Nicolas Cage Quotes - Page 5

I will promise you that if I can give you two good scenes -- which is what I always try to do in every movie -- then I feel like I'm doing my job.

I've been lucky to work with some of the most creative people and it's true that I enjoy filmmaking and I'm an enthusiast.

I like to work with young people, because young people haven’t had their dreams kicked out of them yet. Full of confidence, and imagination, and vision, and when they score that all gets empowered.

I think that movies can help guide us through those experiences [the problems that are happening in our daily lives, the stresses between countries, the economy and global warming]. I think all art tries to grapple with, redefine, come to terms with, express what's happening now when it's working. You can be entertained, but you can also be stimulated to think about things.

I see myself as a student. I would never call myself a master or a maestro. If you take the path of the student, that means you have to try a little bit of everything in hopes that you're going to learn something or strike some kind of new note, expression in the process. I'm not going for grades; I'm going for an education. I'm going to continue experimenting and trying new things to try to evolve and learn.

There is a misperception, if you will, in critical response or even in Hollywood, that I can only do exaggerated characters. Or what they would call over-the-top performances. Well, this is completely false.

When I won the Oscar, I made a point of actively going against that and doing adventure films like 'Con Air' and 'Gone in 60 Seconds,' not what would be expected.

How do you rebel in a family of rebels?

I didn't play the Ghost Rider in the first movie. That was a stuntman. In this film, the Ghost Rider feels much more alive because I did put some thought into how he should walk and into how he should move. I was so into the character, in fact, that I would paint my face with white and black makeup to look like a skull. And I put on blacked-out contact lenses, so I almost looked like an Afro-New Orleanian voodoo icon by the name of Baron Samedi. Oh man, I would walk around the set without saying a word to anybody, and I could see the fear in my co-stars' and co-directors' eyes.

I have a love-hate relationship with New Orleans, which is the strongest sort of relationship. I've had some extraordinary, beautiful, poetic experiences in this city and I've had some terrible experiences in this city. I'm drawn to New Orleans, in many ways feel I grew up in New Orleans, even though I'm from the West.

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.

With the advent of this kind of TMZ culture, it sadly seems to have infiltrated the vanguard of film commentary. I see these reviews sometimes where I think, well, you have a right to say whatever you want about my work, and I will listen whether it's good or bad and see if there's something that I might work with, but personal issues don't have a place in film commentary.

Most of my favourite moments in film have been when I've had an opportunity to say something from scratch, something original, whether I jotted down a few lines or it came out in improvisation.

First of all the criteria that I have that goes into any career decision is whether or not I have the life experience, emotional resources to play the part truthfully or the imagination. Second, would be the director.

Well, good science fiction is intelligent. It asks big questions that are on people's minds. It's not impossible. It has some sort of root in the abstract. So automatically you're getting closer to potentially divine sources of interest because it is abstract. It's one of the only ways that a film actor can express himself in the abstract and have audiences still go along for the ride. They don't contend it. They accept it, that they're going to go places that are a bit more of the imagination, a bit more out there, and that's more and more where I like to dance.

You get dinged for wanting to do a comedy, then wanting to do a big-budget action film, and then wanting to do an indie. But you can't let other people trying to label you get in the way of trying to do something artistically.

I generally enjoy the rehearsal process because that's where you can share your ideas, get your thoughts and feelings out and see whether or not they're going to land, whether or not people are going to agree with them, particularly the director. So you can sort out in that process any elements that need to be sorted out before you're on the set, and of course that saves time and it also makes everyone more comfortable working together.

Without mentioning any names, I looked at pretty much every story that may come to your mind about a politician on the rise who was stopped short or dragged down by personal flaws and then became just a media storm. I see this as a thing that continues to happen in America and I wanted to say something about that.

Remakes are always a challenge and they always are sitting ducks.

Children, to me, are of the utmost importance. They're really the future, aren't they?

One of the things that's interesting to me is I find things like caffeine and stunts actually relax me. When they're putting a bit of gel on my arm and lighting me on fire, or when I'm about to go into a high-speed car chase or rev a motorcycle up pretty fast, I find everything else around me slows down.

Hollywood didn't know if I was an actor or a nut or if I was this crazy character I was playing. I had developed an image of being a little bit unusual, different and wild.

The biggest problem for me was feeling that as I became more balanced and a better man that I wouldn't have the fire to create from.

Celebrity is a word I take great umbrage with. I'm actively anti-celebrity.

The only reason why I tend to pass on a movie is either I don't think I'm right for the material and can't play it honestly, or because of time constraints with personal things in my life.