BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANSdirected by Werner Herzog, written by William M. Finkelstein, with Nicolas Cage, Val Kilmer, Eva Mendes, Xzibit, Fairuza Balk and Brad Dourif. A VVS Films release. 121 minutes. Opens Friday (November 20). For venues, times, and trailers, see Movies.
When the news broke at Cannes last year that Nicolas Cage and Werner Herzog were remaking Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, everyone thought it was a joke. But less than a year and a half later, their movie – titled Bad Lieutenant: Port Of Call New Orleans – touched down in Toronto and turned into the festival’s biggest surprise.[rssbreak]
“I’m very good at casting, let’s face it,” Herzog says with that marvellous Bavarian accent, leaning forward on a white couch in the rooftop lounge of the Park Hyatt. There’s nothing in his voice that suggests he’s bragging he’s just sharing a fact.
“Actors always know that I’m good with them,” he says, “and I get the most intense performances out of them that they have had in their lives. And I think, when speaking of Nicolas Cage, where is a film where he has been better? Where is that film?”
Leaving Las Vegas, I venture. He’s devastating in that. But it’s a very different movie.
“Of course it is, yes,” Herzog says. “But in my film he is much more multi-faceted. Leaving Las Vegas is a very, very intense performance, but doesn’t have so many facets.”
This is certainly true. As Terence McDonagh, Herzog’s self-loathing, drug-gobbling protagonist, Cage expands and contracts himself like a cartoon accordion. It’s a fully operatic performance from an actor who’s spent the last decade or so going ever bigger. And as Cage explains, he knows exactly what he’s doing.
“I knew I didn’t want to make a movie that resembled the original in any way,” Cage says, sitting in a tented alcove about 15 feet from Herzog’s couch.
“And I started to think about the humour that could come out of it, in terms of its outrageousness.”
Cage plotted out what each drug would do to his character.
“The heroin was the one that would bring the voice down and slow him down, and the coke and the crack would create such a level of, like, stimulation that everything had to fly out of him,” he explains, his voice growing more nasal.
“But three days of coke and no sleep would create this other sound in his voice. I’ve been around people who have done that, and I’ve seen the effects, in terms of their vocal sound with no sleep.”
Cage’s performance in Bad Lieutenant finds him riding the character’s debauchery like a bronco, hanging on for dear life. But it never seems showy or overblown somehow, Cage cracks open McDonagh’s manic ferocity to reveal the broken soul within.
“To me, all film acting – really all art, on some levels – is trying to be music,” he says. “Try considering film acting no differently than music or painting, where there is no top to the imagination. You can’t look at Jackson Pollock and go, ‘Oh, that’s over the top.’
“If the character’s on drugs, you can go to another level of performance that may be considered extreme, but not if it’s within the context of the director’s vision. So that’s the key. Can an audience go along for the ride if they sense the truth in it? If the character’s high, absolutely.”
This is not to say that Bad Lieutenant in any way endorses drug use, whether for recreation or police work.
“It was important to me that the drugs be hideous,” Cage says. “There was nothing attractive about them in terms of my behaviour. Even my physicality – the facial expressions and the coke on the nose – the tics of that would be hideous.”
Interview Clips
Werner Herzog on the role New Orleans plays in his film:
Herzog on shooting in the city:
Nicolas Cage on the movie’s existential underpinnings:
Cage on the physical side of his performance:
Cage on the curious second life of The Wicker Man:
normw@nowtoronto.com
