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Interview: Oscar winning actor Nicolas Cage reflects on contemporary cinema

Xinhua, May 31, 2016 Adjust font size:

Nicolas Cage, world famous American actor, has recently shared his vision on contemporary acting, his inspiring figures of the past and filmmaking nowadays.

Asked about some inspiring actors, Cage said: "I'm a film enthusiast, I love Bogart, there was nobody better than him. You can never be Bogart, but at least you can get some taste that you would laugh at."

"I was going to the cinema, because when I was a child there was Jerry Lewis. When I was 11, there was Bruce Lee, and when I was 14, there were James Dean and Marlon Brando," the Oscar-winning actor said.

"After that, I started looking at James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and others, for example, if you look at Cagney's performance in The Public Enemy, that is magically natural acting for that period," he continued.

Cage is also tired about the ignorance and the lack of professionalism in filmmaking. He said,"the issue that is happening more and more, whatever it is a big movie or a smaller one, is that you have people that really don't know anything about filmmaking."

"They don't have a clue about how to do an action sequence. So you can sign to do a low budget drama and before you know about the photography, you are already making an action film, this very frustrating," he added.

Also for this reason Cage was happy to work again with U.S. filmmaker Paul Schrader, he said: "it's certainly more difficult to realize my cinematic dreams, but it's not very often that you get to work with a visionary filmmaker who has a point of view that is fresh. I'm happy to see that Paul, with Dog Eat Dog, did a something new at this point of his career, this fact is remarkable".

About his collaboration with Schrader again, Cage said it was like to "redeem" themselves after the bad experience on the set of Dying of the Light.

Cage, together with Willem Dafoe, presented recently at the Cannes Film Festival the gangster movie Dog Eat Dog by Schrader, a story of three improbable and funny convicts trying to stay out of troubles.

Cage won an Academy Award for Best Actor for his performance in Leaving Las Vegas (1995) and got Oscar nomination for his role in Adaptation (2002). Endit