Nicolas Cage kicks off 2011 by heading back to the 14th century for “Season of the Witch.” Shot across remote locations in Austria, Hungary and Croatia, the film features Cage as a knight charged with transporting an alleged witch to a monastery to be dealt with. Cage sat down with Metro to talk about how he chooses his roles, working with wolves and what’s still on his to-do list.
With this film, last year’s ‘The Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ and your upcoming ‘Drive Angry,’ you’re doing a lot of supernatural movies lately.
I’ve always had an interest in it. It’s just that lately there’s been more of them in sequence — and that’s by design, because I did want to show that I was choosing my roles, that these were opportunities to me that were being selected to create a kind of new body of work. My favorite movies are abstract movies like “The Wizard of Oz” or “The Shining.” My favorite kind of music is more avant-garde. I’m drawn to anything that has a bit of horror to it. So it was perfectly honest for me to go into this now as a point of expression as a film actor — because those are such a huge part of my interests.
The sequence in the film when you’re attacked by wolves looked pretty harrowing.
That was interesting. They’re still wild. You read stories about things going horribly wrong. They’re feral, you know? I mean, some of those shots the wolf was right there, right by my face. And I had a few visions of my facing coming … off. No pun intended.
Do you think you’ve scratched your scary-movie itch?
I hope I have more than one. And I’m hoping that one day, when I get a little more time, I can direct one. That’s the plan, but that’s probably not going to be until I get into my 50s. I’ve got a little time.
Is there a genre you haven’t done yet that you’d like to?
Well, I haven’t done a musical yet, and I’d like to try that at some point. But I don’t know what it would be. But yeah, I’d find that interesting. I don’t know which musical. Maybe “Oklahoma.” That would be a lot of fun.
