Nicolas Cage Felt "Marginalised" By Hollywood After A String Of Flops: "I Wasn't Going To Get Invited by Them"
Nicolas Cage felt "marginalised" by movie studios "after a couple of flops".
The 57-year-old star — who was awarded a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1998 and a Best Actor Oscar for 1995's Leaving Las Vegas — revealed how he decided to take a different approach to his career after he saw a change in attitude towards him as an actor.
Speaking on an episode of Variety's Awards Circuit podcast He said: "I knew after a couple of flops that I had been marginalised in the studio system; and I wasn’t going to get invited by them."
However, he heaped praise on Pig director Michael Sarnoski — who is at the helm of a feature film for the first time with the emotional drama — for taking a chance, and described him as his "Archangel".
He added: “I always knew that it would take a young filmmaker who would come back or remember some movies I had made and know that I might be right for his script and rediscover me.
Cage also recalled working on the 1997 action thriller ‘Face/Off’ — in which he starred alongside John Travolta — and revealed one particular moment where the lines of reality and fiction became blurred for him as he played serial killer Castor Troy.
He said: “There was a moment in there where I think I actually left my body, where I just got scared,
“Am I acting or is this real? And I can see it when I look at the movie, that one moment, it’s in my eyes.”
Cage has always tried to stand out by taking advice from Russian theatre practitioner Konstantin Stanislavski.
He explained: “Stanislavski said the worst thing an actor can do is imitate. Being a bit of a rebel, I wanted to break that rule.
"So I tried with Wild at Heart, a Warhol-like approach to the Sailor Ripley character. In movies, like Prisoners of the Ghost Land or even Face/Off or Vampire’s Kiss, I was experimenting with what I would like to call Western Kabuki or more Baroque or operatic style of film performance.
"Break free from the naturalism, so to speak, and express a larger way of performance.”
Photo: TPG News/Click Photos
