Living out his dreams

NlCOLAS CAGE says he's never felt happier, and why wouldn't he? At 32, he won an Academy Award in March for Leaving Las Vegas, making him the youngest winner of the best actor Oscar since Richard Dreyfuss in 1978. He has made the transition from quirky roles to serious characters to playing an unlikely action hero in The Rock, which is his 25th film to date, and he will collect a $7 million fee for his next movie, Con Air. And he says he is very happily married to actress Patricia Arquette.

"I'm living out my dreams," he said when we met in his San Francisco hotel before the world premiere of The Rock earlier this month. "Being an actor is what I need to do. For me, acting is survival. I'm sure I'd be a psychopath if I wasn't an actor. It's what I need to do to get my stuff out, whatever it is. It made me play-act as a child and I'm still doing it as an adult. I can express myself through acting. In all walks of life, people need to express themselves in some creative fashion."

Cage was born Nicolas Coppola on January 7th, 1964, in Long Beach, California. His father, August, was a literature professor, and his mother, Joy Vogelsang, was a dancer who spent much of Nicolas's youth in hospitals for mental depression. His parents divorced when Nicolas was 12, and the boy spent much of his teens in the San Francisco home of his uncle, director Francis Ford Coppola.

Intent on becoming an actor, Nicolas Coppola quit school before graduation and made his TV debut when he was 17. Frustrated by casting agents spending most of his auditions talking about Uncle Francis, and by fellow actors chanting lines from Apocalypse Now outside his trailer on film sets, Nicolas changed his surname to Cage.

"I auditioned for Valley Girl with my new name, he says. "It changed my life. I got the part right away and it was like a weight had come off of me. I felt free in a way. When I was Nicolas Coppola I was always aware of the other actors saying I was only in the movie because I was my uncle's nephew and I wasn't really an actor. That kind of prejudice can either break you or make you. For me it was just a big pitchfork in my butt saying, `Get to work, work twice as hard as that guy and make him shut his mouth'. And that's what I did.

"Nicolas Coppola is a young boy who wanted to act and Nicolas Cage is the invention of me that I came up with to be able to do what I wanted to do. I guess it is psychological to some extent. When I was a child I didn't have much confidence in myself. I was loaded with self-doubt and maybe I needed to be somebody else to accomplish what I had set out in front of me."

In his early years as an actor, he was an arrogant young man, he says. "Young actors have not been taught that they can't do everything, so very often it's the young actor or actress who will take the most chances. I guess I was 22 when I did Peggy Sue Got Married and I thought I could do anything I wanted with acting. I had been reading books on Edvard Munch, a painter I admire a lot, and I read how his exhibition was slammed when it opened. Nobody liked it. And I saw this correlation between really talented people being beat up in the press. I thought that if I did something that makes them beat me up, I'll be doing something well. So that was my goal on Peggy Sue Got Married, and I succeeded. Nobody liked it!

As he matured as a person and as an actor, he says he has given 1OO per cent commitment to all of his roles, wacky or serious. He looks back affectionately on "some of the more far-out stuff, I did like Vampire's Kiss" - in which he famously swallowed a live cockroach - and says he was thrilled when a low-budget movie like Leaving Las Vegas picked up so many principal Oscar nominations this year, with Cage himself being voted best actor for his vivid portrayal of a suicidal alcoholic writer.

How did it feel on Oscar night when the envelope was opened and he won? "I was elated," he, says. "I felt that if I was going to be fortunate enough to take it home, I didn't want to have the moment blast by me in such a fit of nerves that I couldn't enjoy it. I wanted it to slow down and I enjoyed it.

"Winning an Oscar is twofold in that it makes you think you've got to work three times as hard, which is good for me because I like that. But what I hope it gives me is that five seconds of extra thought when I'm discussing a movie idea, that before they say `no' they'll give me those extra few seconds and take a look at my idea. Sometimes my ideas are not met enthusiastically at first because they seem to be from left field, but there is a method and a point to them."

Producer Jerry Bruckheimer gave Cage considerable freedom in developing his character, Goodspeed, in The Rock. "Of all the characters, Goodspeed needed to be fleshed out the most," Cage says. "Originally he was an FBI agent who didn't like his job and wanted to get out in the field and shoot em up. I said to Bruckheimer that I couldn't play the character with any dignity if I did it like that, playing him like an automaton. I wanted him to be, different and I made him into a man who doesn't swear, is into God, loves chemistry, plays the guitar and is a Beatlemaniac. I can honestly say that 50 per cent of my dialogue in The Rock came from me. It's like being a singer and writing your own songs."

Has he ever felt tempted to go all the way and write his own screenplay I wondered. You know, it's something I've wanted to do and I'd gotten through about 70 pages of manuscript - and then accidentally ran over it with my car. I'm not ready for computers. I had it all in my computer in my briefcase and I put the brief-case down beside the car, got in and drove over it, smashing my computer and losing my script. I think I'm going back to my Olivetti typewriter next."

Nicolas Cage says he feels more relaxed now than ever before. "I, used to collect really violent works of art with car accidents and very explosive stuff that would make you look at it and go, `Wow, that is wild'. I still like it, but now I'm into simple things, like a watercolour of a pear, things that are all around us and we take for granted. That sounds really corny and silly, but to me it's important.

"I'm very happy. I love Patricia. It seems like a miracle that we have each other, considering the way we got married, which was like a fairytale."