Nicolas Cage does need no introduction. The actor has been one of Hollywood’s most accomplished stars since his Hollywood debut with the 1982 romance comedy Fast Times at Ridgemont High. However, the tonality of his movies in recent years has changed, Cage is now more focused on low-budget quality movies than his high-end commercial flicks in the early and prime of his career. The actor has appeared in 120 movies so far, and he just picked one that he would watch again.
Nicolas Cage Shared His Best Pick To Watch
Nicolas Cage in Pig. Image Credit: Neon
Nicolas Cage has a legendary career to his name with 120 credits to complement his prowess as a phenomenal actor. Cage recently appeared in Oz Perkins’ horror mystery Longlegs under the banner of Neon which also stars scream queen Maika Monroe. Longlegs has been on the buzz for quite some time, and the movie is on the promising front with a 97% score on Rotten Tomatoes.
Cage who plays an elusive serial killer being hunted by the FBI, does not think his recent horror is the movie he would want to pick to watch, not even Leaving Las Vegas which earned him his first Oscar, or Spike Jonze’s Adaptation that claimed another Oscar nomination to his credit. Certainly, there has been a series of good movies in his career but for Cage, Michael Sarnoski’s 2021 thriller Pig under Neon would be his first and only choice to watch.
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Pig where Cage played Robin “Rob” Feld, a reclusive truffle-forager and a loner chef, “is something that I think people can get something out of,” the actor told The New Yorker. “Because tragedy is going to hit all of us at some point. It’s just a matter of when. It’s also a movie that to me is like a folk song. It’s very quiet, gentle movie, which is the polar opposite of … people thinking I’m crazy,” Cage added.
The 60-year-old is now on a streak of finding remarkable and challenging roles as he rightly said, “I think [acting] now is — for me, anyway — more interesting, and it’s more personal.”
Pig is a critical darling as the movie climbed the Rotten Tomatoes ladder by an impressive 97% score.
Pig Script Resonated As ‘Haiku’ To Nicolas Cage
Nicolas Cage in Pig. Image Credit: Neon
Pig, as a thriller, has a few mind-numbing scenes designed to evoke surprise but the very narrative as Cage read in the form of a script was more like a Japanese Haiku— a very short Japanese poetic form. “At the time that I met with Michael, and we had a quiet and meaningful conversation over shishito peppers, I had read his script,” Cage told IndieWire.
The script written by Michael Sarnoski who also directed the movie, reminded Cage of the gravity of haiku, “which resonated with me as a haiku,” he said of the script. “With Japanese haiku, you have 5-7-5 syllables. [They] convey the space between. It’s evocative and those spaces become more meaningful than the words themselves,” the actor continued. “The way Michael wrote the script, I felt it would lend itself to the kind of film performance I wanted to get back to,” he added.
Pig was also very personal to Cage, “I was at a point in my own life when I understood the feeling of loss,” he described as he was devastated after losing his cat Merlin after “something horrible happened.” But mourning his cat fueled his performance, it was one of the best recent performances by the actor which earned him a Critics Choice Best Actor nomination.
Stream Pig on Hulu/Kanopy.
