Helen Mirren is someone that I have really admired ever since I saw her in Excalibur. That was the first thing I said to her. "I loved you as Morgan Le Fay."
Nicolas CageI'm not really interested in playing famous people. I prefer to create characters. And I hope I have an exciting enough life that somebody might make a movie about that one day. I don't want to make movies about other people. I was once approached about playing Salvador Dali, which I thought would've been fun until I found out that he was proud of kicking a blind man across the street. So, I decided, I didn't want to play that guy. So, I think I'll just keep it the way it is.
Nicolas CageI see myself as a student. I would never call myself a master or a maestro. If you take the path of the student, that means you have to try a little bit of everything in hopes that you're going to learn something or strike some kind of new note, expression in the process. I'm not going for grades; I'm going for an education. I'm going to continue experimenting and trying new things to try to evolve and learn.
Nicolas CageI do tend to apply myself to projects that make me uncomfortable because usually when that happens I try to find a way of existing in the project that is more creative.
Nicolas CageWhen you're playing a spirit from another dimension, you really can do anything and get as abstract as you want and still have a context that will work within the movie. I wanted Ghost Rider to move in a way where it would be like a bad dream. I thought about cobra snakes, and the way that they will show you their backs and sway in a rhythmic motion and almost lull you to sleep before suddenly attacking. Well, I put that into the movie. And I decided to move my head in the jerky way a praying mantis does. So, I did all these things to give the movie a feeling of otherness.
Nicolas Cage