Nicolas Cage: Acting is therapy

For an Oscar winner who now commands $20 million a movie, Nicolas Cage attracts an awful lot of criticism. Before I leave to see him in Hollywood, a colleague muses that he seems miscast these days. A friend, more bluntly, calls him a sell-out. At the videos store on Sunset Boulevard where I hire his recent film, City of Angels, Bringing Out the Dead and 8mm, the assistant requests I ask him why he now makes "such dumb movies." Even his old friend Sean Penn has said he no longer acts, just gives "performances."

And now the knives have been sharpened for his lead role in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. To him, he explains, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is about how Antonio Corelli becomes a man. A conscript Italian officer in Mussolini’s army, he is sent to occupy the Greek island of Cephallonia and falls in love with the doctor’s daughter, Pelagia. At first he does not take the war seriously. "So he drinks wine and he plays music and he makes love and loves to eat-all these great things that Italian culture is famous for, and they are good things, but it’s offensive to Pelagia because her people are being invaded. It isn’t until he loses his men and the people he loves that he has to grow up. And it really take his music away from him for a while," Cage says

Cage, at 37, is 20 years into his Hollywood career. He has a 10-year-old son, Weston, and ex-wife, the actress Patricia Arquette. I ask if he feels grown up himself. He looks as soulful as his voice, which, although its owner grew up in California, mimics James Stewart’s eastern drawl. "Oh yes," he says. "Maybe more than I really want to be."

At 19 he got a part in Francis’s movie Rumblefish, on the set of which Nic Coppola (as he then was) was heavily teased for the nepotism. Through his father, it got back to him that Coppola thought he was "too restrained" as an actor. Nic’s response was to change his name to Cage – a move still apparently, resented by the Coppola clan – and set about building a new identity for himself, choosing for a model, rather unoriginally, James Dean.

This meant there would be a lot of clearing up after him. On the Cotton Club set in 1984 he wrecked his trailer. On Moonstruck, four years later he threw a chair at the actress Julie Bovasso. Off set, he smashed a bottle of ketchup at a restaurant wall to impress a date.

"Absolutely. Acting to me is therapy. It is medicine, and that’s why I think I act out of need and necessity as opposed to just want. I know that sounds dramatic but if it wasn’t for it, I think I might have really problem with the law, or anything I could have gone the wrong way but, because I had this place to release my feelings, it kept me on track. I found a way to surf my emotions so they correlated with the picture I was making at the given time, meaning if I was really in an angry mood, I’d find an angry movie. If I was in a sad mood, "I’d find a save movie."

I don’t bother to ask him about the rumor that he’s now courting Elvis Presley’s daughter Lisa Marie. (He will not discuss his marriage at all.) He says he still writes love songs. Does that mean he is romantic or a disappointed romantic? Definitely a disappointed romantic? That’s sort of like, what it called, an oxymoron? Like you can’t be a romantic without being disappointed. Would he bet on his remarrying someday? "Oh, some day I’d love to be able to do that. I’m not very comfortable with the idea of being single. It’s not me, no, no. It’s not. It’s not. It’s never really been me.