BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - After playing, among other characters, a one-eyed dad who drinks beer out of his enemy’s skull (“Drive Angry”) and a motorcyclist from hell who can make his head burst into flame (“Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance”), Nicolas Cage had gotten a reputation as a guy whose love of action pictures had, over the past decade, pulled him away from what he does best, namely, act. Quirky comedies and thoughtful indies were set aside for films heavy on bloodletting and explosions. Critics, even longtime champions like Roger Ebert, yearned for the Nic of old.
So it’s worth noting that when Cage went looking for his next screen role in 2012, he wanted something a bit more understated.
He took off much of that year looking for just the right part. “I’d done more baroque things, more operatic things,” he said. “What I’d call Western Kabuki in some ways, where I was trying to be more stylistic. All I knew is that I wanted to explore a quietude and not have to act, but just feel, or be.”
For Cage, who won an Oscar for his portrayal of a screenwriter who commits suicide by ingesting lethal amounts of booze (“Leaving Las Vegas” in 1995), quiet can be a relative term. What he found was “Joe,” based on a Larry Brown novel. Cage plays the title character.
Cage says he came upon the film in 2012, when director David Gordon Green (“Prince Avalanche,” “Pineapple Express”) sent the script to the actor’s agent. Four days later, Cage gave Green a call; the following day, the actor was flying from Las Vegas, where he lives with his wife, Alice Kim, and youngest son, 8-year-old Kal-El, to Green’s home base of Austin, Texas. The two drove around the tiny towns outside the city, walked in the woods, talked about the film, had tacos. “I wanted him to know how enthusiastic I was,” Cage said.
Filming began in November 2012, with a cast that included the owner of a local barbecue joint, day laborers and Tye Sheridan, 17, who played one of Brad Pitt’s sons in Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life.” In “Joe,” Sheridan is Gary Jones, a good-hearted kid with a dead-eyed drunkard for a dad. Joe becomes something of a surrogate father, teaching him how to drink beer and woo girls with a painfully contorted face that says, when done correctly, “I got a lot on my mind.”
The paternal lessons provide a comic respite in an otherwise dark film and allowed Cage finally to use an idea he’d had in the recesses of his mind for years. “I think he was trying to find a place to put that his whole career,” Sheridan said.
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