update: Cage on Cage

Not long after I wrote that post on Nic Cage's late-period career last week, I came across this article, in which Cage talks about his upcoming movies Drive Angry and Some Bullshit About Witches, and in so doing, shines a light into his creative process. About the first:

"Drive Angry I'm doing right now," he said, "which is why I have this Celtic blonde hair. I was gonna shave my head and tattoo my skull with black fire but the producer talked me out of it. So I went blonde. I'm the undead. I've been called up from Hell, because Jonah King, played by Billie Burke, a charlatan satanic cultist, sacrificed my daughter; and I'm called up to get vengeance."

Again, let it never be said that Cage coasts through the B-movie roles he takes. Here he's in a movie about a reincarnated damned soul who goes around running people over with a car as if he were Matthew Broderick, and his producer has to convince him to tone it down. As for SBAW, Cage has this to say:

"Season of the Witch is another supernatural movie. As you may have noticed, I enjoy playing supernatural characters – City of Angels, Season of the Witch, Sorcerer's Apprentice, Ghost Rider, and Drive Angry. Because when you play a supernatural character the possibilities are limitless. It's endless what you can do with it, the choices, because it's infinity, right? You're not stuck in some contextual reality, whatever that is. So I can get abstract, get outside of the box, as I like to call it."

Translation: somebody's going to get paid for this movie, so it might as well be him. Also, the part of Cage's brain that controls his misunderstanding of quantum physics overlaps with the part that controls his desire for maniacal overacting.