Nicolas Cage Interview

Oscar-winner Nicolas Cage may be 48 but that doesn’t stop him returning to the action genre with Bangkok Dangerous, the story of a hitman who travels to the Thai capital on a mission, only to fall for a local woman and bond with his errand boy.

How would you describe Bangkok Dangerous?

I refer to that as my interracial action movie, as I’m the one white guy in Asia and I befriend a young Thai person who becomes my protégé and we work together.

The directors, Danny and Oxide Pang, are remaking their own 1999 film here. What made you want to work with them?

I think it’s always fascinating to work with different mind-sets, to get out of your own zip code. I had a lot of success working with John Woo. He had a different approach than a lot of western filmmakers, and I think there’s so much talent coming out of the East right now that I want to tap into that. I feel like they only made me better.

Is it easy to go back and forth between big Hollywood films and smaller independent works?

It’s not easy to do that. I don’t want to worry about people’s expectations, but it’s inevitable that people do want a degree of certainty with what they’re going to get. I’m not providing certainty. I want to be full of surprises, and I want to surprise you and hopefully entertain you, and I want to keep you guessing. And maybe that will be the certainty. I want to always find new ways of reinventing myself. I just don’t ever want to get comfortable with anything I’m doing.

After so long in the business, how do you deal with fame?

It’s been a while. I don’t really think about it much. It’s been since I was 17, so I guess you could say I’ve been this way longer than not. It’s sort of second nature. Sometimes, I’m not aware that I’m going to be photographed because I’m not thinking about it, and there will always be a really goofy looking picture of me somewhere – because I’m not prepared to go out!

Bangkok Dangerous opens on September 5th.