The movie that first showed Nicolas Cage “the power of acting”
Nobody in the industry approaches acting quite like Nicolas Cage, with the star having made a point of putting his own distinct and highly unique stamp on the profession.
Even when he was consigned to the direct-to-video doldrums for a decade in an effort to repay his various debts, Cage could always be relied upon never to phone it in. Offering anything less than 100% simply isn’t in his nature, whether he’s hamming it up or toning it down.
Of course, not even cinema’s most famous eccentric A-lister debuted with their signature methods fine-tuned and perfected, with Cage’s formative years spent devouring as much cinema as he could.
As a result, he was able to learn as much as possible about the subtleties and nuances of performing prior to developing a style that was unequivocally his own.
Dubbing it “Nouveau Shamanism”, Cage admitted to Insider the term was “just something I came up with” because he “thought it sounded cool”.
Beyond that, he explained what it actually meant, offering that “shamans were really actors that were just going through stories in the village, and trying to bring answers to whatever crisis was in the village”.
In terms of being a film actor, though, James Dean and East of Eden were pivotal. “When I saw Dean in that, it really put the hook in me because I felt like him and I knew then the power of film acting,” he told Rotten Tomatoes, “And I knew then what I wanted to be, what I wanted to do to try to move people with motion pictures.”
During an interview with 60 Minutes, Cage further outlined just how impactful the 1955 classic was, calling it “more meaningful to me than anything else I experienced”.
More so than even “Beethoven, Beatles, painting”, East of Eden made the Academy Award winner “realise the power, the excitement of what you can convey through film performance”.
Dean has been a huge inspiration for several generations of actors, but the way Cage speaks about the ‘Best Picture’ nominee is almost reverential, such is the way it profoundly affected him on a personal – and ultimately professional – level.
Of course, he’s never given a performance that can be directly compared to the part of Caleb Trask, but its fingerprints have remained all over his career, nonetheless.
It’s entirely up for debate how Dean would react to one of the many ‘Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit’ compilations on YouTube that have turned many of his most memorable turns into soundbites, memes, and GIFs, but maybe he’d be thrilled enough knowing that one of his most iconic appearances in a career and life cut far too short has ended up serving as a touchstone for one of the modern era’s most recognisable thespians.
