Interview - Nicolas Cage: Blazing back to form in tough cop thriller

The wilderness years may be over for Nicolas Cage following his astonishing collaboration with Werner Herzog on Bad Lieutenant. He spoke to Film Critic Tony Earnshaw.

Some things are just meant to happen. It's been almost 40 years since Nicolas Cage, then a child, first met the German filmmaker, Werner Herzog, in the winery owned by his uncle, Francis Ford Coppola.

Back then, Herzog barely noticed the skinny kid. Flash forward 37 years and this dynamic duo have delivered one of the most unusual, impossible-to-define police thrillers ever made.

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Just like Mickey Rourke, Nicolas Cage is ripe for rediscovery, resurrection and rehabilitation. In Bad Lieutenant, Herzog allows him free rein to explore the changing face of a good cop gone bad – a man injured in the course of duty, who slips into a morass of drug-taking to kill the pain.

In an industry built upon – and fed by – myths, legends, fakery and downright lies, Cage revels in a story that underlines both his approach to the day job and his director's concern, that Method acting might be a step too far.

Playing New Orleans cop Terence McDonough – a man so high on cocaine that he can barely function normally anymore – Cage decided to embrace the character and go hell-for-leather for total realism.

"Werner actually thought I was doing coke," recalls 45-year-old Cage with a knowing smile. "He would say 'What's in the vial?' I was working the imagination to really believe it and I didn't want to break the wall, so I said 'It's coke!' He said 'You can't do that on my set!' So I thought that was a good sign.

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"But you know, I played it totally sober. I wasn't drinking. I wasn't doing anything, because I wanted to be that way and it's been several years now. When I knew that I was going to play this sober, it was like 'Well, that's the challenge. Can it work? I know it works the other way; can it work this way?'

"It was more impressionistic so I was looking at a landscape way, way, way back in my past and seeing if I could bring it to the movie through the filter of my sobered mind and the power of imagination."

Cage's reputation was

built on mixing dangerous, offbeat roles with commercial pieces of accessible entertainment. Fourteen years ago, he picked up the Academy Award for best actor in Leaving Las Vegas, playing a suicidal alcoholic for British director Mike Figgis.

There have been some great movies and some not-so great movies. But Cage has always been watchable in a louche, effortless sort of way. David Lynch called him "the jazz musician of actors", and this determined maverick may yet be crowned the best living American film actor.

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If he lives a role on the set, he shakes it off when not working. Just as he changed his name from Coppola to Cage so as not to ride on the family connections, he can dispense with a character very quickly.

"I've been doing this since I was 15 and that makes me a child actor of sorts," he muses. "And it was very hard to live my life and to be an actor at the same time. But now I have a family, and my kids and I know how to make the shorthand, to go home and have my life.

"With playing Terence, the body language, the posture, was like wearing a uniform. You go to work, you adopt the character, it becomes a ritual, and then you go."

Cage has little to say about the original Bad Lieutenant, a film that picked the scabs from the seedy underbelly of night-life in 1990s Los Angeles. Abel Ferrara's film is, says Cage, a distant relative of Herzog's new interpretation.

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"Abel is a great director. I love his movies and I love Bad Lieutenant. But they are two different movies. To me, the first one was very much a Judeo-Christian programme; the character had a lot of guilt.

"My character has no guilt, and this is an existential story – the guy surviving in the streets of New Orleans who knows how to solve a case, ironically, due to the fact that he knows the drug culture."

Cage has taken some knocks recently. He entered into two remakes, The Wicker Man and Bangkok Dangerous, played Johnny Flame in Ghost Rider and lent himself to the thriller, Knowing.

All of them were a far cry from his glory days as the intense, edgy performer of the Coen Brothers' Raising Arizona, Alan Parker's Birdy, Lynch's Wild at Heart, John Dahl's underrated and barely seen Red Rock West and the notorious Vampire's Kiss, in which he famously ate a live cockroach.

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Bad Lieutenant takes Cage back to the level of work he was enjoying 20 years ago. And he praises Herzog for it.

"I grew up watching art house films like Aguirre, Wrath of God and Nosferatu the Vampyr (both directed by Herzog]. And I grew up watching Steve McQueen and Clint Eastwood movies.

"I feel eclectic, I like making different kinds of movies and I never wanted to have a steady diet of one type. Sometimes, that pisses people off. Sometimes, people that wear the art beret are pissed about the popular movies and the people that wear the cowboy hat are pissed off about the art movies.

"So, that's how it goes. You can't make everybody happy and you can't really care what people think either way. I try to do whatever I find interesting for me."

Bad Lieutenant (18) is on nationwide release.