by Gill Pringle
It’s not entirely random because, after all, he’s getting rave reviews for his performance in Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli’s black comedy, Dream Scenario.
Almost unrecognisable as unremarkable, balding family man Paul Matthews, his life is turned upside down when millions of strangers suddenly start seeing him in their dreams.
Naturally, Cage has become preoccupied with his own dreams.
“I had a really weird dream last night. I could make a movie out of that weird dream!” says the actor who was recently on location in Yallingup, Western Australia, filming his next movie The Surfer.
“And so, in my dream, my nanny was not my nanny, and she was casting spells, and I was running into my bedroom saying to Riko, ‘I think the nanny is crazy!’ And she’s like, ‘No! she’s not’. And it was just very weird. I can make a movie about that right now,” says Cage, 59, referencing his wife Riko Shibata, 28, with whom he shares one year old daughter, August – named for his late father.
In fact, just the word “dream”, excites Cage so much, the title alone of Borgli’s ambitious film, prompted him to read the script for Dream Scenario.
“The best part for me right off the bat was the title. I just love those words – two of my favourite words combined – dream and scenario. That just sounds so good together. And I do think that movies and dreams go together because they share the same DNA,” says the actor who is not done yet with describing his dreams.
“I like the magic of dreams. The way I choose to look at them – even if they’re nightmares – and I’ve always had dreams, even when I was little. My dad said I was plagued by nightmares,” he continues. “But I’ve subsequently learned how to utilise them – because I like to think about dreams as gifts. Let’s say I have a plane crash dream … and I’ve had recurring plane crash dreams before and it’s terrifying. It’s so real. And I wake up and go: ‘You know what this does for me? This makes me have compassion’. I have compassion for folks that have been through that experience or have not survived that experience and it makes me more compassionate within the community.
“Like, you have a dream about something happening to someone you know – and you care more when you wake up,” he says.
Cage’s dreams even help with his acting process. “Sometimes, I don’t know how to play a scene and I go to bed and I’ve had a dream and I’m just: ‘wow, I’m going to use that in the scene because there’s a residual lingering feeling there that is enigmatic and undefinable. But somehow, it’s giving me something to work with to help play the scene truthfully.
“I think all movies are dreams. They all have a dreamlike quality because it’s not unlike when you go to bed, and something happens in your dream.”
If his character of Paul Matthews appears in millions of peoples’ dreams, then Cage is unsure who he would like to appear in his own dreams for an entire year.
“I don’t know who I’d want to spend one year with outside of my children and my wife in my dreams… I guess the same people that I want to spend time with in life, would be who I’d like to spend my time with in my dreams. My daughter, my boys, my wife . . . it’s pretty simple. The people I love,” he says.
Cage will argue that the concept of appearing in strangers’ dreams is not unlike what he has experienced himself as the subject of countless memes.
“I knew right away I just had to make this movie. I felt like I had the life experience to play Paul because of what had happened to me virally,” he says.
“I think I might have been the first actor – maybe it was 2008 or 2009 – who woke up one morning and made the mistake of googling himself and just saw this mash up called ‘Nic Cage loses his you know what’, and it was just cherry picking all these sort of crisis moments of different characters that I had played, without any regard for the narrative or how the character reached that point.
“I just became what I call – I guess I coined a new word, ‘meme-ified’. I was like, ‘I don’t know what’s happening to me’. And I couldn’t stop it. I couldn’t control it. There was nothing I could do. It just started growing exponentially and compounding on itself and then it went into like t- shirts. And I thought ‘boy, I don’t know what to do with this’,” he says, his facial expression recreating his original confusion, today sporting light brown hair with matching trimmed beard for his current role.
“But when I read Dream Scenario, I thought ‘Yeah, I could apply that experience to this person because people are dreaming about him, and he has no control over that either. So, behind the design of the character, the voice, the movement, and the look – was genuine emotion.”
Cage was so enchanted by the script for Dream Scenario, he describes it as among the five best scripts he’s ever read, listing Raising Arizona, Leaving Las Vegas, Vampire’s Kiss and Adaptation as his other faves.
After 42 years in the business, Cage believes that he has reached the peak of his craft. “I’ve noticed that lately, I want to get more personal with my work. I want to find characters that I can take my life experience, like Pig or Dream Scenario, and kick it into high gear or switch into glide and not feel like I have to act too much … like, just get that real feeling.
“And anytime you’re doing a movie about dreams, on some level, I feel like it changes the physics of the narrative because you go into dream logic. A lot of Japanese horror films like Ringu have a kind of dream logic sensibility and I’m a fan of those kinds of movies, and I thought we can play with that here as well,” he says.
Last year, Cage had a renaissance of sorts with his hit film, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent in which he played a version himself. There are certain thematic similarities between that and Dream Scenario in that both films deal with issues of fame and a ubiquitous persona.
Cage disagrees: “Okay, so specifically Paul Matthews in Dream Scenario is not so-called Nic Cage. It is not me. It is not meta. I’m gonna just go on record. It’s not a meta experience,” he insists.
“The only thing that I think people might be thinking is meta is where I’ve been talking about how I’m trying to find movies where I don’t feel I have to act as much because I feel like I’ve had the life experience to play the character, to inform Paul Matthews, so that’s very different than Massive Talent.
“Massive Talent is hands down the scariest thing I’ve ever had to do in my 40+ years of making movies. There was no muscle in my body that said, ‘Oh, I want to play a character, and by the way – that character’s name will be Nic Cage’. No, all of us actors want to hide behind a character. That’s not me, man! But to say: No, you’re going out there and you’re gonna be you. And I was like, ‘well, that’s not me’. You know, I don’t have a.… Well, I have a daughter now, but I didn’t have a daughter at the time. I’m not someone that wants to choose career over family. Family comes first. It’s very important,” he recalls.
“But then the director Tom Gormican, was like: ‘Well, yeah, but then we don’t have a story. We have to get this story’. So, every step of the way of that movie – because I also knew I was making fun of myself – was humiliating. Like, ‘what are you doing to me, guys? What is this? It’s just like an SNL sketch? I don’t want that’. But thankfully, Tom wanted to tell a story that had some heart … but that was a high wire act. I never want to do anything like that again. There will be no Massive Talent 2. That won’t happen.”
Dream Scenario is in cinemas 1 January 2024
