Nicolas Cage
50 quotes
Biography
"I'll speak for myself, but there's a lot of humor to be found in sarcasm and darkness. You talk to any paramedic, they survive by developing a pretty off-kilter sense of humor."
"Everything we do impacts someone else's life."
"My interest has always been cinema or films, because that’s what I was most compelled by. I was most inspired by the movie actors that I grew up with. I only hesitate to say I would because my process now is that I need about two months for the libretto of the screenplay to sink into my instruments so that I can not have to think about dialogue. That’s the first thing that’s going cave an actor in, having anxiety about not knowing their lines. I don’t want that."
"As a film actor, my job is to facilitate the director’s vision. If there’s something I’m doing that they don’t agree with, I drop it."
"I can’t go into specifics or percentages or ratios, but yeah, money is a factor. I’m going to be completely direct about that. There’s no reason not to be. There are times when it’s more of a factor than not. I still have to feel that, whether or not the movie around me entirely works, I’ll be able to deliver something and be fun to watch. But yes, it’s no secret that mistakes have been made in my past that I’ve had to try to correct. Financial mistakes happened with the real estate implosion that occurred, in which the lion’s share of everything I had earned was pretty much eradicated. But one thing I wasn’t going to do was file for bankruptcy. I had this pride thing where I wanted to work my way through anything, which was both good and bad."
"At a young age, I was interested in comic books, which was really how I learnt to read. The name Cage came from a comic book character called Power Man."
"I think I jump around more when I'm alone."
"I may be alone in this, but I do sense the power of film, in that movies have the ability to literally change people's minds. That's pretty powerful stuff when you consider that."
"It's amazing marrying someone who wants nothing to do with Hollywood."
"How do you rebel in a family of rebels?"
"It's a family that's loaded with grudges and passion. We come from a long line of robbers and highwaymen in Italy, you know. Killers, even."
"I hit the ground running, without a lot of training, so I had to do whatever I could do to survive as a professional, and if that meant being that character 24/7 and acting out, I was going to do that. I lived those characters, I brought them home with me."
"I bought a Yamaha-1 and I was doing 180 miles per hour home on the 405 and that's really, really crazy but I did it."
"If I could have been a marine biologist I would have, but I didn't have that kind of intelligence. Numbers were never my strong point."
"I was always shocked when I went to the doctor's office and they did my X-ray and didn't find that I had eight more ribs than I should have or that my blood was the color green."
"And what I like about it is it makes me happy and I think it makes a lot of people happy to go to the movies and to not think about the problems of the day or the problems of tomorrow or the yesterday and just go on for the ride and have the fun of losing oneself in a fantasy."
"I want to make all kinds of movies. I do want to make big movies that are a lot of fun to go to, but I also want to make movies that are going to stimulate some thought and maybe raise some awareness."
"I do like to move and get physical in my movies."
"I'm an enormous admirer of Christopher Lee. He's somebody, along with Vincent Price, who I celebrate, and I wanted my movies to show that celebration and that honoring of these great film stars that were unafraid to go into horror and Grand Guignol and the macabre."
"I have eclectic tastes in the movies I want to do."
"I don't want to just do independent movies and I don't want to just do adventure films. I enjoy both, and I think both are cogent."
"I'm the first to admit that I like going to, or my memories at least of going to Clint Eastwood movies or Charles Bronson or James Bond."
"I may be alone in this, but I do sense the power of film, in that movies have the ability to literally change people's minds. That's pretty powerful stuff when you consider that."
"I like fantasy. I like horror, science fiction because I can get avant-garde with those performances in those movies."
"I care about the connection with the audience. Film is such a powerful medium. Movies can change the way people think."