His Truth Is Out There

Nicolas Cage sits in a coconut grove preparing to watch men die.

It’s hot on the set of director John Woo’s “Windtalkers,” a World War II drama about U.S. Marines assigned to protect Navajo encryption experts in the Pacific. Cage perches quietly on the back of a military transport truck, waiting for his cue. His face is so relaxed it is nearly blank. As the other actors in the truck kill time chatting, Cage turns his taut body slightly and looks at the ground. He is not aloof. There’s nothing unfriendly or self-important in the way he keeps his peace. As a reddish dust settles on his brown Marine Corps uniform, rifle, ammunition belt and helmet, Cage is simply elsewhere, getting ready.

The highly choreographed battle scene is the kind that Woo is famous for, and it takes several minutes to get the convoy of military vehicles in gear, to double-check the explosives and to prime the dozens of extras for action. Finally, satisfied that the logistics are set, Woo says it’s time to get the scene on film. He turns to one of his six cameramen, the one who will shoot the close-up of Cage.

“I want,” Woo says gently, “to see his eyes.”

Nic Cage’s eyes. Everybody who knows him talks about them, though not always the same way. There is sadness there--on that everyone agrees. But the eyes also hold a yearning for happiness. They can be demented or befuddled or fiercely resolute. And when he has truly lost his temper on the big screen, as he has done more frequently (and affectingly) than perhaps any other American movie actor, those heavy-browed blue eyes betray a kind of mania that is both out there and strangely close to home. More than his edginess, his spot-on comedic timing or his strikingly lean physique, Nic Cage’s eyes have made him a leading man, a soulful superstar.

“Nic conveys, I think, incredible sincerity and integrity,” said Universal Pictures Chairwoman Stacey Snider, who is banking on Cage’s appeal in the romantic fantasy “The Family Man” (in theaters Dec. 22) and in next year’s historical romance “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.” “The Family Man” is the “Christmas Carol”-like tale of a supercharged arbitrage king who gets a surprise glimpse of the domestic road not taken when he’s plopped into a new life complete with wife (Tea Leoni), kids and minivan.

“I don’t know who else could convince you that he really doesn’t know whose house he is in, whose kids those are, whose wife that is,” Snider said. “There’s a way he delivers those lines with classic Nic Cage consternation. You believe it.”

Brett Ratner, the 30-year-old director of the 1998 box office bonanza “Rush Hour,” hounded a reluctant Cage into doing “The Family Man,” the actor’s first romantic comedy since 1994’s “It Could Happen to You.” Ratner says he’s long believed Cage to be “the coolest,” but he especially wanted him for this project because Cage hits an emotional current with women.

“Any movie he’s in with a woman--’Raising Arizona,’ ‘Moonstruck’--there is a chemistry,” Ratner said. “He’s like an underdog, because he’s not the most handsome or automatically gorgeous. And he’s able to express the frustrating moments everyone has. If you watch those old movies with Jimmy Stewart--there was a bigness there. Cage has that same old-fashioned quality.”

With nearly 20 years of on-screen experience, the 36-year-old Cage is one of the few actors under 40 who has earned a midlife crisis. Nobody does over-the-top like Cage, but while some critics have praised his bravery, others bemoan his lack of restraint. And there are those, like his friend Sean Penn, who have accused him of selling out his talent in pursuit of a big paycheck. Cage, after all, followed his Academy Award for best actor (for the bleak 1995 drama “Leaving Las Vegas”) with three action movies in a row, and his most recently released film--the forgettable (though popular) “Gone in 60 Seconds”--is more of the same.

Cage offers no apologies for his price ($20 million) or his choices. He believes escapist action movies that are “just for stimulation” are as legitimate as films that prompt self-examination. He stands by his lesser-seen movies, Brian De Palma’s “Snake Eyes” and Martin Scorsese’s “Bringing Out the Dead,” whose box office failure he attributes to marketing campaigns that wrongly sold them as action fare. He believes the widely panned “8MM”--last year’s movie about a private investigator’s quest to authenticate a snuff film--was a valid exploration of a good man’s descent into hell.

“It took an average man and turned him into something grotesque,” Cage said. “I haven’t seen it in a while, but I actually was quite happy with the results.”

That Cage can be happy about a film that critics called demeaning and mysogynistic says a lot about what fuels not just his post-Oscar choices, but his acting itself. Cage is fascinated by unlikely heroes. When he was a kid, he was drawn to comic books, especially the characters whose strength was born of suffering. (“Those are the best ones,” he said, laughing. “The ones that are turning into monsters and can’t control themselves or have some kind of mutant, radioactive abilities.”) He once considered playing Superman, but only if he could make him quirky, leaving the Man of Steel’s “perfect American citizen” persona behind. “He’s an alien, after all,” Cage said.

Cage relates to outsiders. As a young actor, he pasted his most scathing reviews in a notebook, treasuring them as proof that he--like other artists he admired--had done something so affecting that it prompted a backlash. There’s an intellectual bad-is-good contrariness to Cage, who has made a lifelong study of being set apart.

But don’t go thinking this means he doesn’t care. Whether he’s a self-annihilating boozer in “Leaving Las Vegas” or a maimed opera buff in “Moonstruck,” whether he’s an angel in love in “City of Angels” or a roach-chomping yuppie in “Vampire’s Kiss,” Cage is deadly serious about the work. Sure, the money’s good, and this connoisseur of fast cars, modern art and fine wine likes very much to spend it. But there’s more to the job for Cage than that. The actor’s approach is almost literary: He deconstructs characters in the hope of finding not just a better performance, but a higher truth. Making movies--both the high-minded and the popcorny--lets him explore the messy question of what it is to be a man.

Chapter 1: In which Cage weeps for James Dean.

We’re sitting in Cage’s drab “Windtalkers” trailer, talking about life and acting--which for Cage are largely the same thing. In person, the 6-foot-1-inch Cage looks even taller and thinner. He’s also, at first, a little formal. When he offers a glass of water, he’s so polite he seems nervous. And when lunch arrives--a big sloppy plate of pasta on one tray, a salad and skinless chicken breast on the other--I can feel his pain.

“Let’s see,” he says, slowly. “Whose--uh, did you order?” Relentlessly fit (“It’s not just vanity,” he’ll tell me later. “It keeps me sane.”), he really wants the chicken. But this movie star has manners: Though his gaze reveals his desire, he offers his guest a choice.

We’re talking about why Cage became an actor. There are plenty of creative people in his family--his mother, Joy Vogelsang, was a dancer of some renown, his uncle is the director Francis Ford Coppola, and his grandfather was a composer and conductor. As a kid growing up in Long Beach, he had such a gift for pretending that other kids couldn’t figure him out.

“Even teachers couldn’t really understand why I was writing stories about the things I was writing stories about or thinking the things I was thinking,” he says, recalling that if he saw a flock of birds, “I’d try to be a sea gull flying around, trying to join them. They realized, ‘This kid’s a little bit different.’ ”

It wasn’t until Cage was 14 that he knew why. He was sitting in the dark watching “East of Eden,” the 1955 classic about two brothers’ rivalry for their father’s love that features James Dean in his debut role. Dean plays Cal, the tortured black-sheep son who resolves to win affection from his father (Raymond Massey) by raising the money the family lost in the lettuce business. Cal presents his father with the money as a birthday gift but is rebuffed, and the sorrow in Dean’s face, the way he falls clutchingly upon Massey, sobbing, the money falling from his hands--Cage watched all this and it changed him forever.

“I was like a blubbering idiot in the theater going, ‘My God, that’s what I want to do,’ ” Cage recalls. “It got to me more than any song or oil painting. I was a big reader. I read Melville and Hesse and Huxley. And still, it wasn’t until I saw James Dean break down with his father in that scene that I thought: That, that really moved me.”

Cage dropped out of high school senior year to study acting. Soon afterward, he landed a part in the 1982 film that launched so many young actors, from Penn to Jennifer Jason Leigh, “Fast Times at Ridgemont High” (though most of his scenes were cut). A year later, he left behind his birth name, Coppola, and opted for Cage--a nod to the avant-garde composer (John) and the comic book character (Luke). He bore his family no ill will, he says. He just wanted to make it on his own.

“There just comes a point, as a youth, where you really have to kind of measure yourself and it’s hard. There’s a need to be independent and then to find yourself and be able to relax into your family,” he says, sounding--if one could somehow ignore the slow-paced Cage cadence--a lot like a character Dean might play. “It’s hard when people have preconceived judgments about you because of other people in your family. Really, as a boy I just wanted to be my own man.”

Chapter 2: In which Cage borrows a page from Elvis.

“I don’t like perfect heroes,” Cage says. “I like flawed characters because somewhere in them I see more of the truth.”

The talk has turned to “Windtalkers,” in which Cage plays Joe Enders, a Marine sergeant who has been shattered, both physically and psychologically, by war. Enders is assigned to protect one of the U.S. Marine Corps’ Navajo code talkers, whose language was the basis for the only code the Japanese didn’t crack during World War II. Through his friendship with Pvt. Ben Yahzee (Adam Beach), Enders struggles to find peace. But Cage has pushed Woo--whom he worked with on 1997’s “Face/Off”--to let him appear, in the beginning at least, completely broken.

Early on, Cage came up with the detail that would define Enders. He would chew aspirin all the time, trying to mute his pain with pill after bitter pill. Then Cage did his research, watching war movies, reading historical accounts. Though they are not the focus of “Windtalkers,” he became so obsessed with kamikaze pilots that he wants Saturn Pictures, his production company that made this year’s Cannes Film Festival entry “Shadow of the Vampire,” to develop a film about them.

“The Japanese had a bushido code, which was to live with death, live constantly reminded of death, and earn the right to die,” he says admiringly. “You have to work hard to earn the right to deserve your rest.”

These are words Cage lives by. He is making his 36th movie. He rarely takes time off. Other stars of his generation tend to pace themselves. Not Cage. He’s a throwback.

“Someone once asked Humphrey Bogart how he made so many great films, and he said, ‘I just kept working. I never stopped working,’ ” he says when asked about his backbreaking production schedule. “I’m driven to get things done. I feel like I’m in my prime, and I’m not always going to be able to be, so I’d like to make an abundance of films now. I’m hoping if I keep doing it, one of them’s going to be really great.”

The discussion reminds me of the scene in “Moonstruck” when Olympia Dukakis offers her theory of why men chase women: fear of death. Cage too is motivated by death. For a young guy, he thinks a lot about it.

“When I was 15, I used to meditate on it and say, ‘OK, I’m going to take the samurai approach. I’ve got a lot I’ve got to get done in my life and I know I’m going to die, so I better start working hard now.’ I used to read Miyamoto Musashi’s ‘Book of Five Rings.’ So in a way, death has always been something that I’ve kind of embraced and confronted.”

He used to confront it head on. “I had a reckless period, but I’m done with that. I like red wine. Is that a vice?” he asks. “I don’t drink coffee. I don’t smoke. I like driving, but I’m not stupid about it. If I want to go fast, I go to the track. And I’m not an angry person. I’m amazed that I’m not.”

He laughs. “I sometimes wonder where my temper is,” he says. “I used to have a temper. But I don’t have a temper anymore. It’s weird.”

Cage credits Weston, his 9-year-old son with ex-girlfriend Kristina Fulton, with helping him to grow up. “Before I was a parent, I was more of an anarchist. I didn’t care. You know, I wanted to”--he pauses, smiling dangerously--”shake things up. I was adamant that I rattle”--another pause--”the cage, as it were. After I became a parent, I sort of calmed down a bit and became less interested in making a punk statement.”

Directors who have worked with Cage in recent years praise his creative professionalism. On “Face/Off,” for example, Cage decided to give his psychopathic villain, Castor Troy, a regal presence. Drawing inspiration from Elvis Presley, who Cage had heard always had an underling at the ready with a cigar box of his personal effects, Cage asked the film’s prop man to fill a box with Chiclets, an extra pair of sunglasses, a jackknife and some illicit-looking hand-rolled cigarettes. In the movie, the ornate box is presented to Troy early on, and Cage makes the most of it, dramatically changing his shades as another underling helps him remove his topcoat and slip into another.

“Nic always finds some interesting thing to make the character more rich, more touching,” said Woo, whose “Windtalkers” will be released next summer. “He’s dedicated. He’s precise. On-screen or off-screen, when you talk to him, he’s real. He’s never hiding anything.”

John Madden directed the upcoming “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin,” in which Cage plays an Italian bon vivant who is reluctantly drawn into WWII as a soldier in Greece. He too found Cage--who learned to play the mandolin for the role--strikingly inventive.

“Nic is an actor who defines himself by the risks he takes,” Madden said. “He’s brave. He’s disciplined. And he’s really on top of his skills. He’s thought around the part and comes to the set with a cupboard-ful of ideas to try. He sees how narrow the neck of the bottle is and he knows exactly how to aim the liquid to fill it.”

Such praise can be hard to reconcile with the on-screen Cage. Again and again, he has played the baddest of psychotic bad boys, convincingly uttering lines like Castor Troy’s “If I would allow you to suck my tongue, would you be grateful?” But Cage at work, directors say, is humble, patient, generous--the anti-prima donna.

“I mean, you call him to the set, he’s there. On time. Not a complaint. Ready to work,” said Ratner. “Usually, you’re waiting for actors. They’re slow coming out of their trailers, maybe they had a bad night. No matter what was going on in Nic Cage’s personal life, it was never brought into it.”

Not that Cage is itching to reveal his inner self. Expansive when talking about acting, Cage clams up when asked about his family. Sometimes, the two topics intersect, like when he mentions maybe making a movie about a single father because his son--”uh, the most important relationship in my life, has opened up all these other emotions.” But he is uneasy, clearing his throat several times in a single sentence.

“Having famous parents--that alone is hard for any child,” he says, his eyes suddenly intent on the faux wood tabletop. He picks idly at his skinless chicken. “Even just now, talking to you about it, I feel like, am I doing the right thing? Or am I directing too much focus on it? I have to be that way with Weston. I shouldn’t even say his name.”

Cage married actress Patricia Arquette in 1995. In February of this year, he filed for divorce, then withdrew the papers. But don’t look to Cage for explanations.

“I started acting when I was 17 years old. I was a hothead, you know. I said things I wish I hadn’t said about my family,” he says. “Just because I’m a person in the public, it isn’t fair that the other people around me have to be scrutinized. So I’d just as soon leave them out of it. And I’m going to be that way with everybody in my family, including Patricia.”

It’s the only time he mentions her name.

To learn about the romantic Cage, you must enter through a different door. He is describing a scene in “The Family Man” in which the Manhattan arbitrage king, finding himself suddenly in New Jersey with a wife and two kids, happens upon a home video of one of his wife’s birthday parties. As Manhattan Jack watches the tape of his alter ego, New Jersey Jack, crooning the Delfonics’ hit “La, La, La, La, I Love You” to his wife in front of a crowd of people, he starts to see what he may be missing.

“To be that open, to be that free, to just sing to your wife on her birthday--diamonds aren’t going to be more meaningful than that, you know what I mean?” Cage says, aiming his famous orbs straight at mine. “That’s what he has to understand: that Manhattan Jack, with his obsession with money, is missing the boat. He’s chased the wrong muse.”

Ratner remembers Cage turning to him after seeing the completed film for the first time. The actor’s eyes were wet.

“I am soft that way,” Cage explains. “Though it can’t be corny. It can’t just be manipulato. It has to have just the right amount of edge to make it feel real enough that I can get misty-eyed.

“I like love stories,” says the man who reportedly asked Arquette to marry him on the day he met her. “I always have.”

Chapter 3: In which Cage mimics Steve McQueen.

From the start, Cage wanted to be a dramatic actor, and it was there that he first got attention, playing the disfigured Vietnam vet Al Columbato in “Birdy” (1984). But he was funny too. The way he paused, the way he fumed, the way he completely lost his composure. He did a string of comic roles--in “Peggy Sue Got Married,” “Raising Arizona” and “Moonstruck.” But he worried about getting pegged.

“I guess what happened was I became labeled as a comic actor,” he says. “And I didn’t want to be the goofball, you know?”

Back then, Cage believed in living the work. He ate a live cockroach for a scene in “Vampire’s Kiss,” slashed his arm with a knife for “Racing With the Moon” and reportedly had his wisdom teeth removed without anesthesia for his role in “Birdy.” He won praise for his wacko portrayal of violent ex-con Sailor Ripley in David Lynch’s “Wild at Heart” (1990), which won the Palme d’Or for best picture at the Cannes Film Festival. At the time, Lynch dubbed him “the jazz musician of actors.”

But instead of impressing Hollywood with his versatility, Cage inspired confusion. He had to continually screen-test for roles, he recalls, insisting, “I can do this. I’m not the guy in ‘Vampire’s Kiss.’ I can be in ‘Honeymoon in Vegas.’ I can be an action guy.” It was as if he were flapping his arms like a sea gull when everyone else on the playground was playing tag.

“I had done a lot of work that was just a question mark in a lot of people’s books,” he says. “I always had a core base of fans, and they stayed with me. But largely, I was a mystery to the powers-that-be in Hollywood. They didn’t know what to do with me.”

In 1994, he was approached about the role of Ben Sanderson, a man bent on drinking himself to death, in “Leaving Las Vegas.” His advisors told him to pass on it. The film, by director Mike Figgis, had a shoestring budget and sounded too dark to win accolades.

“I really believed in it, even though everyone told me not to do it and that it was not the kind of material that would ever win an Oscar,” Cage says, laughing. “And I said to myself, ‘I’m not going to win an Oscar anyway, so let’s do “Leaving Las Vegas.” ’ “

From the movie’s opening moments, Cage is devastating. “There’s that scene in the beginning, where he’s just driving down the street drinking straight out of the bottle,” said director Spike Jonze (“Being John Malkovich”), who is making his first film with Cage next year. “I heard that before that he went to Ireland and went on some drinking binge for a week. Who knows if it’s true or just folklore. But looking at the scene, you can just taste how harsh that vodka is.”

Cage won the Oscar for best actor in 1996. He’d already signed to do “The Rock,” a high-intensity action picture with Sean Connery. But instead of making Cage regret that decision, the gold statuette only made him more determined. He’d opted for action because no one thought he could do it. Now he wanted to show he was no snob.

“I was always a fan of those kinds of films but felt that they had lost something in the ‘80s, whereas in the ‘70s it seemed like there was real character development,” he says. “I’d watched other actors who had won the Oscar kind of intense themselves--or pretense themselves--out of the business. And I didn’t want to be that guy.”

“The Rock” made $134 million at the box office in 1996. The next year, “Con Air” made $101 million and “Face/Off” took in $112 million. Cage had proved he could be a tough guy. And he’d watched his price--reportedly $6 million for “Face/Off”--head north. He got a reported $16 million for De Palma’s “Snake Eyes” in 1998 (it made only $56 million). By the time producer Jerry Bruckheimer asked him to do this year’s “Gone in 60 Seconds,” he was a $20-million man.

When we talk about action, Cage’s eyes flash. He loved building the character of Cameron Poe--the twang-talking, pumped-up longhair who saves the day in “Con Air”--and bucked the studio executives who wanted to tone Poe down. Cage injected irony into what was usually straight-ahead genre. Except, I have to point out, in “Gone in 60 Seconds,” which plodded along with predictable “If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it my way!” dialogue. Cage nods and smiles a little sheepishly.

“Yeah. Yeah. That one I was trying to play more straight,” he says. “I was trying to copy a certain mode where you try to do as little as possible and see if it’s still interesting. Steve McQueen has always been my model for that, because he seemed like he did nothing but still it was interesting to watch, you know?”

Chapter 4: In which Cage takes Miles Davis’ name.

It sounded like a dodge, and in part, it was. Cage likes Bruckheimer, the producer of “Gone in 60 Seconds,” because Bruckheimer took a risk on him when no one else would. Cage was never going to diss the man who’d made him a worldwide box office sensation--and a rich one, at that. But there was something else at work in his response. Cage likes to experiment. And even when the experiment doesn’t work, he’s glad he tried it.

“I love the fact that he won’t settle. Almost uniquely among American A-list actors, he’s pushing himself across boundaries he hasn’t yet crossed,” said Madden. “Whether or not all of them are advisable he doesn’t concern himself with, which is terrific because he wants to keep fresh. He’s somehow retained his sense of mischief, of humor, of freedom to work without a safety net.”

Cage wants to act in, produce and someday direct all kinds of projects, from no-frills art films to big-budget blockbusters. The $20-million paydays let him afford this, he explains. And he likes it that way, but for one problem: It is confusing for his fans.

He came up with a solution recently, though his advisors--he’s represented by Creative Artists Agency and managed by Brillstein-Grey--have so far succeeded in talking him out of it. Cage wants, occasionally, to change his name to Miles Lovecraft, inspired by jazz virtuoso Miles Davis and H.P. Lovecraft, the 1920s science-fiction writer.

“Whenever you saw Miles Lovecraft in a movie, you’d know it was going to be dark subject matter, an independent film. It would be my own little internal protection device so people aren’t going to ‘8MM’ expecting to see ‘The Rock,’ ” he says, admitting that his “team” warned that people would think he was nuts. But that, of course, has never stopped Cage.

“Miles would work for scale,” he says. “He’d have to build his way up the ladder. Nic Cage has been doing it for 20 years. Miles Lovecraft hasn’t done anything. You’ve got to put in your dues.”

In February, immediately after “Windtalkers” wraps, Cage will begin rehearsing a role Miles Lovecraft would love to play. “Adaptation”--which re-teams Jonze and Charlie Kaufman, the director and screenwriter of “Being John Malkovich”--is a dramatization of Kaufman’s attempt to adapt New Yorker writer Susan Orlean’s “The Orchid Thief” into a screenplay. Cage will play both Charlie and his imaginary twin brother, Donald--”two sexually frustrated fat guys, who may not really be fat.”

Cage must gain at least 20 pounds for the role, topping 200 for the first time in his life, and he’s a little worried about it. He’s talked to doctors about how it may make it easier for him to pork out in the future, and he’s warned Jonze that he’s not sure how he’ll behave after three months of forgoing his daily workout regime.

“It’s a huge stress release, exercise. I do it because if I don’t, I start getting really paranoid. It won’t be the most pleasant time for me,” he says, but his face is happy. He’s smiling and his eyes, when he talks about Jonze and Kaufman, look positively eager. “I just admire their guts, you know? I’m excited to be going into another territory.”