LOS ANGELES — Nicolas Cage and I are sitting in the middle of the Nuart Theatre, the art house bastion that has been a fixture on Santa Monica Boulevard since it opened in 1930. Cage saw David Lynch's "Eraserhead" here, more than once, midnight showings that remain indelibly etched in his mind. He took his son Weston to the Nuart to see a James Dean double feature of "Rebel Without a Cause" and "East of Eden" because he wanted him to feel the power of great acting and learn from the legend who inspired Cage to pursue movies as a career.
"I used to work at the Fairfax Cinema on Beverly, selling tickets and popcorn," Cage says. "It was my first job. I was 15 and all I cared about was cinema. I wanted to be in movies. Cinema had always been a friend to me as a child. It helped me through different difficult periods. So working at the Fairfax, in between whatever I had to do, I would just stand in the back of the theater and dream. How am I going to go from here," and Cage pauses, pointing first to his seat and then to the screen in front of us, "to there? That was the meditation."
If you love movies, you know that Cage made it from here to there and back again in a singular career that began with a small part in "Fast Times at Ridgemont High," took off with the Coen brothers' "Raising Arizona" and the romantic-comedy "Moonstruck," put him onstage at the Oscars ("Leaving Las Vegas"), made him a blockbuster action hero ("The Rock," "Con Air," "Face/Off") and then leveled off when, as Cage puts it, he became "marginalized by the studio system."
