LONDON — 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 and.
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. And I think it’s because I don’t want to feel tied down. My favorite movies are abstract movies like The Wizard of Oz or The Shining. My favourite kind of music is more avant-garde — and also painting, I’m drawn by the imagination of Francis Bacon or 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.
How was filming in such remote locations?
I just kept waking up every day so happy to be there. To make a movie in that environment was really a huge pleasure for me. You can tell the difference. There were some special places we went to also that were like Celtic sacred sites. Some of the forests in the Austrian alps were some of the first areas that those people started to congregate. It was kind of magical.
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 interesting. That would be a lot of fun.
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. So I’ve got a little time.
What type of scary movie do you think you’d like to direct?
I think it’s a mixture of the kind of Japanese dream logic that we see in movies like Ringu and The Grudge combined with a sort of antebellum southern United States grandiosity. I’ll try to find a way to marry those two elements to make a horror film. I was thinking about a… well, I don’t know if I should talk about it because I haven’t written it yet.
