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By Woodrow J. Hinton
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The feeling of filth is apparent. Inside a makeshift basement set, surrounded by tables of adult video tapes and assorted sex paraphernalia, Nicolas Cage and director Joel Schumacher stand knee-deep in their makebelieve, underground porn swap meet.
It's an emotionally tough moment, Schumacher says, one of many that filled the production of 8 Millimeter. Because when you're making a thriller set in the underground porn world, one expects a fair share of grueling moments.
"Standing in the racks of pornography, whatever eroticism that you feel for pornography when you're a kid, you lose all of it at one point," Schumacher says at a Los Angeles hotel. "It's just human degradation. You become the way people in the morgue must be about death. You have to get to a place where it can't affect you too deeply anymore."
At a time when studio moviemaking is at its most conservative, Schumacher and Cage deserve credit for backing 8 Millimeter's tough-stance storytelling. It's a gritty adult tale reminiscent of 1970s filmmaking. Cage plays Tom Welles, a family man and private investigator who enters the world of underground pornography in search of a young runaway last seen in a violent sex film.
Cage has tackled dark subjects before in films like Wild at Heart (1990), Vampire's Kiss (1989) and Leaving Las Vegas (1995). For him, the chance to work with Schumacher and the quality of the script outweighed 8 Millimeter's unique on-the-job anxieties. He worked hard at reining in the film's violence. At the end of the day and after much effort, Cage says at the same hotel, he was able to go home and leave the film behind.
Audiences might feel the same way after watching 8 Millimeter's tough tale. For newfound fans accustomed to action roles such as The Rock (1996) and Con Air (1997) or the celestial romance City of Angels (1998), watching Cage slither through the porn world might come as an unsettling surprise.
And industry pundits might consider his decision to take on 8 Millimeter a career risk. Not that he agrees. In fact, for the 35-year-old actor, taking roles in chancy films like this is what challenges him creatively. Movies, for Cage, don't only have to be about entertainment. The dark side of things have always appealed to him.
"You can say it's entertainment on the one hand, and you could say it's artistic expression on the other," says Cage. "I mean, I've always had a side to me that appreciates Francis Bacon paintings, Edgar Allen Poe and horror films. If I deny that side of myself, I'm denying a certain aspect of my expression. Sometimes I want them (movies) to be a little bit frightening, a little bit shocking.
"For lack of a better word, to be blunt, I think 8 Millimeter is a horror film. It's scary because it's realistic. That stuff is out there. You don't need to go to the war and make a war movie. You don't have to go to the jungle. I mean, it's in your backyard. It's across the street."
There is visual irony in listening to Cage's soft-spoken defense of 8 Millimeter's porn context. In his black suit and neatly pressed white shirt, Cage comes off almost priestly. His black dress shoes glow with fresh polish. The look is worlds apart from his wild-man garb of T-shirts and denim that signified his early years. Now, appearing in his most subversive film in years, Cage comes off surprisingly serene.
Cage is one of the more distinctive of Hollywood's male stars. He's taut and well-built, with long legs that put him at an advantageous height. But he doesn't have the typically all-American good looks of a Val Kilmer or Tom Cruise.
He's an unlikely leading man. Still, it's his "difference" that always sets him apart. Today Cage is anything but a sexy and dangerous outlaw-actor.
Maybe box-office success has matured the once-wild man. His 8 Millimeter persona might be pitch black, but today Cage is downright saintly.
Stardom has a way of making demands on one's creativity. So Cage understands if 8 Millimeter audiences come to the theater expecting Con Air 2. But his earlier work -- especially a character like Wild at Heart's Sailor Ripley -- points to a history of chancy material. Like most actors, Cage simply wants to push himself.
"When I made the action movies, it was another place I could go as an actor to express myself and do it in a popcorn format that would be stimulating and fun to watch," he says. "But I had 15 or so years before that making pictures like Wild at Heart, Raising Arizona and Vampire's Kiss where I was expressing myself in these other more alternative kinds of movies. 8 Millimeter falls back into that category."
Not that moviemade surprises are always a bad thing. Cage's young fans might enter 8 Millimeter expecting action, but they'll leave wiser by the film's cautionary tale. And if a young moviegoer thinks twice about running away from home after seeing the film? Well, then, maybe 8 Millimeter's scares hit their mark.
There are many reasons for an actor to choose a film. Giving the audience what they want doesn't always fall into the equation.
"When I was sort of wrestling with the notion of doing it (8 Millimeter), I was concerned that people might be turned off by it and that they wouldn't really get it," Cage says. "That's when the element of risk goes into the decision to make the movie. But I guess what I hoped the audience would feel with Tom Welles is something I've been feeling over the years watching the news -- that powerless feeling, that hopeless feeling one gets when they see the horrible things that can happen to young people in our country. Nothing ever really seems to get done about it. That's really Tom Welles in a nutshell."
Dark Man
His fans shouldn't be too put off by Cage's sudden switch to darker material. He's shifted gears before.
Cage's acclaim as the doomed alcoholic in Leaving Las Vegas seemed to be a precursor for more serious film work until his two-film hiatus with Hollywood blockbusters. Now, at the height of his box-office appeal, Cage steps back from the mainstream realm of romantic dramas such as City of Angels, following up 8 Millimeter with a lead role as a troubled paramedic in director Martin Scorsese's New York City drama Bringing Out the Dead. It's always been part of the fun that comes with tracking Cage's career: Guessing his next move.
Still, 8 Millimeter is easily Cage's darkest cinematic trip.
It's evident that the film tests his stamina as an actor. At the same time, audiences placated by current mainstream movies might feel tested by the film's adult subject. Not that Cage chomps a live cockroach in 8 Millimeter -- the way he did playing a bloodsucking literary agent in Vampire's Kiss -- but his attraction to dark material is evident.
"That's something I've done in the past, and that's part of what I do," he says. "I like to take these chances. I try to look for something new in the material. That doesn't mean I'm not going go and make another popcorn movie. I want people to go to the theater and get their minds off of problems and escape. Sometimes I want them to go to the theater and really get to thinking about some of this scarier, more disturbing stuff."
Cage's own dark days -- his time as just another struggling actor trying to jump-start his movie career -- seem like a long-ago dream. He's enjoyed his own retrospective at the Sundance Film Festival. His career seems set.
Life growing up in Long Beach, Calif., was not about preparing for Hollywood. His father, August Coppola, was a college professor. His mother was a modern dancer. His parents divorced when he was 12.
A small role in Fast Times at Ridgemont High started Cage's screen career. But his early profile really kicked off with his low-budget debut at age 17 in Valley Girl (1983) and an appearance in uncle Francis Ford Coppola's Rumble Fish (1983). Roles as a disfigured Vietnam vet in Birdy (1984) and an ex-con in Raising Arizona (1987) revealed his knack for adventurous work. Playing Cher's maimed baker boyfriend in Moonstruck (1987) also showed an ability to attract mainstream audiences.
Now, looking back on his summer stays with his Uncle Francis and his cousins in their Napa Valley home seems like a precursor of his current Tinseltown lifestyle. It was then that Cage first tasted the life of sports cars and in-home movie theaters.
It was also as a teen-ager that Cage became a fan of Elia Kazan. Watching East of Eden (1955), he's said, is when he decided to become an actor. Early on, acting might have been just another way for a young man to attract girls. Now, it's evident Cage's priorities have changed.
Career High
Any possible 8 Millimeter controversy probably wouldn't harm his current career status. He's come too far for one film to stop his momentum. But Cage has heard the grumblings -- including veteran filmmaker Paul Schrader's opinion -- that 8 Millimeter is an "exploitation film."
"To me, if that's his (Schrader's) opinion, he's entitled to it," Cage says. "But it's subject to interpretation. I'm only concerned about the complexity of the character. That's my end of the movie. Tom Welles provided an extremely complex character and gave me some range to play him. I don't want to get calcified just doing standard fare or what Joel (Schumacher) referred to as 'Prozac Cinema.' I want to try and break the walls down a little bit."
Schumacher is surprised that the film is already generating the controversy it has. The movie's controversial snuff scene is just a small sliver of film. 8 Millimeter, he says, is really a film about Welles as a protagonist-investigator.
"I really see it as the story of a man who, through his own ambition, takes a job he thinks is a career boost and suddenly finds himself faced with true evil," Schumacher says. "That's the journey. I knew I would take you to dark and disturbing places, but there's always been films that take you there."
8 Millimeter's lineage is evident -- dark, adult tales such as Taxi Driver (1976), Network (1976) and A Face in the Crowd (1957). There's a history of serious Hollywood cinema, although most recent studio films are decidedly more mainstream than 8 Millimeter. Schumacher remains surprised by the rarity of a film like his.
"When I was growing up, which was supposed to be a more naive and innocent time, there were tons of dark films that were extremely successful," says the 59-year-old director. "What's interesting is that in this era people keep saying, 'But why would you make a dark film?' If you're not making a Prozac medication that makes everyone feel really good, then it's a curiosity. It's a disturbing thing that someone actually makes a disturbing story. That's what I'm having trouble with: Haven't there always been movies you love that are very dark? Isn't Silence of the Lambs dark?"
What's important, Schumacher emphasizes about 8 Millimeter, is that this is a dark story that takes a moral stance. When it comes to the time-honored question of why bad things happen to good people, the film attempts an answer.
"I think one of our fears is that we will be somewhere on a dark street and see a terrible thing one person is doing to another person and we'll have to make the decision about what to do about it," he says. "Are we going to try to intervene, putting ourselves at risk, or are we just going to run the other way and pretend it's not happening? I think that Nic is very much like someone who goes to war, in the sense that he leads a relatively normal life and goes out to fight the good fight. He witnesses atrocities and evil he had never confronted before, and then we see what he does about it. That's how I always saw it."
Not that anyone should be surprised by 8 Millimeter in these days of blitzkrieg movie marketing. There are trailers, commercials and the poster to inform potential audiences. Nobody, Cage says, should be caught off-guard by the film's subject matter.
"People know going into it that this is a frightening kind of experience," Cage says. "So it's up to them, ultimately, if they want to do it or not. If they don't want to do it, that's fine. They can see one of my comedies.
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Joaquin Phoenix and Nicolas Cage
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"You have to have a certain measure of freedom of speech. I think the best example of filmmaking was in the 1970s when people were taking all sort of chances and it wasn't always about dollars and cents. There were movies like Taxi Driver that were very edgy and were happening, and the studios were behind them. Today we've sort of gotten away from that, and I think 8 Millimeter maybe is trying to get back to it."
The accusation that 8 Millimeter is a manipulative film doesn't bother Schumacher. To him, all movies, tear-jerkers or otherwise, manipulate their audiences.
What's important, he says, is that 8 Millimeter tells its story in rough fashion so as not to glamorize the sex and violence. The sets would be dank, the lighting grainy. It was important that the storytelling be unattractive. And as far as its porn setting? Porn, he says, is too pervasive to offend adults.
"There was $10 billion spent in the United States last year alone on all of this," Schumacher says. "So where's that one old man in his trench coat? It's on the Internet right now, and you've probably never seen any images or your friends have never even shown you one. So it must be appalling what I've done."
Sure, 8 Millimeter is a tough film. But standing in the back of a Scottsdale, Ariz., theater for early test screenings proved to Schumacher that audiences could take it. There were no walkouts. In fact, it received high scores from older women in the audience. That, Schumacher adds, says something about the moviegoing public.
"I think the audience is not some demented child that has to be protected from everything," he says. "I think people are just as sophisticated and maybe more so than us, than the studios, than all the interviewers. There's always this thing like 'Don't show them that, they can't handle it.' Really?"
Time will prove whether audiences want to see Cage's rejuvenated dark side. After his acting flamboyance in 1998's Snake Eyes and following in the footsteps of his City of Angels' romance, 8 Millimeter is an opportunity for him to show audiences a more brooding part of an on-screen personality.
Times have definitely changed for Cage. The Jerry Lewis overbite and cartoon voice as heartthrob Charlie Bodell in Peggy Sue Got Married (1986) now seems like some long-ago fluke. A more moderate Cage looks over his current agenda.
"What I've done in Snake Eyes is more kind of splashy, extreme acting," he says. "With City of Angels, I started exploring containment more. And this performance was a chance to be more restrained. I've been a fan of people like Steve McQueen who seemed to do very little and were very much larger than life on film. I wanted to figure out how you do that and how you can be that interesting. I don't know that I have or haven't, but it's something that challenged me."
8 Millimeter reminded Cage how good it feels to test the acting waters. Maybe there's never a good time for risks. It's a question of priorities -- the celebrity or the acting? He has his own agenda.
"Maybe I've always felt like I've had to grapple with what is right and what is wrong in morality," he says. "I never practiced any religion when I grew up, and I sort of had to find my own sort of morality and code of ethics. When you're born with all that energy and you're 17 and you're wild and you're doing crazy things, you don't think about the others around you. Then you get a little older and you start maturing and you start thinking, 'Do unto others as I would have done to myself and treat people with respect.' Through my growing up process, I kind of had to deal with trying to be good in corrupt scenarios."
Listen closely. This is the gospel of Saint Nic. ©
