I'd never actually seen when I started working on this book, and one of them is Red Rock West, which is this neo-noir thriller that he starred in in 1993, directed by John Dahl. People don't really talk about that film. I think part of the reason that it doesn't get much attention is because it's not available on streaming, which is a whole other issue. But it's a super subtle, understated Cage performance, which is something that he doesn't really get enough credit for, being able to do these quieter, more understated performances. It's an excellent film.
Cage also has a lot of stinkers in his catalog. Is there any film in his filmography that strikes you as the empirically worst?
There are so many. There are a lot of movies that he's done over the past ten years that have been awful, during his pumping-out-straight-to-streaming-movies-in-order-to-pay-off-his-real-estate-debt era. In terms of truly dreadful ones, Arsenal, Rage, Next, they all have one word titles.
But I guess if we limit it to the chronological span of my book, what is the worst movie he did during the era of my book? I would say it might be Fire Birds, which is this really bland Top Gun ripoff with helicopters. And he openly admitted at the time that he did that movie to pay for his house, because he had just bought this mansion in the Hollywood Hills and he was in over his head financially, which was really interesting because I think it's common knowledge that in more recent years, he's been pumping out shitty movies to pay off his debts. But I don't think people realize that as early as 1990, he did a shitty movie to pay off some real estate debts. So he's definitely had spending problems for longer than people realize, which is something that I came to realize during the course of researching this book. There's a story in the book about how when he was promoting Peggy Sue Got Married in 1986, TriStar sent him to New York and put him up in a hotel and he started ordering crazy amounts of caviar and champagne to his hotel room, and started inviting random people on the street to come to his hotel room and enjoy some caviar and champagne. His agent had to yell at him and say you can't charge twenty thousand dollars to room service. He once told an interviewer that sometimes the only way that he can feel free is in spending money.
Anyway, I'm getting off topic. You asked about the worst movies he's ever done. I would also cite Trapped in Paradise. It's a holiday crime comedy starring Cage. It's dreadful. I find that to be a very frustrating movie because I feel like Cage, John Lovitz, and Dana Carvey, this was like Cage teaming up with some SNL legends. At the very least, it should be a watchable and entertaining movie to have this comic pairing, but it's just terribly unfunny and overlong and tedious. It's so much worse than it should be.
I learned something interesting from blurbing your book that I want to get on record.
The name spelling.
Yes! I feel like this is some weird Mandela Effect where I've seen it spelled N-i-c Cage on movie posters. But you're telling me that he goes by N-i-c-k.
For many years, I also thought it was N-i-c. But here's the thing. He's never credited as Nick Cage. He's only credited as Nicolas Cage. So you will never see Nick Cage on like a movie poster or an IMDb credit. So here's what happened. In 2021, after I'd already been working on the book for a year, I decided to reach out to his manager. His manager is a guy named Mike Nilon, who's worked with Cage for many years. Eventually Mike Nilon got back to me and sent me a very brief, polite email to the effect of, “Thanks for reaching out. Nick is not interested in participating in the book. Best of luck.” But here's the notable thing, he spelled the name N-i-c-k. So finally, when I was finishing the book, I reached out to Cage's manager one more time, because I wanted to give Cage an opportunity to comment on what I believe to be the most potentially contentious story in the book, which is a story about him using the n-word when he was on the set of The Cotton Club. He was trying to stay in character as this racist character in a 1930s era movie, and he was using his character's racist vocabulary on set. So I reached out to the manager and he called me the next day. He was like, “I ran the story by Nick. He said he doesn't remember that and he has no memory of any fights on the set of The Cotton Club.” I was expecting it to be more of a tense interrogation, but actually it was very friendly. And I was like, “While I have you on the phone, I wanted to ask you one important question. What is the spelling of the shortened version of Cage's first name?” And his manager started cracking up and was like, “Oh my God, I should have led with this! Your book is a great opportunity to correct the record. It is N-i-c-k, not N-i-c. I don't know why everyone thinks it's N-i-c, but it's N-i-c-k. Please correct people in your book.” So that was my final confirmation that Nicolas Cage prefers to spell his name N-i-c-k.
Also, in 2022, that movie Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent came out. I didn't like that movie. I personally thought the movie was trying too hard and was kind of cringy. But what's interesting is that Cage plays a fictionalized version of himself. And in the movie, his character is not Nicolas Cage, but Nick Cage. N-i-c-k. And my theory is that Cage was trying to correct the record and let people know that his name is spelled with a K, but it kind of backfired because it seemed like some people interpreted it as, “Oh, the real Nick Cage is N-i-c, but the fictional character in this movie is N-i-c-k.” Like, that's his fictional alter ego. I think the movie kind of confused people.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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