Nicolas Cage continues his shift away from B-movie action back to more dramatic, well-received roles this year with the release of Joe, director David Gordon Green’s (Prince Avalance) adaptation of Larry Brown’s 1991 novel of the same name. Ahead of its arrival in the Spring, Cage has been speaking to Red Bull’sRed Bulletin about his career for a feature that’s set to land in next week’s edition of the news app, and we’ve got an exclusive excerpt here where the Oscar-winner talks about reinventing himself as an actor, and whether he regrets any of his recent roles:
Joe is a far cry from the bizarre action spectacles you did in the recent past…
Nicolas Cage: That’s true, I am in the process of reinventing myself in terms of the movies I want to do. I am returning to my roots, which is independently spirited, dramatic characters. Before Joe, I had taken a year off to re-evaluate everything I had done, different kinds of performances I had done, the more operatic and more baroque stuff like Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, Drive Angry or Season of the Witch. I wanted to find something where I could use my life experience, my memories and my emotions.
Do you regret some of your choices? For a while you turned into the king of B-movies.
I don’t look at it like that. Much has been made of the fact that I made many action movies. The reason I did that was because the first time people said, you couldn’t do it. ‘You are not an action hero, forget it.’ So what you saw was a dramatic actor acting like an action hero, trying to find characters that were interesting within the genre. And then I tried to mix in a little Lord of War, a little World Trade Center, The Weather Man and Bad Lieutenant and keep the spectrum going. Now having done that, I want to focus on the dramatic kind of filmmaking.
Joe is released in the U.S. on April 11th and here in the UK on July 25th. You can read our TIFF review of the film here, and be sure to download Red Bull’s Red Bulletin app to read the full interview with Nicolas Cage this coming week.
Originally published February 7, 2014. Updated April 11, 2018.
