![]() ![]() Meanwhile, a third woman he has a one-night stand with, Rachel (played by Jennifer Beals), is continually haunting him - though her continued appearances could either be real or imagined. He ricochets between tormenting a female underling at work to such a degree that he becomes obsessive, almost animalistic, towards her, while simultaneously, he has such codependence with his (female) therapist that he calls her in her off hours, at one point begging her to move their appointments to earlier in the week with the tone a small child might use on his mother. Part of this ineffectualness comes in the form of Loew’s very complicated relationships with women, a subject one could write a thesis on. ![]() (Indeed, after writing this, I discovered that Bale used Cage’s performance in Vampire’s Kiss as inspiration when crafting his Bateman character.) Cut from the same cloth, yet totally ineffectual. But if Bale’s self-obsessed protagonist has that Michael Corleone level of unfeeling ruthlessness, then Cage, in a sense, is Fredo. Something about literary agent Peter Loew, Cage’s character in this film, seems to have at least a familial connection to Patrick Bateman, the sociopath portrayed by Christian Bale in Mary Harron’s adaptation of American Psycho (based on the novel by Bret Easton Ellis). “I believe it’s just stylistic choices.” About some of his more heightened moments in Vampire’s Kiss, he said, “This was obviously a choice to use grand gesture and go bigger.” “See ‘over the top’ doesn’t work with me, because I don’t believe in such a thing,” said Cage. He rejects any notions about being too “over the top.” “It actually is extremely choreographed, I mean every one of those moves was thought out in my hotel room with my cat,” said Cage.Ĭage seemed to have a strong handle on where he wanted to go as a performer, and the rest of the world just needed to catch up with him. ![]() There’s a famous scene involving the alphabet that happens fairly early on in the film, with one pose Cage has described as “Jagger-esque.” Understanding these aims is maybe one key to fully appreciating Vampire’s Kiss, though out of this context, Cage’s performance still remains wildly entertaining. Why can’t you do the same with film acting?” Bierman has said, citing naturalism as being “terribly limiting.” “If you look at other art forms like painting, you have photorealism and surrealism, and you have abstract. He believed that acting is an art form in which perhaps there should be a whole palette of styles to choose from. The director in question, Robert Bierman, was interested in experimenting with the same ideas in his work when he joined forces with Cage. allowed me to go there, never held me back, which was kind of amazing, I don’t think any other director would have let his actor go there.” And I was weaned, oddly enough on vampire, German Expressionistic film like Nosferatu and Cabinet of Doctor Caligari, and I wanted to use that kind of silent film style of acting which, shockingly enough, allowed me to do. “I guess in my own mind I thought that there could be a new expression in acting. There’s, of course, a lot to be said for Brando’s talent and the acting style he helped rein in which we now take for granted.īut no one ever questions: shouldn’t there be room for more than one style of acting in the medium of film? Was Cage’s larger-than-life acting style (which he’s since made into a personal art form) just ahead of its time in the late 1980s? So much has been made of the Brando style of acting which revolutionized film acting in its day, steering everything towards a more naturalistic style that continues to this day. There is so much to like about Vampire’s Kiss as a viewer, that one wonders if it was critically panned upon release because people at the time just couldn’t tune into the frequency it was on. And he was able to explore some crazy shit.” Cage was only 25 years old at the time of the film’s release, so it makes sense that he would still have been in a sort of incubation period.Īs one of its producers, Barry Shils, recalls, “Nic used to say to me, ‘ Vampire’s Kiss was like my laboratory for these big studio pictures! That was my laboratory!’ He really loved the film. This is perhaps in part because he used it as a platform to try out the style of acting that would later become his trademark - inspiring YouTubers to create entire highlight reels of his zaniest moments. The film is Cage’s personal favorite of all the films in his now 40+ year career. (He really ought to start an acting school for people to train in his particular brand of crazed, histrionic scenery chewing, but is the world really ready for this?) Vampire’s Kiss was released in 1989 and may be, by all accounts, where Nicolas Cage’s now-iconic acting style really took off. ![]()
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