Nicolas Cage has to have had one of the most incredible careers in the history of Hollywood. At various points he’s been an Oscar winner and an action hero, but more recently he’s been known as the guy who has made so many movies over the last few years, many of questionable quality, that it’s difficult to keep track of them all. And while Cage admits that, yes, he did it because he needed the money, the money wasn’t all for him, and he rejects the idea that he didn’t care about the movies or his performances.
In the mid-1990s Nicolas Cage was one of the biggest movie stars on earth. He followed up his Oscar win in Leaving Las Vegas with a string of hit action movies like The Rock and Face/Off, a movie so popular that it’s getting a sequel more than two decades later. However, by around 2010, Cage’s career had started to stall out after some bigger budget movies weren't big hits. Unfortunately, as the actor tells GQ, the downturn in his career coincided with a need for money, not only due to his own debts, but he also needed money for his mother Joy Vogelsang, who recently passed away. Cage explains…
I’ve got all these creditors and the IRS and I’m spending $20,000 a month trying to keep my mother out of a mental institution, and I can’t. It was just all happening at once.
Needless to say, this situation led Nicolas Cage to have to make some decisions. And the decision was to start to make a lot more movies. Cage then became one of the most common faces in movies simply by virtue of making a lot of films. Of course, many of those movies were of the VOD variety and never saw the inside of a multiplex.
It’s easy to assume that when you’re making that many movies that quickly, and that money is a factor, that you’re not really caring about the movies themselves, but Cage rejects that assumption. The actor insists that he always gave every performance his best. Cage has also said working is better for him personally. While he admits that many of the movies didn’t turn out great, it wasn’t because he didn’t care. Cage goes on…
When I was doing four movies a year, back to back to back, I still had to find something in them to be able to give it my all. They didn’t work, all of them. Some of them were terrific, like Mandy, but some of them didn’t work. But I never phoned it in. So if there was a misconception, it was that. That I was just doing it and not caring. I was caring.
The good news for Nicolas Cage, is that with his new role, playing an amplified version of himself in The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, Cage is now free of debt. He can continue to find those movies that interest him, though maybe he won’t make quite as man y of them going forward.
